The Greeks and Romans had to deal with problems we will never have, as well as some of the same ones we face today. They solved some, and failed at others.

We study how they lived and thought not to learn how to solve their problems, or even our own, but to learn how to go about solving problems in general. Its a form of meta-knowledge, or learning how to learn.

We can't design our societies the way the Greeks and Romans did, but we can learn to avoid the mistakes they made, and preserve the insights and triumphs they achieved.

Now that I'm getting older, I am slowly coming to a great realization, a way of looking at the world I lacked as a young man, but that now is starting to become increasingly clear. There is a real world out there, but the world we live in, the one we inhabit, the one that really matters, is largely one of our own creation. It lies inside us, not external to us. We live in a primarily subjective reality. Its not that objective reality is false, its that it is mostly irrelevant.

No, we don't get to pick and choose what is real and what is not, but we have total and complete control over what really matters to us, and what does not. This is the reality that "political agendas" attempt to dictate for us. They don't try to tell us what is, they try to convince us what matters. They seek to control us by trying to alter our priorities. This is what the Greeks and Romans knew and what they taught our founders, and what they can teach us.

The Enlightenment broke with the conservative, orthodox Christian dogma of their time precisely because they understood the wisdom of the Pagan past. The Medieval, Renaissance and even Reformation view of the world was regressive, reactionary, it was the Classical thinkers that preceded them who were truly progressive. Democracy, republicanism, humanism and free-thinking deism were already thousand of years old when we rejected the monarchies and theocracies of Europe. Bringing the concepts of the Age of Reason to government was the triumph and genius of the American Revolution.