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A mysterious light display appearing over Norway last night has left thousands of residents in the north of the country baffled. Witnesses from Trøndelag to Finnmark compared the amazing sight to anything from a Russian rocket to a meteor or a shock wave—although no one appears to have mentioned UFOs yet. The phenomenon began when what appeared to be a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain. It stopped mid-air, then began to circulate. Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky. Then a green-blue beam of light shot out from its centre—lasting for ten to twelve minutes before disappearing completely.

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In his classical work on political philosophy Aristotle observes: “Hippodamus was the first to discourse about the Best State. It was he who had invented the divisions of cities into quarters and he laid out the street-plan of the Piraeus. ... Hippodamus planned a city with a population of ten thousand, divided into three parts, one of skilled workers, one of agriculturists, and a third to bear arms and secure defence. The territory also was divided into three parts, a sacred, a public, and a private; the worship of the gods would be maintained out of the produce of the sacred land, the defenders out of the common land, the agriculturists out of the private...” There were laws also stipulated and procedures for settling the lawsuits. Such a division of labour and of property is fair enough and the state should acknowledge it as a healthy desideratum for its proper functioning; it should in return provide the right of citizenship to its constituting members. But Aristotle had other views. His political philosophy, while dealing with the individual and the state, attempted to take care of the whole of human relationship into account. Not very happily, at least to the present day ideals of society, it introduced the pernicious concept of the grades of citizenship. The virtue which the state is to encourage and reward lay only with the few. For him “those who possess arms must be superior in power” to other sections of the society. Not only that. A citizen “must not do work that is felt to be degrading”. Modem mind will immediately discard such a notion and in doing so pronounce that we have passed through another human cycle of social evolution. Even Plato's idea of “communal ownership of property, wives, and children” cannot but appear shocking to us today. With all that philosophical content in it, communism of any sort would be repugnant where individual liberty is made subservient to the state authority, although the importance and the role of the latter is to be fully recognised in an organised collective life. The failure is the failure of a human cycle.

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