20 History Books (and Some Essays) About Art and Culture, part 1: The grand sweep of history · 4:47pm Sep 19th, 2016
If you've been reading my blog posts for a long time, you may have noticed that I posted a lot of theory articles in 2014, but that stream ran gradually thinner and shallower, until now I post less than one a month, and I've left my biggest teasers (the principal component of art and the general evolutionary theory of fiction) hanging for years.
That's not because I'm thinking and reading less about those things, but because I've been thinking and reading more about them. My reading got so far ahead of my blog posting that I couldn't post the things I was thinking about, because to explain them would require explaining other things first. This snowballed as time went on.
I put together this spreadsheet to organize my thoughts. My overly-ambitious plan is to work through it, releasing posts in an order that will make sense to everyone, without needing to write them in that order. (Some are already written; more are in draft form or are just accumulating notes. My "$5 or more per 10,000 words" Patreon donors can read them in advance, which may or may not be a good idea. Did I mention that I have a Patreon? I have a Patreon.)
I can, however, list some books and articles which I've found especially revealing about the big-picture history of thought and art. I'm giving a short summary of each here in advance of their big reviews, in the hope that you'll be more able to see some of the connections between them. Some I haven't finished but have just skipped about in, reading the parts that interest me. Links are to Amazon pages, so you can buy & read these in advance if you want. I'll post longer reviews of most of these books on my Patreon blog after I read them, and on this blog when the time for them comes along in my grand scheme. Page counts end at the last page of text; they don't count bibliographies or indices, because I figure you want to know how long it will take to read them.
(Did I mention that I have a Patreon?)
Originally, I titled this post "great books", I guess because I wanted to encourage people to read them. I'm taking that back, because I'm adding more books, some of which definitely aren't great, and some of which I haven't even read yet. Many of them I consider great, but wrong; I don't endorse their conclusions. My criteria for selecting these books is not how great they are, by any measure, but how helpful they are for my particular task, which is trying to detect patterns in art history.
Each of these books looks at some historical period as a time of conflict between worldviews. The biggest theme running through them is the intellectual conflict between faith, logic, and empiricism, and their use in the struggle between traditionalists and progressives. Platonic idealism is very consistently associated with conservative, suppressive regimes, yet also logically validates independent thought, so the history of the major civilizations is one of careful control of art and thought by the traditionalists in power, who find Idealism useful but dangerous.
This manifests as two opposed views of art. The traditionalists and conservatives--certainly including Rome, medieval Europe, Puritan and Reformation England, neo-classical Europe (~ the late 18th century), Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union--used the word "art" but really meant "propaganda". Art was good if it taught their own dogmas and reinforced their own political position. The subversives, including the Elizabethans, European literature from the 19th century on, and Greek playwrights from Euripides until Greece's fall, sometimes see art as progressive propaganda (e.g., Brecht), but often as something mysterious which was a source of insight and an activity for original thinkers rather than a mere mouthpiece for tribal elders and logicians. Traditionalists write down to an audience they assume is more stupid than themselves; subversives often seem to be discussing things with equals. Traditionalists write about, paint, and sculpt archetypes; subversives care about individuals.
In other words, when we today say "art", we are referring to a concept of art which has existed only during a small fraction of the history of the West. I'll write our concept as "Art", uppercase. If I use the term ars or "craft", I'm talking about the medieval concept. The entire stretch of time from the Romans until about 1400 A.D. had no concept comparable to Art, which is why their ars sucked by our standards.
Much of the art we really love--for us, notably Lord of the Rings and Star Wars--is an insidious mix of the two: a comfortable conservative message over-simplifying the problems of life and calling for a return to old ways, clothed in the storytelling techniques of the subversives.
Some of the large sub-themes of the development of Art include the development at the end of the Middle Ages of:
- a belief in real numbers and in the real world, and a corresponding development of empirical philosophy and realistic art
- the notion that humans could be creative
- the idea that change might sometimes be good
- a belief in the value of individual people, even if they were not rich or dead
These sub-themes are all rigidly tied to the larger theme, as they're associated exclusively with rebellions against Platonic idealism and traditionalism. Perhaps an unfortunate meta-theme of interest is that periods of intellectual and artistic freedom are unstable or weakening, and never last more than a few centuries before the societies that indulge in them collapse or are conquered. Historically, that seems to be the case so far.
I'll have some mercy on you and split this post into four parts:
Part 1. The grand sweep of history: Books covering more than one large period of history.
Hazard Adams 1971, 2ed 1992. Critical Theory Since Plato. 1254 p.
Vincent Leitch, ed. 2001, 2ed 2010. The Norton Anthology of [Literary] Theory & Criticism. 2653 p. This is similar to Critical Theory Since Plato, but with a much larger fraction devoted to hostile critiques of Western literature and Western society from social justice activists and deconstructionists.
Mircea Eliade 1949, expanded+translated 1954. Cosmos and History: The myth of the eternal return. 162 pages.
Pitirim Sorokin 1938. condensed edition 1957. Social & Cultural Dynamics.
Lawrence Brown 1979. The Might of the West. 549 pages.
Part 2. The Middle Ages
Alfred Crosby 1997. The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western society, 1250-1600. 240 pages.
Umberto Eco 1959, translated 1986. Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. 119 pages.
Johan Huizinga 1949. The Waning of the Middle Ages. Citations from 1954 Anchor Books edition. 335 pages.
The Walters Art Museum 2011. The Medieval World. This is the best medieval art book I know for my purpose, because it discusses the reasons why people made art the way they did.
Pamela King 2011. Medieval Literature 1300-1500. Edinburgh University Press.
Part 3. Modern Totalitarian Art
This random, insightful blog post on totalitarian art, which talked about Kundara, below.
Milan Kundera 1984. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Part 6: "The Grand March". Fiction. Why totalitarian art is kitsch. This seems to contradict most of the books below, which claim that totalitarian art is modernist. Kundera summarizes totalitarian art the same way I've summarized medieval art: "all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions."
Marcin Giżycki. "Modernism and Post-Modernism in Eastern Europe." Artium Quaestiones VI 1993, p. 39-43. Argues that modernism is totalitarian.
Igor Golomstock, 1990. Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the People's Republic of China. I haven't read this yet.
Boris Groys, 1992. The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond. Argues that totalitarianism is modernist, and modernism is totalitarian. I haven't read this yet.
Mikkel Bolt & Jacob Wamberg, eds., 2010. Totalitarian Art and Modernity. I haven't read this yet.
James von Geldern & Richard Stites, eds. 1995. Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, poems, songs, movies, plays, and folklore, 1917-1953. Indiana U Press. I haven't read this yet.
The most-controversial thing I want to say is that both medieval art (European art during the High Middle Ages, 1000-1300 A.D.) and totalitarian art are bad art, and that they are deliberately bad art because they are both opposed to the expression of the human spirit, for the same reasons. These reasons are extensively thought-out and documented. Both the High Middle Ages and totalitarian regimes viewed art only as propaganda; both ended up producing only kitsch because of the nature of their power base and their resulting philosophy and morality. None of my argument is new or even controversial; it just consists of many pieces which have not been put together before.
Part 4. Everything else
Jeffrey Hurwit 1985. The Art and Culture of Early Greece, 1100-480 B.C. Cornell U. Press. I've only skimmed this, but it looks interesting. It appears that Greece did not make realistic art in 600 B.C. and did in 570 B.C., a change which matches the time of Solon's reforms.
[Something about Roman art and culture.]
Geoffrey Marshall 1976. Restoration Serious Drama. Asks: "Why does restoration drama seem so bad to us?" Murcushio has volunteered to read this.
Pseudo-Longinus, 0-300 A.D. "On the Sublime."
Edmund Burke, 1757. "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful."
Roger Shattuck, 1955. The Banquet Years: The origins of the avant-garde in France 1885 to World War I. 360 pages.
Clement Greenberg 1971. Art and Culture. This is a famous book shaping the contemporary interpretation of modern art, by the guy who invented the concept of "kitsch". Modern art largely sees itself as the war with bourgeois kitsch. I haven't read it. I expect not to like it.
W. E. B. Du Bois 1926. "Criteria of Negro Art." In Leitch et al. p. 870-877.
Langston Hughes 1926. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." In Leitch et al. p. 1192-1196.
Zora Neale Hurston 1950. "What White Publishers Won't Print." In Leitch et al. p. 1023-1027.
W.E.B. Du Bois & Langston Hughes both insisted that blacks should or could write only black-activist propaganda. Zora Neale Hurston complained that blacks were allowed to write only black propaganda. Collectively, these essays support my argument that cultural survival mode (a generalization of the conditions leading to what Nietzsche calls "slave morality") leads to totalitarian-propaganda art.
Gregory Bruce Smith 1996. Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Transition to Postmodernity. U Chicago Press. This is a frequently illogical book which, contrary to the intentions of its author, alerted me to much of the bad philosophy in post-modernism.
Part 1. The grand sweep of history
Hazard Adams’ Critical Theory Since Plato is a 1271-page collection of the most-famous essays on Western literature from Plato up to 1988. I already reviewed it here. IMHO it was most remarkable in opening my eyes to the true history of literature and literary theory:
1. There has been very little useful literary theory since the start of recorded history.
2. Most "literary theory" has been a covert attempt to subvert literature for political purposes. Many societies throughout history have tried to limit literature to mere propaganda.
We can divide Western literary history into five periods:
1. Ancient Greek: There were two contending views of literature, Plato's and Aristotle's. Plato saw literature as purely functional; it should be allowed only insofar as it was useful propaganda for the community. Aristotle saw literature as being useful to individuals, and not just for conveying information, but for its emotional effect on them. Literature was relatively free, particularly from Euripides onward, and good by our standards.
2. Ancient Roman: Aristotle's view that literature had a psychological, individualistic function is not represented in Roman writings, and the Roman attitude towards the "plastic" arts (arts manifested in physical form, notably sculpture and painting) was strictly functional. A Roman statue might commemorate a battle, or an individual, or demonstrate the wealth or power of its possessor, or be a captured statue from a foreign capital whose presence in Rome signified Roman supremacy. It would not be a work of individual or emotional expression. Poetry was more highly respected, but there was no analogue of the Iliad in Roman literature. They had only poems such as the Aenead that glorified Rome in an unreflective, socially conservative way, and comedies. The fact that Romans thought the Aenead was comparable to the Iliad tells us they were rather stupid and unperceptive about art. (This same fact tells us the same thing about every culture that thinks the Aenead was comparable to the Iliad, notably the neo-classicists.)
3. Christian / medieval: The attitude shown in writings from 400 through 1600 A.D. reveals a monomania with religion that is unique in human history, and occurs only in the Biblical-descended religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism) and in religious cults. Christianity controlled every aspect of thought. The degree of ideological control of thought during this period was, contrary to popular belief among historians today, stronger than anything Stalin or Mao could have done with modern technology, for it recruited faith (and guilt and fear) much more powerfully than communism did. People self-policed more forcefully than any secret police could.
During the years 400--1400 A.D., art was on the defensive. The question in public debate was not whether art should have some expressive value or be purely propagandistic, but whether art should be allowed to exist at all. Throughout that entire time period, clerics repeatedly called for the abolition of nearly all art. Pictures, poetry, and music were all under nearly continual attack as being sinful, distractions from God, wasteful, and inherently untruthful. The Muslims did outlaw most representational art, and the Byzantines destroyed all their paintings and sculptures in both the 8th and 9th centuries.
4. Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic periods (with time-outs for the Puritans, Restoration, & neo-classicists): Rather than describe these individually, I'll say these were time periods during which no one ideology controlled art, and so artists were free to express their own visions. The art of these periods therefore matches our modern conception of Art.
5. Post-Modernism: There are strong ties between modernism and post-modernism, but the critical literature of the two is quite different. Modernist theory was written by people trying to make sense and move forward; post-modernist theory was made by people trying to deny and destroy sense and move backwards. It is destructive nonsense, and dominates literary theory from the 1960s until the last essay of this book in 1988.
Mircea Eliade 1949, expanded+translated 1954. Cosmos and History: The myth of the eternal return. 162 pages.
Eliade divides people throughout history into two categories that are forerunners to the modern categories of conservatives and liberals. Traditionalists, he says, think the good things in life are those that repeat: marriage, love, birth, harvest, spring. (I don't know about winter and old age.) Unexpected things are always bad: famine, plague, war, death. Traditionalists therefore think in cyclical time. They take comfort in the idea that everything repeats, nothing ever really changes, and so nothing really matters. Morality doesn't mean trying to reform society, but only to cultivate your own attitude of resignation.
Their stories glorify things that repeat. This includes people. They try to fit even outstanding and historically important individuals into some archetype, so that they become just one more instance in a recurring pattern rather than someone unique in history. Their stories subtly communicate that there is nothing new under the sun. (Buddhism and Hinduism fit this pattern perfectly.)
The Jews, he says, introduced the notion of history, with their signposts of significant events in historical time (the captivity, the Exodus) and a prophesied future coming of the Messiah. Christians and Muslims took the concept further, and this eventually led to modern science and liberal progressives, who both see change as a good thing rather than as exclusively bad.
However, Eliade says, history, which requires us to look reality in the eye, is so terrifying that humans can only tolerate it if they make up a God who directs it, to give this heroic confrontation "meaning". Modern people, having progressed far enough to realize there is no God, have pulled out the floor from underneath themselves. Without a belief in a God, they no longer have the courage to face the terror of History, and are turning back towards cyclical time and the idea that change is bad.
I find this book potentially important for several reasons:
1. It suggests an explanation for the rise of science in the West and only the West, as being caused by Judaism and Christianity. It is interesting but confusing to note that Muslim lands also had a scientific revolution, but cast it away in the 14th century, at the same time that it was taking hold in Europe. (Some historians have suggested that the Black Death caused Europe to reject its religion and the Arabs to reject their science.) This hypothesis is especially interesting because Christianity was anti-scientific--it would present a strong example of a doctrine bearing the seeds of its own destruction.
2. It makes a link between religion, philosophy, and the artistic theory of realism. Realism--the depiction of realistic individuals doing realistic things, rather than Mary Sue heroes doing grand heroic things, is always a major break with earlier artistic tradition. However, Eliade has clearly gone wrong somewhere, since his theory puts the Middle Ages on the side of realism, and artistically and philosophically, it very very obviously was not. Also, he puts the classical Greeks firmly on the side of tradition and idealism, but classical Athens was experimenting with realism before it was weakened and then conquered.
3. It explains the difference between people with progressive intent, and New Agers in progressive disguise. I am, as GhostOfHeraclitus can tell you, anti-communist. I think communism is unworkable, inherently violent, and unreformable. But communists have progressive intent. A communist will agree with me that tractors, fertilizer, and antibiotics are good things. Contrast them with "progressives" who want to build a commune where they'll work the land with oxen and use only "natural" fertilizer and medicine (as if antibiotics weren't natural!) You could try arguing with these people, but it won't do any good, because they aren't progressives, but regressives. They don't want to help people; they want to return to cyclic time.
4. It predicts that civilization is inherently unstable. Civilization leads inevitably to atheism, which leads civilization to destroy itself. I hope this isn't really inevitable, but if the argument has some merit, then we need to understand and deal with it to avoid destroying ourselves (as we seem intent upon doing at present).
Pitirim Sorokin, 1938, condensed edition 1957. Social & Cultural Dynamics. The link is to the 1957 edition, which is a mere 704 pages, about one-fourth as long as the 1938 edition. Some of the data tables are only in the 1938 edition.
I found this book while I was formulating my own theory of the principal component of art from reading Critical Theory Since Plato. I think Colin Martindale referred to it in The Clockwork Muse. Sorokin had come to the same conclusion I had about the principal component of art after decades of studying art from all time periods, from all around the world.
Sorokin's useful insight is dividing ways of thinking into the "ideational" (by which he means what everyone else calls Platonic or idealistic) and the "sensate" (empirical). He notes that the ideational is associated with conservative regimes, and the sensate is usually subversive, associated with concern for the lower classes (which he calls "decadent"). He notes that most great swaths of history produce either ideational or sensate art, but great art is produced only in brief periods of transition when the two are blended, such as in classical Greece or Elizabethan England. His enumeration of the characteristics of ideational and sensate art are identical to what I've formerly called totalitarian and subversive art, and his observation on blended art is one I've also made.
Sorokin also claims--insightfully, I think--that there have been only three bases for epistemology throughout history: empiricism (direct observation of the world, associated with sensate art), rationalism (logic, associated with ideational art), and faith. Nearly everyone else fails to remember that not only are empiricism and rationalism not the same thing, but they were historically opposed to each other. The Greeks and the medieval scholastics were rationalists; they believed it was more reliable to deduce truth while sitting in your armchair than to go out into the messy world and try to figure anything out from it. The Middle Ages, unfortunately, spent its brainpower trying to synthesize rationalism (which they called "reason") and faith rather than rationalism and empiricism, so that synthesis, which resulted in humanism, statistics, and science, wasn't begun until the 17th century, and wasn't completed until late in the 20th century with the discovery of information theory, Bayesian networks, and machine learning.
(The distinction between empiricism, logic, and science will become especially important when studying post-modernism. All phenomenology and deconstructionism is based on mistaking logic for science, on account of having a classical but not a scientific education.)
However, Sorokin was a madly conservative Catholic. He liked the Platonic, the traditional, the authoritative and hierarchical, and hated democracy, the poor, the sensory world, the new, and the free. I think this is the only book I've ever read, outside of communist propaganda, which puts "freedom" in quotation marks when talking about Western liberties. He thought the modern world could be saved only by re-instituting monarchy and placing the world back under the chains of the Catholic church--and not the Roman Catholic Church, which is a bunch of heretics, but specifically the Russian Orthodox Church, which is the only repository of good and true values in the world. So I find his data and his observations brilliant and useful, but his interpretations sometimes stupid (to avoid contradicting his prejudices), and his conclusions insane.
Like Eliade, Sorokin sees something like conservatives and liberals as being the only two artistic traditions throughout all of time and space, but his theory slices up reality a little differently, putting the European Middle Ages on the side of tradition, and classical Greece in his transitional category. This corresponds better to reality. It's unfortunate that he didn't incorporate Soviet realism and Nazi art into his 1957 edition, because they add a new twist to the totalitarian / subversive art dichotomy, which turns out (I think) to be the exception that proves (in the modern sense) the rule. [1]
[1] "The exception which proves the rule" has three different interpretations:
- The original legal interpretation, which is that an assertion of an exception to a rule proves that the rule itself is otherwise in force, e.g., "Parking is free on weekends" proves that parking is not free on weekdays.
- An extrapolated, hypothetical original interpretation, which is that it was using the Elizabethan sense of "prove" to mean "test", e.g., "The exception tests the rule."
- A sophisticated modern scientific interpretation that it expresses the common phenomenon that something which appears to be an exception to a scientific rule will on investigation reveal further circumstances which only make the evidence for that rule stronger. For example, most instances of particular animal behaviors that have been raised as objections to evolution have, on inspection, revealed new facts about those animals which predict the observed behavior under evolutionary theory.
Lawrence Brown, 1979. The Might of the West. 549 pages.
This is a well-researched and insightful book which seems to have been ignored or dismissed by historians, probably because its conclusions are so weird. TMotW combines one of the insights Sorokin relied on in Social & Cultural Dynamics (modern science is a blend of the opposing schools of the rational and the empirical) with the main argument of The Measure of Reality (the crucial impetus towards the scientific revolution was the development of measurement, which did not exist in the classical tradition). Brown argues that, except for Archimedes, the Greeks knew nothing of the empirical, that the rationalist tradition is mostly useless, and that therefore the classical world is really not that important to Western history.
I think that's an exaggeration, but still a really interesting insight. We say Aristotle knew everything, but he didn't know arithmetic. He probably couldn't multiply, and he would have said division was theoretically impossible. Geometry is pretty useless. It's only useful once you start computing sines and cosines, and then it's not Greek geometry anymore; it's Arabic. Statistical (empirical) learning techniques trounce (rationalist) logic in nearly all artificial intelligence applications. (Though note I am typing this on a computer that uses Boolean logic.)
The sensible conclusion, then, is that European civilization owes most of its scientific inheritance, and thus its modern might, to Persia and the Jews, not to the Greeks and Romans--which Brown agrees with--and that, after acquiring this inheritance in the 14th century, Europe moved through the Renaissance and Reformation towards Enlightenment and modernity--which Brown disagrees with. For some reason he wants to say Christianity's influence was entirely negative, so he argues that the Renaissance and Reformation were steps backwards. I haven't read this part, but it sounds nuts.
It's odd that the most-common objection made in Amazon reviews of a book arguing that Western civilization comes not from white people in Italy and Greece, but from darker people in the Middle East, is that Brown is racist. I don't yet know what racism these claims refer to, but I suspect white supremacists are also not very happy with Brown.
______________ Part 2: The Middle Ages, to follow ______________
Is that seven? There are fewer than that on my amazon "bad horse" wish list
Either you read Tolkien or I did, because we could not be farther apart.
Strange that I don’t see anything by Karl Jaspers or Vladimir Propp on your spreadsheet anywhere.
Shows how much context we don’t share, I suppose.
I will be honest and admit I basically have almost zero tolerance for people who unironically rail against conformity by dividing the human race and all it's work into two tribal categories that ultimately devolve into those that are hip and those that are square. I also finding it darkly amusing that after being thoroughly annoyed with such reification and tribalism I find out one of your sources is a apparently a religious zealot and the other was a fascist. I wonder if perhaps the authors would be better served with a dose less projection in their analysis.
For my part I find Ayn Rand's postulate that art is a selective recreation of reality in order to convey something a useful definition.[1] SoloBrony's definition[2] that art is a form of creative and indirect communication serves as a a useful expansion on that basic conceit. In short, art is the... art, of saying something by taking the knowledge you have, and constructing or creating elements and arranging them in such a way as to make your audience realize something.
Art is human expression, and as such you can find patterns in it insofar as you can find patterns in people, which is to say, with ease but often in a very ineffective and useless fashion.
Consider how useless the categories of "likes change and stuff" vs "doesn't" really are. They tell us nothing about a person other than their likelihood of choosing a new situation over their current one, which means all useful data, like what kinds of policies they'll support, how they'll treat others - any kind of predictive data at all - is going to be rooted entirely in the context of their situation.[3] It's also not an intrinsic trait in people - period, and tends instead to be a derived trait from circumstance. If you want examples, consider just how quickly the American Founding Fathers 180'd from being King-loving conservative Brits with a small beef with Parliament to Radical Secessionist Democrats after King George declared them traitors for questioning his government. For a more modern example, watch how the Republican Party morphed from the party of stolid conservativism to blood thirsty free market radicals the instant they lost power, or how Clinton has dropped all pretense at progressivism and is instead obsessed with demagoguery over a fucking cartoon frog now that she's confident she's destroyed the will of the Bernie contingent to fight. Wanting to change the situation or preserve it is - surprise! - entirely reliant on whether the subject is either content with the status quo or comfortable with an alternatives. In the end, Marx's dictum that wealth and power are the primary drivers of history is far more useful than some vague postulate that some people are just more hip, man.[5]
So, yeah, rambling anger and snark aside, I basically find this whole exercise misguided at the outset simply because it's seated on bad epistemology and bad psychology. Trying to carve the human race into sets devoid of context is often an exercise in futility due to just how dynamic those humans tend to be, and since art is a very human endeavor, to falls into the same issue. Better to engage the reality of the individual and their art in the context of its creation.
----
Footnotes!
[1] Although if it makes you feel better, she also fell into the trap of seeing art as a struggle between romanticism and realism, and yes, this formulation also annoys me.
[2] If I mangle anything he says, it's my fault. Go read his ADPA stuff.
[3] As for deflating the current balloon on the plate I can think of at least one prominent author who was very vocal about idealistic art being a useful tool for human liberation, thus providing the white raven proving the system false.[4] Although it is worth noting I can't easily conjure an example of realism being used directly to prop up totalitarian regimes off the top of my head other than Rand's thesis that "realism" was often used as a way to sow nihilism and defeatism into populations by correlating the weak and the morally degenerate with the "real."
[4] Surprise; It's Ayn Rand.
[5] It also trivially explains the correlation these books put forth. Rand[6] was quick to note that totalitarian regimes derived their power from psychological power over their citizens. As such, it's in the interest of the regime to promote idealistic art insofar as it idealizes life under the autocrats, and suppress realistic art insofar as it might educate the people to the depth of their suffering and plight. On the other hand, realistic art revealing the depravity of the regimes enemies will certainly get published, and idealistic art encouraging people to fight for Liberté, égalité, fraternité will probably be thoroughly quashed.[7]
[6] Boy I'm a one philosopher pony today. Although points to me for citing Marx and Rand in the same essay in a coherent and non-oppositional fashion!
[7] Such as the heavy editing and ultimately suppression the Italian film adaption of We the Living suffered when it was produced in Fascist Italy. Arguably the film, given it was green-lit for it's anti-communist setting and plot which was derived heavily from Rand's own life, is an example of both.[8]
[8] Holy recursive footnoting Batman.
4217267
Oh right, that chestnut flew right over my head in the rest of my philosopher rage.
Tolkien and his highly simplistic, childish, good vs. evil stories with realistic portrayals of PTSD, pointless tragedies fueled by short sighted spite, greed or despair rather than Ultimate Evil, and a powerful recurrent theme that judgment and execution is a perilous proposition and mercy may be for the benefit of everyone in the long run because no one has the foresight to know the true worth of a person.
...
Wait a minute-
4217267
No, that was always there. The passing of the third age is met with hope as an opposing force, not as its courier. Elves are the symbol of the past, disappearing from the world, but they are presented as being a noble people of better times. Gandalf, the ultimate figure of morality and guidance for characters in the story, follows an ancient code and punishes those who break it.
In Lord of the Rings the past and old orders are revered, even as change and the march toward the future is embraced as inevitable and fraught with risk and excitement. Perhaps BH oversimplified here, and he may actually have it backwards from a certain point of view (he'd be more correct about Star Wars), but he's right about elements and storytelling patterns of both being part of what makes it magnificent.
4217339 noble people of better times. Except, you know, for like an entire tribe of them. The Noldor.
If you're willing to overlook a lot, you can totally see "golden ages" in Tolkien. But you're going to have to overlook a LOT. Go through the silmarillion. I'm not sure how anyone can go through and say--ah yes, this is the golden time that only we could return to.
The Elves are beautiful, but to say they are inherently more worthy or noble in anyway is kind of basically recreating their own flaws. No, they aren't. They're beautiful, and they have a leg up on man in that they were prepared for by the Valar. But they also shed blood in Valinor, betrayed each other, fueded. They were often shortsighted, bitter, corruptible, fallible, and often just plain assholes.
If anything, Tolkien is able to embody a nostalgia that doesn't idolize the past as perfect. It's only better by mere comparison and you have to go way back, and even then throughout there is an acute and burdensome knowledge of how the past is littered with failure.
Magnificent? I'm getting more of the tired "Tolkien is a reactionary pretending not to be" vibe here. Star Wars fits this description way easier. Claiming Tolkien advocates some blanket return to the past is to ignore an awful lot of his work.
4217327 I'm mostly with you here (even zealots have shades, ha). I'm still questioning the arbitrary divide between Ars/art as presented, especially within time frames given. What does that do with Job or Aeneas? Whatever you might feel about them, they do seem closer to the Art half of that unfortunate dichotomy. So do a lot of things. I'm not sure I buy it.
Did it, though? A lot of the classic epics of northern and north-western Europe date to that time period. The Matter of Britain, the Matter of France, the Song of Roland. Beowulf. Geoffrey of Monmouth was writing in this time period, as were Chaucer and Langland. I mean, my god, the Prose Edda dates to this period; Snorri Sturluson knew how to write. Parzival... okay, Parzival is post-1400, I suppose, as is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but they're pretty close.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "sucked by our standards." Everything on my list inspired readers and scholars for centuries and are still doing so today indirectly through the works that descend from them. That's usually a decent sign that a work of art has something going for it.
Incidentally: unless I'm quite blind, you've got nothing on your spreadsheet from north of the alps and east of the Rhine until the modern era. This seems like an oversight; the Germans did more than invent the printing press and Scandinavia is more than a little bit important to the development of English literature. Also, you've got Chaucer on your list, which is good, but you should pay more attention to Langland. Or, rather, to Piers Plowman. It is more important than people think it is.
Man, I haven't thought about Eliade since undergrad.
I'm not sure this is anything worth worrying about. Civilizations have been destroying themselves just fine without atheism for thousands upon thousands of years, and it seems unlikely that widespread disbelief in God is going to make that more likely rather than less or equally likely. Eliade's arguments on this front are... unconvincing. I'm always suspicious of this sort of thing; it is, in my opinion, a form of nihilism, and I find nihilism hypocritical at best and an outright lie by someone looking to con you at worst.
I'm not sure I'm prepared to buy this re: deconstructionism, but I have a complicated and about a 1:4 love/hate relationship with postmodernism.
4217267
Tolkien is a bit of a mixed bag but generally speaking, he portrays Middle-Earth as a fallen world where those who are most virtuous are those who are trying to recall the glories of the past, which they will never equal. The kingdoms the Noldor build in Beleriand can never be as grand or as wonderful or as beautiful or fulfilling as the ones they left behind in Aman. Numenor at the height of its power and virtue cannot compare to what the Noldor built in Beleriand. Gondor at its height cannot compare to what Numenor achieved. Aragorn, when he re-establishes the line of Kings, cannot rebuild the kingdom in such a state as it actually matches its former glory. The Dwarves of Erebor cannot master craft as fine as their forefathers did before the Dragon came, which in turn was not as fine as the craft they had before the Balrog came to Khazad-Dum.
Everything decays.
I'm a huge fan of Tolkien and I think he has important things to tell us (and that when he doesn't, his setting is engaging and fun and heart-stirring enough to somewhat mitigate that) but he is hella problematic. Example: he straight-out says in his Letters that the grievous original sin of both Melkor and Sauron is that they want to make the world a better place; that is to say, they looked upon the divine creation and decided "nah, I can do better." That's the sin from which all of their subsequent evil flows; a refusal to settle.
(Although it is of course also true that Melkor defined "better" as "a universe that bends to my will and mine alone." Sauron is considerable more complex, because he's a better builder and has more actual redeeming qualities, slight as they are, than his boss does.)
I don't have much to say, except that your interjection here surprised me... That's the selling point.
A cyclical view makes winter, old age, death, etc maybe not good, but noble and necessary, and worthy of respect. I'd say that's one of the most popular reasons for buying into that paradigm, since those things are generally inevitable, something that gives them purpose comes in handy in a worldview.
Edit: It's the ciiiiircle of liiiife...
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ed/Bill_bryson_a_short_history.jpg
Personally, I liked this one.
EDIT: To tie it more closely to the blog, I will say what it's very good at is studying the evolution of world views with a very strong authorial voice that is entertaining without being intrusive or what I'd deem unnecessary embelishment
I would go less with 'art is propaganda' and more with art being a free-flowing attempt by power structures to build on themselves, pitted against the desire of artists to express their view of the world. When the two mesh, you get artistic explosions sweeping over a country. When the two clash, you get graffiti on the underpasses and art being burned for being heresy. Sometimes, even the struggling artists attempting to promote their vision are in effect power structures set against the existing government/power, and attempting to bring it down.
4217280 I'm not familiar with Jaspers. Propp is not in this category. He focused on Russian folk tales from a narrow time period, really just a century or two, IIRC. This is only the big picture list of books that help form an image of the grand sweep of patterns in Western art, story, and philosophy over the past 2,500 years, or focus on specific important periods of change. (Also, I've only listed 2 of the books so far.)
4217327
The books I'm talking about categorize cultures, not individuals. They may take it too far--but be warned that I'm oversimplifying their books.
This kind of loose dichotomy is always incomplete, but always justified. I explained the concept of a principal component at length in "The principal dimensions of English". Nearly always--in my experience, always--if you have some complex natural phenomenon which generates instances that can be represented as points in a high-dimensional space, you can find a line through that space such that 35% to 60% of the variance in the points is accounted for by their projection onto that line. You can call that line whatever you like--"conservative vs. progressive", for instance--and it will really explain about half of the variance in your dataset.
The dimension that you've then found is not a primitive dimension--it isn't a single feature of instances. It isn't causative. But then, neither are terms like "conservative". If you find no such line, there's something weird about your dataset. (Usually, it's weird in the direction of a single dimension accounting for more than 60% of the data.) If your system is some competitive human activity, the first dimension is likely to account for more than 60% of the data, because of how humans form alliances. For instance, I'll guess that you could predict about 95% of the votes of Supreme Court judges from their political affiliations.
Neither of the books rail against conformity. Sorokin is strongly in favor of conformity. I haven't read most of Eliade yet, but he says that we have a lot to learn from traditional, conservative, [oppressive] regimes. As I noted, I disagree with the viewpoints of most of these authors. I'm the one who would rail against conformity.
4217483 I haven't read it--the title always put me off because it sounded too ambitious. "Social & Cultural Dynamics" stakes out a much smaller area of study, and it's about 3000 pages long. But I'll take a look.
4217571 Artists within totalitarian regimes are not supposed to express their views. Not in Rome, where sculpture was often done by slaves whose names were not recorded, and was usually supposed to be an exact replica of a living person or of an earlier sculpture. Not in the Middle Ages, where artists were supposed to draw stereotypical, iconographic representations of a small number of well-known scenes, such as the Annunciation or the stations of the cross (and the names of artists were again not recorded). Not in Stalinist Russia, when artists were told what to say and how to say it, and judged on the basis of their obedience, and punished severely for possessing original vision.
Hey Bad Horse, the Atlantic Monthly just called. They want...well, whatever it is you stole, they want it back. God knows why.
4217740
Well, that makes you part of the problem.
Also:
And what then, pray tell, is a culture composed of Bad Horse? Rabbits?
4217406
You're right about that. I wrote this as one big post with all 7 books, and I mention some of those in the next post. Short answer: Christian medieval literature sucked. Beowulf, the Eddas, the Nibelungenlied, and more were not Christian. Gawain and the Green Knight was, and IIRC it's 14th century, so it does qualify, and I didn't mention it bcoz it's complicated. Similarly wi. Roland, which is French, circa 1100, but I haven't read it in a very long time, so I'm not prepared to talk about it. My recollection is that its Christianity was a thin veneer over Frankish barbarism; a real Christian story wouldn't end with a trial by combat followed by executing all of the bad guy's relatives. Le Mort was 1485. Chaucer's popular works were traditional, boring, idealistic stuff like Troilus & Cressida; Canterbury Tales wasn't taken seriously at the time. (Tho maybe that's because he hadn't finished them.)
This also brings up the issue of written vs. oral storytelling. The things I write about the literature of different regimes usually refers to that which was allowed, condoned, and funded by the state, church, and/or nobility. Usually, there was some simultaneous oral tradition which was probably what I call "subversive", but it wasn't as polished or as permanent.
The spreadsheet is old, and it would be nice for it to be more complete, but I was working from a collection of history books, and replicated their oversights. Piers Plowman is historically important, but I don't see any value in it as literature. I'm afraid I gave up on it early (it's hard to read! and it's basically a long, angry rant) and dismissed it in the second half of the post as, artistically, just another of those annoying am-I-hitting-you-over-the-head-hard-enough-yet religious allegories.
I hope to post detailed arguments later, but probably much later (like 2018), because that's in the 20th century.
4217804
Telling someone they're part of the problem without bothering to say what the problem is, is jerkish behavior. Do you mean diversity is the problem?
See The Central Limit Theorem. Collections of individuals have a much lower variance and a more normal distribution than individuals can be, so classifying them, as collections, results in much less error. You're probably imagining that I would then project those classifications onto the individual members of the cultures, which would, of course, produce all that error you fear. But I don't need or want to do that here.
Classifications are statistical operations, and there is nothing wrong with them, so long as one keeps track of expected error. Objections to categorization stems from contemporary progressive philosophy, which is based in classical Greek logic, has no concept of real numbers, and therefore cannot conceptualize, let alone estimate, error.
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Le Mort was 1485, but that's Malory. I was talking about Monmouth, who wrote Historia Regum Britanniae in the 1100s. Without that Malory doesn't exist. Hell, without that the Arthurian mythos doesn't exist, period. Neither do the plays King Lear or Cymbeline.
My understanding of Chaucer is that he had a small legitimacy problem, not because his work wasn't thought to be good, but because he was writing in the vernacular in a time period when doing that made you unserious. Granted, he was one of the people who changed that.
The Matter of Britain? The Chansons de Geste? The Troubadors? The Minnesingers? The Goliards? Francois motherfucking Villon?
There's a lot there that doesn't suck, and a lot that has literary value.
Unless of course you insist on very peculiar definitions of "medieval," "literature" or "suck."
Hate to break it to ya, but Snorri Sturleson was born in 1179. Iceland became Christian by law in 1000. That meant that by the time Snorri started writing the Prose Edda (which seems to be mostly his own invention), paganism had been illegal in Iceland longer than slavery has been illegal in the United States today.
You need to start getting more of your Norse literary history from, say, Nancy Marie Brown, and less from these guys:
Besides, Nancy Marie Brown actually got wasted on mead while soaking in Snorri Sturleson's hot tub. HOW. METAL. IS. THAAAAAAAAT?!!??!?!1??
And have you even read "Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics?" Beowulf was pagan material reworked in a Christian context. If that's not Christian, neither is Paradise Lost.
Listen, I'm not joking!
I was under the impression that even before the Red Party started pushing Atheism hard, the Chinese Emperors (especially those of the Legalist persuasion) were generally agnostic outside of the customary ritual forms necessary to maintain the Emperor's legitimacy. The people could worship as they wished so long as they paid their dues to the state, but the state would not mettle in religious affairs so long as they did not interfere with the state. At the very least, it seems as though a civilization can survive a not insignificant portion of its ruling class being a touch atheist.
Speaking of, your reading list could use some cross-examination from the Middle and Far East for completeness's sake, but I think that's already been brought up...
EDIT: Also, I was always under the impression that civilizations fell due to some combination of catastrophic soil loss and runaway wealth concentration creating a cultural echo chamber, removing the elites' connection with the fundamental situational understandings that allowed them to make sensible decisions. So we can apparently be as Atheist as we want so long as we keep the dirt on the ground.
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I presumed the context of the statement would elucidate the "problem" I was mentioning, which was namely the incongruity of championing complexity and individuality while simultaneous cleaving to a paradigm that divides the world along a false dichotomy. Only a Sith deals in absolutes, and the like. My statement was in reply to a reply you made to a statement I made expressing my annoyance with that, so I assumed the line of statement-rebuttal would make that all clear.
My bad.
I was also, primarily, pointing out the absurdity of your defense: I say the model is useless to categorize individuals, and you tell me it's not for categorizing individuals, it's for categorizing cultures, which makes me stare in wonder because cultures are nothing more than semi-arbitrary ways to categorize... individuals. The fact is that you are making broad statements about how groups of people will behave which must mean that you are making statements about how the individuals in those groups will behave because a group is nothing but a set of individuals.
Furthermore, if your grand theory of art is not for categorizing the art individual people make accurately then I have to wonder what it's for, because art isn't made by committee. Even in huge collaborative projects you need people like directors and producers to add coherence to the chaos by bending everyone's artistic efforts to a single end goal and keeping people focused on that vision.
4217840
I also must question the invocation of Central Limit Theorem in conjunction with human endeavor. Art is not a random, isolated output generator, which is what your linked wikipedia article defines as a being the purview of the theorem. Art is not random, and art feeds off of itself. Artistic culture, such that it exists, is a dynamic and iterative process.
For example: People watch My Little Pony. People write fan-fiction. Device heretic reads the fanfiction. DH writes Eternal. Everyone else reads Eternal, and suddenly everyone is writing Twilestia stories that closely ape the emotional conflict and arc of Eternal. People read those stories and find them annoying, so they write parodies of this Eternal-type fic.
For another example: Marvel makes a movie about a super hero. It makes them a lot of money. They make many movies about super heroes. This makes them more money. They make a movie about all their super hero characters teaming up. This basically makes them all of the damn money. DC sees this. DC starts trying to make movies about super heroes teaming up.
This is not a randomly generated set. This is a, to borrow a programming term, a reflective system: it modifies itself. Before Composure and Eternal, Twilestia was a relatively obscure ship. After them, the market became flooded with it, to the point where writing Twilestia was one of the easy paths to featuredom because everyone wanted to recapture the magic of Eternal and Composure. Before 2008, super hero movies were on the decline and inter-movie continuity was basically unheard of. Now we have two incredibly successful studious competing in, what was before a relatively novel prospect, with other contenders (such as Dracula Untold) attempting to enter the ring.
As such, I find your use of CLT to justify this methodology to be suspect.
I think the The Divine Comedy (beginning of the 14th century) and the Decamerone (mid 14th century) may be another two arguments to reconsider a bit the limits of the time in which no great literature was produced.
4218336 4217919 When I say medieval literature sucked, I don't mean there was no good literature. But it was IMHO very low quality overall. The badness of most medieval art (other than the functional and the decorative, e.g., cathedrals and wine goblets) is remarkable. It needs to be explained. It was explained by medievals themselves. The short answer, IMHO, is that they had theories of art which were based on false beliefs about the world, and a conception of art as propaganda or prettiness rather than as Art, which I attribute partly to their lower position on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. (I found a lot of it in a book you recommended to me, Ed.
)
I am not going to be one of those people--specifically, nearly everyone else in the contemporary study of literature--who says, "Oh, we can't judge their literature; we see things differently; we can't assume humanity progresses or knows better than people did a thousand years ago; everyone has their point of view; taste is arbitrary." Because then I might as well throw up my hooves and go home; there would be no
point trying to figure out anything about literature if there's no such thing as "good" or "bad".
I don't assume humanity knows more than people did a thousand years ago. I take it as a thoroughly-proven fact.
Ed, you're going to go ballistic when I post the second part of this, because I'm going to say terrible things about the Middle Ages. Cut me some slack. I'm not a professor of history. I'm not writing a book or kicking people with opposing views out of the University. I'm just a guy trying to make sense of the big picture of the history of art. I would like to give each age and each region on Earth the time it deserves (CC 4217922), but I can't. I can't spend more time looking at the Middle Ages. I can't study Chinese or Persian or Aztec literature. I don't have enough years of life or memory capacity. I have to muddle on with an incomplete picture and guesswork to fill in my blanks, and just say what I think rather than stop in terror of insulting people who've been dead for a thousand years. A critic must make judgements.
I can't measure up to the standards of academia for statements made on specific time periods. I am currently reading a book on Restoration drama, by a guy who seems to have gone through the Bodelian and read all their old unpublished manuscripts. Hundreds of plays and other books from the late 17th century. It's his life's work. (And he hates them all. Odd choice of career.) I can't measure up to that. I've read two. Maybe I'll read a third.
4217922 Someone should write a book about the rise and fall of theories about the rise and fall of civilizations.
4217936
If you think we can't categorize cultures, then we can only stare in wonder at each other. Again, you're operating from a classical worldview which denies the existence of real numbers, and so can't conceive of making statistical statements. Suppose you had to allocate the US surveillance budget. How much should we allocate to monitoring ISIS, Russia, England, and Canada? If you refuse to categorize those cultures into ones that are more or less friendly toward the US, everybody in your country will eventually die.
I already explained that categorizing cultures produces much, much less error than categorizing individuals, and you're just ignoring my explanation and repeating yourself. Probably because you're operating from a classical philosophical basis which can't incorporate error measurement into its ethics.
4218620
I see two possibilities here: either you are working on dangerously incomplete premises or you are using a very specific definition of quality which is different from mine. I think I will wait for your next entries to understand which one it is. Obviously there is the third possibility which states that I am wrong, but that is not a good starting point for any discussion even if it is a more than acceptable conclusion to a discourse.
4218700
You assume top down analysis by broad categorization in useful in this scenario when it frankly isn't. Observing all of Russia is a monumental task that not even the bloated, mindless Cthulian monster that is the United States Intelligence is up to. Instead you have to analyze the trends and pinpoint the smallest critical junctures which you can observe to get predictive data. Don't observe all of Russia, observe the movements of the Russian state. Don't observe all of the Russian state, observe the power players and operations of interest. The more focused and accurate and dare I say individualized you make your investigations, the more and more useful data, paradoxically, you can generate. The fact is right now the NSA is mindlessly and aggressively spying on every human being in the United States like some sort of ravening dark god and they really have nothing to show for it, and that isn't hyperbole either. As of 2014 they really had nothing to show for it. At best you can go "Russia is hostile to us" or "Canada is nice to us" as a starting point for iterative investigations until you get more and more focused data on which to generate more and more focused investigations. So, I find your argument ad absurdum incomplete.
You could also, I dunno, try explaining what these magical "Real Numbers" are to me instead of insinuating I have a cognitive deficiency because my education was somehow outdated and lackluster. The wiki you linked certainly didn't do so.
Wow. All we need is Capn' Chryssalid and there will be chairs a-flyin'
I think some people would do well to remember Bad Horse is just an evil villain from the Evil League Of Evil, scheming to take over the world by understanding it into submission. A chain of reasoning is only as good as its weakest link, and only works if it's functional within a useful context. A context of one is hardly a threat to anybody.
Bad Horse would do well to remember that we construct many chains of reasoning in our lives, and it's the making of them rather than the celebrating of them that matters. I delight in seeing this type of work in that it's like Rob Ager (see his analysis of The Shining) and can get you thinking in unexplored directions. That does NOT mean that Rob, or the Bad Horse, are privy to anything resembling truth. They are just determined that, like Shaw speaking of Wagner's Ring sequence, 'whatever was intended, this work contains all that I have seen in it!'
True, but not the whole story (except to the critic, because it is the whole story as seen through their eyes.
4218629
Working from Collingwood's The Idea of History, it seems to me that the idea of empirically studying past artifacts with an eye of developing a working theory of the rise and fall of civilizations is sufficiently recent that there has not been much scholarship on the matter to rise and fall. I believe it was the 1700s when the first notable effort to rigorously trace the general arc of the Roman Empire and its driving factors, but the field did not get much more press until the late 18-early 1900s and there haven't been enough shifts in intellectual patterns since then to really have much to do scholarship on. Prior to the 1500s' with Erasmus and the renewal of critical historical scholarship, there was not much interest in accurate history for history's sake but rather 'history' was more for moralizing, fostering civic pride, and perhaps the nobility held it important insofar as it guaranteed their ancestral privileges in the current power structure. "Is this really what happened?" had no bearing on the questions the field sought to answer. ("Does this happened-...ing? get me that Barony?" on the other hand...)
Of course, the Chinese Zhou and subsequent Warring States Periods also produced a large amount of scholarship on finding a reasonable political arrangement, but a lot of that is lost due to it being several millennia out of print and the matter that some of it was intentionally torched with every inter-dynastic collapse of civic order.
With regard to lack of time to get a complete picture, I'm going to call nonsense. Anyone with a desire for researching a particular area of scholarship can find time for a generalist introduction to a different topic or perspective. For instance, last month I studied the entire material for a Ham technician's license, completed a book on first aid, and wrote a few (yet unedited
) fics on two one hour slots and a half-hour slot every day. While I'm not going to be able to become an expert, the point still stands that you can make a lot of progress by making the commitment to set aside a small block of time every day for something completely different. If you start with the understanding that you're doing it for the roundedness, you should easily find what you're after.
It's good to hear from you again, BH!
Thank you for the reviews/summaries. I wish I could borrow some of your propensity for reading a lot quickly--I've got over 15 untouched books D: and it grows ALL THE TIME.
I have some questions though. Don't worry if you can't get around to answering them. I know you already need, like, two extra life's worth of time :p
How do you define progress, particularly in regards to art (and more specifically, literature)?
Is literature something that can progress infinitely, or will it reach a nirvana state, beyond which any progress would actually be a backslide?
To clarify, you're seeking an absolute set of standards to judge and write by--standards which would be enforced in classrooms and lit journals, right? For instance: "ask questions, don't answer them" or "the moral complexity in your story must reflect that of real life".
I know you have a moral component to your theory on good lit vs bad (unless that has changed?)--does this mean you support censorship/banning? Such as a book that advocated all the worst ideas about art, morals, and people? Personally, I am undecided on censorship, believing as you do in a Morality. The latter does seem to necessitate the former.
4218620
I have 9/10ths of an actual English degree (although you are almost certainly better read than me at this point in my life; my first, failed attempt at a Bachelors was over a decade ago) and am related to, and friends with, people with Masters in a variety of literature fields, and I'm comfortable saying that you're just straight up wrong about this unless the field has changed radically since '05.
At best, I'll concede that it is considered pedagogically sound practice to periodically remind people studying this sort of thing that taste is in fact arbitrary not as a method of ending the conversation, but as a method of encouraging people to take a step back and check the rubric they're using to evaluate things. It is also true that people are often encouraged to try and view works in the context they occupied at the time of their creation, and that attempting to judge everything by modern standards all the time is not always an appropriate way of doing things.
But judging the literature of the past happens all the time. Loads of people who study the topic seriously publish mountains of work each year doing just that.
We know more than people did a thousand years, but we're not actually smarter. Knowledge, mere facts, can be transmitted easily once the hard part of sussing it out is done, but the people doing that sussing out aren't any smarter today than they ever have been; they just have the advantage of standing on top of a mountain of accumulated prior accomplishments.
Isaac Newton messed around with mirrors and made a better telescope. Theodore Maiman made the first laser, a device incalculably more complex. Nonetheless, I'm comfortable making the assertion that Newton was probably smarter than Maiman.
4219791
Smarter as in "you take a child from that era and educate it with modern standards and it will perform worse" probably not.
Smarter as in "the median of the population can deal with abstractions and apply that kind of reasoning to complex plans achieving what once upon a time required a life of studying or an exceptional mind" almost certainly yes.
The most striking difference is the environment where we live. We produce and process information at a staggering rate. It was all built on the foundations laid out by our ancestors, and there is relative little doubt that if we lived in their conditions we would behave similarly, but we are "smarter" as we grow up with intellectual tools they didn't have, and which make an incredibly difference. Oh, and just to be clear, I am talking at the population level here. Individuals may always deviate from the median either way.
4217327
The division is not between people who want change vs people who want things to stay the same.
The two camps exist. The former camp believes that the future can be made a better place; the latter camp fantasizes and fetishizes a reality which doesn't exist and any movement away from that is evilbadwrong.
Referring to them as "people who want change vs people who stay the same" is (perhaps misleading) shorthand.
The "stolid conservatives" are still there. They're boring so you don't see them on the news much (though apparently Bush Sr. is going to be voting for Clinton). The angry losers (the Trump followers) are not the same people and never have been. Nor is Ted Cruz and his ilk. What happened was that one side gained ascendancy over another.
Likewise, the idea that Hillary has somehow "abandoned progressivism" is nonsense. Sanders is an ideologue; Hillary is a pragmatist. Focusing on Pepe is pure nonsense; the campaign has done literally dozens of things.
Interestingly, Sanders actually falls into the "hates change" camp. He fetishizes the labor movement and hates free trade. He believes in something which doesn't exist and never did. But it doesn't matter; he sees the world moving away from that, and is angry about it. Whenever reality contradicts his beliefs, reality is wrong.
This is true of all people who fall into that camp. Such folks often are in favor of change. But their "change" is, in their mind, "reverting" the world to the "proper" status quo, putting things back into their places (whether or not things ever were in those places to begin with).
These people are not unified because they don't agree on what the proper places are. Viewing them as a "tribe" is problematic; they're not one. But it is a general mindset, and there is some cross-over between angry, stupid Trump supporters and angry, stupid Sanders supporters - obviously farcical politicially, but it actually makes sense if you look at it from a different perspective of fantasizing about and fetishizing a world that doesn't exist. Sanders' white America and Trump's white America aren't actually all that different - they emphasize many of the same things and they play on many of the same fears and xenophobic feelings (opposition to free trade is a proxy for racism and xenophobia, hence why people mostly complain about brown people stealing "their" jobs, not Europeans and Canadians).
It isn't about not wanting change. It is about the idea that any change away from their fetishized utopia is always bad no matter what, and anything which implies that their vision should be changed is wrong.
Someone who accepts change accepts the idea that change can make the world better, that there is no one pre-determined direction in which the world must go, but that we must adapt to conditions and always try to forge a better way into the future.
Someone like this might be "conservative" - they might want to keep the world a stable place because they feel that is the best conditions for the world to evolve and change in a positive direction. But their goal is not to steer it into some imagined utopia.
4217936
This is wrong on a very fundamental level. The larger your sample, the more average it gets.
Predicting an individual's reactions are very difficult.
Predicting the average reaction across a population group is much easier.
As numbers go up, people become more grossly predictable.
I can't tell you if any random person in Portland picked at random is liberal or conservative. I can't tell you their political views.
But I can make statistical predictions, and if we pick enough people, I'll be right more often than I'm wrong.
I feel like this is the sort of discussion that leads to people thinking they can develop psychohistory as an actual discipline.
... not sure if that's good or bad.
4220208
We've already got actual eugenecists and racists participating, so, eh, no point in telling Hari Seldon he can't play.
4220324
Hell, Seldon was both a eugenicist AND a fascist, he'd be right at home.
(For reals. Dudes entire plan was "galaxy ruled indefinitely by a secret cabal of psychic overmen." I mean, wow.)
4220347
I'm afraid I have to agree with you there.
Isaac Asimov was a secular Jew and leftist who worked for the U.S. government in WWII, but his utopian vision incorporated the worst elements of the system he hated and fought.
Shows what comes of thinking that political ideology and loyalties excuse one from checking one's opinions for viciousness.
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4219027
4218700
Unfortunately I never could study much of philosophy and my knowledge about art is very limited but I do study history and considering that you are working a lot with history of art I can apport my little grain of sand to this.
Any society is made of individuals, but it's more than the sum of those individuals. Society build itself above those individuals molding and affecting them at the same time that those individuals can change or affect the society. In the right context you can take societys and mention them as a whole, you can take the “average” and extrapolate it to a whole society; as long as you are really aware that you are simplifying something.
In most cases that leads to more mistakes than benefits though. The problem happens when one tends to believe in that general categorization as “static”, “closed” elements instead of open and contradictory things and ignores the differents tendencies inside them. Let’s go with the “people who wanted change”, “people that don’t want change” example.
In the XIX century in Russia most industrial businessmen believed in liberalism and wanted to modernize the country and introduce democracy, free trade, technology and progress in it (take their extended support of the 1905 revolution); while most of the landowners noble aristocracy was extremely conservative and wanted to know nothing about “progress” or the “western” ways. Yet, when it was the moment to build more railroads for connecting Russia with Europe, the liberals industrial businessmen were opposed, because they didn’t want to compete with the european manufacture, while the aristocracy was the one that impulsed that project, because they could sold their grain much more easily and cheap to the rest of the continent.
It would still be right to say that the russian aristocracy was conservative because it was it biggest and normal tendency, as long as you have in consideration that that wasn’t an absolute.
It would be right to say that Russian society in general was very conservative and didn’t wanted change (because it was, not only landowners but bureaucrats, peasants, etc), as long as you have in mind that there also was a minor tendency of people (industrials, “intellectuals”, workers) that did wanted change; because later that minor tendency would play a major paper in Russia.
I wanted to take that example, but to give another more close case: You’ve spoken several times yet in different blogs about western “individuality” culture against for example asian “collective” thinking. But that’s too schematic. Just in middle east we have at least three totally different societies/cultures in time (mesopotamian/egyptian, hellenist and arabic) which were very different, and that had inside different tendencies and in which the consideration of “individuality” had fall and rise in different moments.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I do have the impression that you have a very “absolute” and “closed” use of categories.
Which make me curious about something. As I said, I never studied philosophy but in history and sociology that kind of dynamic, of things not being absolute but being formed by different tendencies in constant change, it's called “dialectics”, which I understand was the essential formulation of Hegel, and it’s an basic concept of social sciences used not by “marxist” but for pretty much all historians/sociologist/anthropologist from all ideological tendencies (it’s even the same methodology used by Clausewitz, probably the most important military strategist in history). Again, I never studied Hegel itself, I only have seen dialectics in social sciences methodology, so I was a little curious when I saw in your sheet that you marked Hegel as a terrible thing. I vaguely understand that he was also a idealist, and I have the impression that you disagree with idealist, so may I ask what exactly is what you don’t like of him?.
Well, I only have a general glance of roman society yet, but I’m more of the impression that they couldn’t impose a religion rather than they didn’t wanted. The existence of any state is based in it’s legitimacy. Essentially, they have to convince people that all that a state take from people is reasonable enough for what they give. Any state has to maintain that equilibrium to exist for enough time, in antiquity maintaining that equilibrium was specially hard without mass media and general education, without the quantity and qualities of modern professional apparatus of repression/security and without the level of modern productivity (especially of food).
The idea that rulers of antiquity had “absolute” power it’s very unfounded, their government were terrible fragile and they had to make a lot of concession between the differents elites that supported them and the huge number of lower classes that were incredibly exploited of their resources by the state. Ruling over a such a huge territory and cultures, the Roman HAD to give a lot of local autonomy if they wanted to maintain control over those lands and not to suffer even more rebellions than what they already had.
Far to be the exception, it’s the same that did most really big and lasting empires in antiquity (Chinese, Mongol, Macedonic) they not only couldn’t impose a only religion, they couldn’t even impose a common law (In Roman province, except for roman citizens, people were judged by traditional local laws).
WHEN, the Roman emperors become considerably more powerful, in the late empire, it’s pretty much also when they start to try to impose christianity as the only religion; but it also match with the lost of real power in the provinces and the rise of local generals and warlords and the decay of the empire in general. There just wasn’t enough technology (specially productivity) to sustain really centralized governments which could effectively impose “totalitarian” regimes in antiquity.
Which also lead me to another point that I won’t develop because I already writed a lot. But it seems, at least by the books that you are quoting, that you are reading books of history with a very culturalist approach. Which is very common in people who write about history of art because each one of us love our camp of study and always wants to make it the cause of any progress
but I would recommend to relativize that a little. There is no doubt that ideology has a great level of influence of the movement of history, but I wouldn’t trust so much in theories that explain the rise of western europe in things like “Judeo-Christian” or the level of progressivism instead of things like the grown of productivity with the progressive exploitation of less fertiles areas ine Europe or the relaxation of feudal relations after the XIV demographic crisis, which didn’t happened in the middle east or China. Though, that’s a valid discussion of methodology between historians.
4220387
You're making a really interesting assumption here--that "viciousness" doesn't refer to committing vicious acts, but to being open-minded to particular strategies. Asimov might reply by saying that the worst elements of the system he hated and fought were killing Jews for being Jewish, and that Hari Seldon didn't do anything like that. You're saying that the evils of Nazism were a belief in the concept of race and an un-democratic government. He would, I think, say the evils of Nazism were its hatred and prejudice, and the resulting evil things it did.
4221721
What, like partitioning Poland with Stalin, and exterminating Jews and Gypsies?
I would say that being open minded to those particular strategies is proof of a certain level of viciousness. It's not the same as actually committing them. But it would be enough to make me not want to hang out.
It'a like when Lefties talk about terrorism: oh, they don't condone violence, dear me no, but they're willing to give the terrorist's motives and worldview a fair and impatrial hearing, unless of course he's a righting terrorist.
In other words it's creepy and you're creeping me out
4217919 Re. your specific points:
The Matter of Britain is history, not literature.
The Song of Roland is on my list of exceptions, but I'm unfamiliar with the Chansons de Geste, because they don't appear in English literature anthologies, because they're French. I don't honestly hold out much hope for them; my impression from references to them is that they range from stories about battles of exactly the sort that bore me, to something like Orlando Furioso, to which my reaction is OH MY GOD PLEASE STOP THE STUPIDITY, PLEASE MAKE IT STOP.
The troubadors, minnesingers, & goliards are performers, so referring to them is meaningless here.
I haven't read Villon, because I don't read French, but 1. Johan Huizinga lists him and Charles d'Orleans as the only 2 poets of the 15th century who weren't "superficial, tiresome, & monotonous", and 2. he wrote in the middle of the 15th century, so he's a transitional or Renaissance poet, not a representative medieval poet.
The Eddas are Norse mythology, and not Christian. Calling them Christian because Iceland was officially Christian is like calling the New Testament pagan because Rome was officially pagan.
Beowulf is not Christian; it has a few Christian lines that were probably thrown in later. (I actually don't like the story of Beowulf, at least not the first half; he's a Mary Sue with no emotional connections to those around him. But it's very well-crafted. I love the poetry of it, but I wouldn't hold it up as great literature for my purposes. It was great literature for the purposes of Britain in the 8th century. Relating that distinction to "bad" and "good" is quite tricky.)
But in any case, listing a few specific good works isn't going to change my mind that medieval art and literature was unusually bad, though "bad" requires some explanation. I'm preparing a long post on representational art in Western Europe from 1000-1300, which I think was pretty "bad". The curious thing is that it wasn't a matter, as it has been presented, of art decaying with the Dark Ages and the loss of wealth and artists and knowledge, because representational art was IMHO much better during the "Dark Ages" of 500-900 A.D., and was especially good in one unique time and place where good artists were exported from Byzantium (where they were tightly controlled by church and state) to Gaul, where they were let off the leash. I believe Christian doctrine--not really even Christian, but the brand of Platonism that was thought of as Christian at the time--led to the deliberate eradication of Art (as we think of it today) in the High Middle Ages, because its basic purposes--expressing humanity, conveying emotions, studying life, questioning society--were all considered evil by most clergy at the time. During the High Middle Ages, "art" was actually a tool to suppress Art and stamp it out of the human spirit.
All this would just be talking about preferences if it were the case that the Christian artists of the High Middle Ages were equally skilled as those of earlier and later ages. But except for the Byzantines and the Irish, they were not. They lacked basic skills such as drawing curves, keeping parallel lines equidistant, drawing feet, keeping the different parts of the body in proportion to each other, drawing things (e.g., babies, dogs) as what they were rather than as oddly-shaped or sized adult humans, separating parts of figures by color, and drawing facial expressions. In many cases they seemed not to have thought out Which suggests that human skill and artistic technique can't be separated from the human artistic spirit, and that we can meaningfully speak of good and bad artistic theories by relating them to human psychology and to their observed products.
4221789
Spoken like a true statistician: properly define your sample population, and you can make the data say anything you please.
I give the fuck up.
4221721
Also:
This is without doubt the coolest way of saying "fuck you" that I have ever seen, and I'm totally stealing it. Thanks!
4218629
"Mr. Gibbon has discussed the matter at sufficient length, to put it mildly." -- Will Cuppy, The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody
4221903
Well, if you're talking about Geoffrey of Monmouth. If you admit that as literature, you have to admit all history chronicles as literature, because it operates differently. Being false history doesn't make it literature. If you mean the entirety of British legends throughout the Middle Ages, that's not specific enough to use as evidence.
4221785 Okay, now I have to respond, because you're slandering me.
It was you, not me, who implied that Hitler was evil not because he partitioned Poland with Stalin, or exterminated Jews and Gypsies, but because he shared certain academic beliefs and general political strategies with Hari Seldon. I just corrected you by saying "no, he was evil because he killed people, not because he didn't fit your politics," and you turned around and slandered me as having said what I had just disagreed with you for having said.
4221970
No, I never said that, and for the record I say Hitler was evil for precisely those reasons--and plenty others, like authoritarianism and eugenics.
What I did say was that fictional character Hari Seldon and, by extension, his creator, real person Isaac Asimov, smelled vaguely of that same sort of shit.
(Okay actually it was Murcushio who said it but I agreed with him. So.)
I...what...okay, there are too many double negatives for me to work out here, but I upset you and I'm sorry. It did indeed seem to me like you were trivializing authoritarianism and eugenicism as "different viewpoints" but then I guess I was arguing with the people in my head, not you. So: sorry.
4220746
The view of individualism is a key feature of any culture. It goes along with only certain types of government and religion, and helps determine the rate of artistic and scientific change, and the kind of art produced. I am only echoing what most people who study history and cultures have said about the West being more individualistic in general, and the East being more collective in general. There are times and places that can said to be either individualistic or not without oversimplifying too much. 1950-2000 in America was very individualistic. The Middle Ages in Europe, especially the High Middle Ages, were very much not individualistic. There are also cultures that can't be easily categorized that way, like classical Greece.
He was an Idealist, which is very different from being an idealist. That is, today we usually use the word "idealist" to mean "progressive", but Hegel was an Idealist philosopher, which means he believed essence precedes existence--that before a thing can exist, and before a category like "chair" can exist, the essence of that thing or category must exist in some other realm. For instance, an Idealist would probably say that for us to talk about triangles, the category Triangle must first exist independently of human thought. Anyone who talks about perfection is probably an Idealist, whether they know it or not. Platonism is a variety of Idealism; so is Christianity. But there are many varieties of Idealism, and I don't know how Hegel was an Idealist, other than that he believed human history was working out a logically pre-ordained plan which progressed towards the perfect society.
GhostOfHeraclitus may correct me on this, but I hold these things against Hegel:
1. He corrupted European thought by fooling people into believing that rhetoric was logic. There is no such thing as dialectic logic; dialectic (the synthesis of contradictory propositions) is illogical by definition. That doesn't mean it's bad, but it is bad when people use it thinking they're using logic. And if you read his work (which I haven't read much of), all he's really doing is telling good stories but pretending they're logical proofs. Storytelling is fine, but should never be taken as infallible.
As a result, everyone on whom Hegel was a major influence made up just-so stories only poetically related to the subject at hand, and then claimed they proved something with certainty. For example, Marx, Heidegger, and Derrida.
2. He wrote very badly, and so prolifically, that you seem to have to specialize in Hegel just to have the right to talk about Hegel. A Hegel scholar can always say, "No, you're mistaken" to anything you say about Hegel, and you can't do much about it. His work is so impenetrable that, rationally, it ought to be given a giant complexity prior penalty (such as a Kolmogorov prior), which would disqualify Hegel's work from serious consideration.
3. I have found that when any philosopher cites Hegel as a major influence or quotes him extensively, it's a very strong indicator that that philosopher's work is nonsense or mostly wrong.
What you said after that is correct, but still, the Roman emperors had more theoretical and practical power than medieval kings did. There was no Pope to contradict them, nor dukes whom they could not order about, nor did they have feudal obligations to their vassals. If I compare Rome to ancient Egypt, or ancient China, or medieval Europe, my impression is that the product of central government power times local autonomy was highest in Rome. For instance, during the life of Christ, the Romans had great power over the Jews, theoretical and practical, yet gave them great autonomy.
Since the way I categorize cultures results in examining central power divided by local autonomy (because they're positively and negatively correlated with one of the principal components I look at), my usual categorization doesn't work well with the Romans.