If Socrates were to view the world today, he would find himself both in wonder and dismay. How far we have come in some areas, but how backward we have remained in others. Perhaps one of the most backward movements of history has been a continuation of racial myths and stereotypes used to justify and destroy communities and cultures.
Even as we’ve moved forward we have stayed the same. N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain shows how removed the U. S.
government was during the late 1800s in its views and practices towards the plains Indians.While only a few decades earlier Abraham Lincoln declared a freedom for all people, the same government he led forward into that “freedom” was wiping out a way of life and culture that was older than its own. As Lincoln pointed out in his Gettysburg Address, the country’s collective mind would always retain the memory of the battle fought but we would not always remember the words. We know that he made the Gettysburg Address but how many know what he said? How many follow what he said? Instead for years the physical battle has been remembered but the sentiment has frequently been forgotten.
You can look even farther into recent history at the actual attitudes that persisted towards blacks after the end of the Civil War. On paper they were free but their culture was not their own and their voices were as stifled in an expression of their lives as the voices of the Kiowas. In recent years, society has still used race, religion, and culture to separate and alienate people. It is a worldwide epidemic in some ways, that we move to fix while someone else moves behind us undoing the good we have done.In many ways, since 399 B.
C. we have moved forward; there is a greater freedom in thought and the advances in science and technology are utterly mind boggling. However, in the area of human relationships we keep repeating the same conflicts of common and uncommon natures clashing and complimenting. While our ideas of knowledge and thought have changed to reflect the advent of science and a changing of politics, we still have retained the same fallible humanity of all our preceding ancestors.
