Sawing into freedom

I recently read on one particular Yahoo list the varied views of a small selection of new citizens. The old saw about the rough and tumble nature of the Main List surfaced. The Main List is our forum, and as such it is open to all. Since Nova Roma is a community many issues will be debated there and yes, frequently they involve politics and law, which can certainly evoke heated debates.

An experiment was once tried, where no one posted on any topic concerning those two categories. This was meant to encourage the free flow of debate and discussion on higher and nobler subjects, such as art, literature, poetry, history etc. The result? Very few people posted and there was certainly no renaissance that flowered in place of all these apparently ghastly and verbally bloody debates.

The day that we stop debating politics and law on the Main List is the day we hand over control of Nova Roma to the intellectual elite, or at least to those that consider themselves such.

An intellectual oligarchy would be as much as an anathema to the concept of a res publica as rule by one man.