In our culture today a fairly common form of dismissive communication is to be called “woke”. It seemed interesting to look back over history to others who in their day might have earned this distinction.
About 600 BC an Indian Prince, Gautama Buddha reportedly left his palatial world following a spiritual path of compassion and inner strength, giving rise to one of the world’s great religions.
In approximately 300-325 BC three Greek philosophers, Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates taught the foundational principles which became the values and underlying tenets of an enduring Western civilization.
Circa 200 BC a sect of Jewish mystical monks, the Essenes, or desert fathers practiced a pure form of Judaic religion which laid the foundation for what we would now think of as asceticism which involved living, thinking and doing the consummate balanced life.
In the first century BC, building upon these traditions Jesus the Nazarene walked this earth teaching, preaching, and healing centered on the essential principles of his Jewish faith and founding a third world religion enduring all these centuries.
In the 15th and 16th centuries the Renaissance swept over the Western world spawning the roots of human culture and civilization including arts, literature, science and medicine, the roots of which have established what we would now consider research, higher education, medicine and the humanities.
Rejected and condemned by the Church in 1600 Galileo taught the foundational principles of astronomy and astrophysics. He proved to be right!
In the 17th and 18th centuries the enlightenment spread the seeds of the Renaissance to medicine, science and government, toppling the kingdoms of Europe.
In 1776 among our nation’s founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton wove their international exposure to the Enlightenment into the establishment of the world’s most enduring democracy.
So if you have the occasion to be called “woke”, please have the courage to say “thank you”. Those who paid you the unintentional compliment stand on the shoulders of those enlightened people who gave birth to their freedom to do so. You’re in good company.