Golden Age & Polis
How can we reinvent the western world's great cities, SF/NY/London, for the 21st century?
Note: I attempted to do something different, so I wrote a longer-form essay this week, featured in Athwart magazine. Attached below is an excerpt of said story and on behest of the editorial staff, the full piece is here.
Hope you enjoy!
“I tell you, you Athenians who have become my killers, that just as soon as I’m dead you’ll—meet with a punishment that—Zeus knows—will be much harsher than the one you’ve meted out to me by putting me to death. You’ve acted as you have now because you think it’ll let you off being challenged for an account of your life; in fact, I tell you, you’ll find the case quite the opposite.”
— Plato, Apology
Upon receiving his sentence, Socrates prophesied that his execution, echoed through the streets of Athens, would be paid back to the city with a vengeance. The turning of the city against its wisest man is itself part of a bigger puzzle. Ashamed of his countrymen’s actions, Plato renounced Athens, swearing never to return again. However, he later changed his mind and returned to the polis, building his akademia and tutoring the city’s best minds. Yet, the question remains: why should he have come back to Athens?
In hindsight, Socrates’s execution was also the definitive death of Athen’s golden age; to gadflies everywhere—and throughout all ages—it was a sign that if you thought differently, you would be persecuted. For Socrates’s disciples, like Plato, it was apparent that Athens had both intellectually ossified and turned wary of critically reflective thinkers.
Yet, without these idiosyncratic personalities, how could the city and the minds of its inhabitants develop? Luckily, the city retained enough of a luster to convince Plato to return and enable the greatest school of thought the world had ever seen; instead of fleeing, the philosopher returned with a goal to inspire philosophers and leaders alike for generations to come.
The history of human civilization and the polis are intertwined; the city feeds art alongside scientific progress while science and culture shape the city and its inhabitants. During the Italian Renaissance, the Medici family was a patron of artists and thinkers such as Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, and Machiavelli. In modern Vienna, the Wittgenstein family bankrolled much of the cultural and musical scene, paving the way for the Vienna circle and Ludwig Wittgenstein himself—alongside artists such as Johannes Brahms and Francçois Auguste Rodin.
The combination of capital and fellow creatives to compete with and learn from helped to create unparalleled networks; to create golden ages. As such, the seeds of the greatest intellectual movements and their catalysts have always been planted deep inside the heart of the polis…
👉 Full essay on Athwart
This topic was first brought to me by a subscriber of Dreams of Electric Sheep. If you have any ideas on what I should write about or would just like to chat, feel free to respond to this email.
–Anirudh