I quite like reading old stuff though as you go really far back what you read is likely written by/edited for/dedicated to some slave-owning warlord of one kind of another, so maybe that explains something about the 18th century that they looked to these for wisdom.
Why was slave-society artistocrat Plato so skeptical of democracy? What did the slaves think about this?
While the democratic period is the height of Greek cultural achievements, democracy is not easy.
If the state is ruled by the people, people should care to do the ruling, and have to be competent. It's a job; it takes time and effort.
To do such a job, a person needs to understand things related to it, keep their eye on it, and has to know people around well enough to vote for / against them at elections. This works best with local issues and small communities that interact daily. The poster child of democracy, Switzerland, which holds national referenda multiple times a year, is about the size of Maryland, with a population about the size of NYC (not the greater New York city area). And it has 3 major languages (4 official), 26 cantons with local laws that are sometimes materially different, and very strict immigration and integration rules.
In other words, democracy is hard to scale. What passes for democracy in larger Western countries is representative democracy, when citizens don't get involved in the state affairs as much, but select and hire other people to do that, sort of like shareholders elect a board and a CEO for the company they collectively own. It's way better than despotic monarchy, of course, but introduces an obvious agency problem. It also introduces the problem of showing off instead of competence, because the voters have rather vague idea about most candidates, having never met them in real life, interacted in business, etc. Look at the US presidential elections, they are a colossal and sad show of just that, every 4 years. The miracle is that this system still works acceptably well 2.5 centuries after it was instituted. It's already longer than the Athenian democracy.
The greek antic democracy was very different compared to modern democracy. Alot of our assumptions are actually projections, they basically ran a "randomized" aristocrats government, with rights and urn votes.
This seems to be doing something like what the article is talking about with such a heavy emphasis on “slave-owning”. I’ve never seen Plato referred to as a “slave-society aristocrat”. The left is a very sad thing now, I guess.
It's important to note that while Plato was born into an aristocratic and undoubtedly slave-owning family, he also spent several years enslaved in Sicily.
Why, we can still hear some of their voices. Of the names you readily know, Aesop, Epictetus, Diogenes, and Plato himself were slaves at some periods of their lives. They all got freed though, AFAICT.
>one reason is very simple. Society produces more information every year. Counting in bytes, humans have produced more information in the past year than all of the rest of history.[...]
In raw bytes this may be true but in terms of cultural output above a certain threshold I don't think it is and for me this has always been the most simple and straight forward reason to not be "time parochial".
Most books, music, films, what have you are old, so all you really need to concede to dig into older works is that most good stuff is probably old just because most stuff is old. How high is the chance that every great movie has been made in the last five years? Just not having a recency bias is enough.
I use this as a strategy even. Time is one of the simplest filters to just avoid all the mediocre ephemeral slop that ends up being advertised everywhere and the longer something has advocates and passionate audience the more likely it is there's something worthwhile in it.
minor pedantry: 50 years ago was the mid 1970s, and there was a not insignificant amount of concern about gender and sexuality back then (especially in my college town). 50 years before that would be the 1920s, and although I wasn't around then, I believe the suffragettes in those days (would we guess Mary Olive Byrne to have been one?) had had their concerns as well.
Transplants were possible more than 50 years ago, but the few that were technically possible were still a bad idea.
50 years from now? My guess is that gender reassignment surgery will become so easy, so reversible, as to be as uncontroversial as a tattoo is today.
The controversy will shift to people getting very upset about furries who want living tails and full-body skin replacements for that glossy winter coat…
> The controversy will shift to people getting very upset about furries who want living tails and full-body skin replacements for that glossy winter coat…
I am not sure cosmetic medical science will ever reach that far ...
All necessary steps regarding the bio-hacking itself (not safety and by extension also not licensing) will probably be demonstrated within a decade, perhaps by a group I'm currently following on YouTube: https://www.thethoughtemporium.com/
Genetic engineering may. Human skin can produce hair, it only needs to grow longer, and maybe include certain pigments. (The result would likely look more like Chewbacca than like a cute anime character though.)
FWIW, for furries there is a whole spectrum of different options on the realism vs. cartoony axis, so eye size may not be part of it.
OTOH, overall skull shape is much harder than just putting on a muzzle, as the phenotypes of the corresponding common real species often have eyes much closer to the top of their skulls than we do.
And those eyes have a different spacing than ours.
Basically there's a lot to consider if you want to aim for "realistic".
"...an ordinary 19th century family’s one book beyond the Bible (thousands of years old) might be Pilgrim’s Progress (about two hundred years old)."
I think that is part of the reason speech has changed. I am reminded of this snippet of dialog in the film True Grit. The language used sounds so archaic, even though the fictitious event is just over a century and a half old.
A people cannot understand themselves without understanding their past. We not only become small-minded, parochial, and petty by forgetting our past. We forget who we are. We become enslaved to passing fads and silly nonsense of the day instead of aiming for the eternal. We lose perspective and become pusillanimous, obsessed with ourselves while remaining ignorant of our place in the tapestry of time. By forgetting the received tradition, we forfeit a goldmine of wisdom developed and communicated over the ages that we, too, should embrace and develop. We exclude ourselves from a dialogue with our ancestors who have much to share with us, from whom we have much to learn, and whose efforts we should continue, refining, correcting, expanding, elaborating what came before. We should engage with the endoxa of the ages. That doesn't mean thoughtless acceptance of a calcified mass, but entering into relationship with a living inheritance with the requisite humility.
We have chosen foolishness and mediocrity, and spiritual and intellectual poverty, savagery over humanity. And in our foolishness we cannot help but walk in circles, repeating the same errors, because we do not remember where we have already been. It is the story of modern philosophy which rhymes with and echoes the errors of the presocratic philosophers.
I'm not here to accuse you of racism. This isn't X.
But there are some words here which require closer examination. "A people".. "themselves".. "we".. "our past".
Who, exactly, gets to draw the boundary line around a people, or determine finally and canonically how "the" story of "our" past should be told? To whose ancient philosophers, priests and spiritual leaders should we look for wisdom?
This is not to say that stories of the past have no value, but which ones are mine and which are yours, and whose record of past events is the most accurate or conveys the most wisdom, that's much harder to say.
Signed, a UK citizen who is and forever will be pissed off with Brexit, not principally because of the needless economic damage or the lives uprooted, but because someone else decided to cast me as part of a "we" I never asked nor wanted to be part of.
But views and norms are shared within a country and you can make accurate predictions about people based on their race, country of birth and country where they grew up.
I recently went to a wedding. Who got drunk and started a fight? Was it the only Irishman?
I would predict that a white British person thinks that gun ownership should be restricted to military and police. A Swiss person will think that everyone should be given a rifle by the government. (Over 95 percent of Swiss households have a fully automatic rifle)
You can group people by ethnicity and nationality, then observe big differences between the groups.
Nationality? Certainly. Race / ethnicity? With extreme caution. Most Black people in the US have enough of a shared history that it's a useful label, for example. But Ghana, Eritrea and Eswatini share almost none, even if their people might be superficially lumped together as ethnically Black African.
But even if you can successfully draw a boundary around a people (Brits? White Brits? And that's before we even get into the whole Welsh-English-Scots thing), which stories do we tell? And how do we update them as - for example - it has become more and more apparent that Britain's relative prosperity during the 18th & 19th centuries was largely at the expense of conquered peoples and Empire territories - many of whose descendants (Indian, Irish, Jamaican or Ghanaian) are now an integral part of society here?
How do we avoid crude re-tellings of WW2 where the Nazis are cast as certain and irredeemable baddies from the beginning, when the greatest of their atrocities - the one that marked them out forever as a greater monster than any of the Western allies, who had a far from unblemished record - wasn't actually known to our leaders until very late on in the war, by which time the Nazis were facing almost certain defeat?
(I'm not saying, to be clear, that the Nazis were anything other than utterly evil - but up until the scale and nature of the Holocaust became apparent, the story did not resolve so cleanly into "good vs evil" as the way it's commonly told today).
> A people cannot understand themselves without understanding their past
This kind of stuff gets rolled out regularly by arty and literary types but never with any explanation as to why it might be true, and I don't think it is. Care to indulge me?
If a person could unequivocally understand themselves without understanding their past, then the trivial understanding of mere knowledge of the past should have no impact on their current self-understanding capabilities. Thus, a person with ongoing amnesia, unable to form memories which extend beyond a day's context window, would have no disadvantage in terms of self-understanding.
Further, history isn't just a series of events that happened long ago. It’s the story of how we - communities, nations, and civilizations have evolved over time. The experiences of previous generations shape the social, cultural, political, and economic structures that define a society today. Understanding this history allows a community to grasp why they are the way they are. For instance, the American Civil Rights Movement helps explain contemporary discussions on race in the United States. Without historical context, many aspects of the current social fabric would seem inexplicable or disconnected.-
Collective memory, as Halbwachs would have it, is like the shared pool of information and experiences held by a group of people. This collective memory is essential for maintaining cultural continuity across generations. When a community loses touch with its history, it risks losing the cohesion that binds its members together, which can lead to a sort of cultural amnesia. This concept isn’t just for nations; it applies to any group with a shared identity, including religious communities, ethnic groups, and even professional organizations.-
For example, indigenous communities often emphasize the importance of oral histories and traditions because these narratives carry the accumulated wisdom and identity of their people. If these stories are lost, so too is a sense of who they are as a distinct group.-
An understanding of history also allows a community to make informed decisions about the future. When people understand the causes and consequences of past events, they are better equipped to navigate present challenges. Santayana's quote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," might sound like a cliché, but it's rooted in the idea that historical awareness helps societies avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. The European Union, for instance, was built on the memory of two world wars, which profoundly influenced its emphasis on cooperation and integration to prevent similar outcomes. Notwithstanding this whole mess in Ukraine ...
You've just made a whole load of claims this without backing any of them up. But okay, let's take one which does make sense:
> When people understand the causes and consequences of past events, they are better equipped to navigate present challenges
To a small degree. Most of this boils down to the bleeding obvious, like "avoid war when you can because it's hideously expensive", treat people with decency etc. is there really much more to it than that?
And you talk about cultural continuity – some of these continuities are not good, q.v. the Taliban. Also cultures change very rapidly – the kind of homophobia that was acceptable or even encouraged when I was a kid is now seen very much as a serious transgression or crime (speaking as a straight bloke, I'm glad it; I'm very glad things have changed). We haven't achieved gender parity in pay, we getting there. You can't stick your hands all over a woman as you could in the 60s and expect to get away with it (ditto good).
Well I don't know. I can't say I'm convinced by what you've written but I appreciate the answer anyway. Thanks.
> some of these continuities are not good, q.v. the Taliban
Indeed. Good point. As you well point out, in this case the past determines an outcome for the worse ...
PS. That said - I found interesting how, in a recent "live from a Taliban courtroom" video, the Sharia judge made a point along the lines of "We are lucky these aren't medieval times anymore and we have Sharia law with us ..."
They considered themselves an advance upon a certain past. Progress.-
Very cute but that's all. No reason for me to consider it true. This if we are making unbacked claims then let me riposte thus, "the past is another country, they do things differently there". Which if true would mean the past has little bearing on the present – if true.
I'm riffing on bluestein, not defending lo_zamoyski — as far as I'm concerned, the invention of the web has made it far easier to go through the pockets of older cultures and discover what sorts of things they have that are worth taking a five-finger discount on.
(then again, I also find it worth learning how things are done in other countries, so I believe both the Durants' statement and your proposed riposte may be true at the same time)
[as for the truth: from a DBMS' WAL (the past) one may always reconstruct its tables, but for queries it's more convenient to always have them materialised (the present); does that make sense?]
> When people who haven’t been to America talk about it, they get their ideas from the distorted cliches of the media. A land of gun nuts and COVID deniers, rife with racism and obesity! This annoys me. I’ve lived in the US and have family there. I know these views are absurdly one-sided. People who’ve lived in Africa get a similar twinge when the clichés come out: “Africa, land of rape and lions”, as the Wronging Rights blog puts it. Not going abroad makes people parochial. Their experience is limited, and what they know of other countries is refracted through the biases of the local media
Public relations was invented in US and the whole establishment of the United States is rooted in manipulation of the public opinion. The African examples are not a distraction of real issues but some real issues while in the US there is, I think, much less actual issues than thought. For example there are probably no major racial issues in the US today; localized racism exists but everyone can vote and has roghts. Poverty on other hand is an issue. Of course you can say you have evidence against this point, but note that it's probably just confirmations of the narrative, not a relative comparison of societal challenges.
This would imply there exists a confusion between issues per public opinion and issues per literature. We can further deduce this is probably caused by the lack of separation of these in context of foreign talk about Americans; others satirisize Americans for being fools to falll into focusing on issues of public opinion and others only recognize the social hotness of the issue per public opinion without recognizing they are a distraction.
The 2D histogram is very interesting, but difficult to interpret, because of the various samplings and normalizations that could be relevant: number of books published; number (fraction) of books digitized.
If I had to summarize the big picture, taking the contour at the top of the dark blue band: coverage was sporadic until ~1700; then more books were published, and the references gradually moved back to 1500 over the next 100 years, but did not consider the future very much. 1800 seems to be a singularity (but perhaps due to sampling effects), where interest in the deep past and the future exploded in a short period.
There are also interesting lines in the plot. First the vertical lines. There seems to be one (or more) books in 1530 that discussed the far future up to 1900. Then another futurist work around 1610. There's a history book published ~1580, that covers then recent past, and another cluster around 1650, perhaps including Hobbes's 'Leviathan'. Of course we miss Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall' because it covers antiquity, off the chart.
Secondly, the horizontal lines. There is a bright line at ~1100, perhaps the First Crusade, and more at ~1300, ~1600 ~1800. The line at ~1350 could be the Black Death.
Finally, there are the shadows of the 20th century wars, when history was not so popular, because there were more pressing current events to be written about, and all the historians were fighting at the front.
I, for one, welcome our new centrifugal bumble-puppy World Controllers[0].
> "History is more or less bunk." —HF
[0] my guess is that the Cyberspace Controller would approve of HN (if only it required more expensive equipment to access?), for the half-life of front page[1] conversations can be measured in days.
[1] in the long tail, on the other hand, the Vokuhila principle suggests that while HN keeps it all business on the front page, there may still be a party in the back?
Why was slave-society artistocrat Plato so skeptical of democracy? What did the slaves think about this?