The agora is the marketplace, of course. This afternoon, I read an essay by Robert Reich describing his relationship to Robert Bork. It reminded me about phrases and aphorisms regarding ideas. One of these is the phrase the marketplace of ideas. This phrase alludes to the notion of the Adam Smith’s Free Market of goods and services imagining the unfettered consideration of ideas as a market. It’s an interesting notion. The aphorism that came to mind was “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” It’s a line variously attributed to Victor Hugo and others.
These things are entangled in my mind because they allude to the First Amendment that protects us from being muzzled by our governments (local, state and federal) and to the notion that the free sharing of ideas promotes a kind of natural selection of superior ideas over lesser and erroneous ones. Such ideas might include Christianity, Democracy, Evolution, Truth, Transparency, Justice, etc. At various points in history, some group(s), feeling threatened by such ideas, have attempted to use government to suppress them.
The fear of ideas brought us the Roman suppression of Christianity (that didn’t go so well). Later, it brought us the Scopes trial and censorship of educational texts that explained Evolution. Today, it brings us the culture wars. The teaching of black history cannot be countenanced by fragile white males. Any discussion of gender identity must be verboten by insecure, straight, mostly white and evangelical males.
I am tempted to reinterpret the term agoraphobia in a manner that adds a new meaning: fear of the open discussion of ideas.