Why not just read critically instead of discarding great works? For example, in Herodotus or Thucydides you can extract that the Greeks were a group of petty, vain, and prone to self-interest resulting in their near destruction. In the other hand you can critically infer that the Persian Kings were lording over a diverse, tolerant, empire who thought and generally acted in a much more recognizable manner to us in the west today they were when dealing with troublesome Ionians.
This is in part what I advocate for. I definitely don't think great works should be 'discarded', people should at least be aware of them and the general point they try to make.
In practice, people have a limited amount of time and weighing books by how likely they are to reveal a lie of our era is a way to choose between them. This changes from era to era, so a great work which mainly reinforces lies of our era could in another era reveal important truths.
When Martin Luther was compelled by his faith to put his life on the line to challenge the Papal authorities at the council of Worms, was he inspired by Truth or deluded by a Lie? When Thomas Jefferson declared that all men are created equal before God, do you think he was motivated in his heart by the Truth of America as a land of freedom and opportunities, or did he architect the cornerstone of our great Republic on a Lie?
Lies can't push an era forward, only genuine belief and faith. And those who push the farthest are the ones who define their eras
To be fair, the hypothesis that all men are created equal is not only not self-evidently true, I would go so far as to say that, to the degree that anything can be self-evident, that hypothesis is self-evidently false. We are surrounded daily by the evidence of people's inequality relative to each other, on just about any quality you could possibly think to compare them on, and the only way you can salvage the statement is by interpreting it as an aspirational slogan that basically means "we reject the idea that our new country should have a hereditary aristocracy", or by appealing to a deity who values us all equally - a deity whose existence is less than self-evident.
Benjamin Franklin substituted the word "self-evident" for Jefferson's "sacred and eternal." It comes from mathematics, specifically the axioms of Euclidian geometry, the truths of which are "self-evident" (for example, that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line).
In other words, the idea that all men are created equal is an assumption on which the American republic is founded. Its practical significance is that the new government should govern in accordance with the principle that not only is the happiness of every citizen is equally important (in so far as the design of good public policy is concerned), but that, as a general rule, a dollar is worth more to a poor man than a rich one. Only in this latter sense does it say we are all alike, that being the very axiom upon which our republic is founded.
And being an axiom, it is not up for debate. Which is a good thing too, since it is neither provable nor disprovable.
Or put another way, those who choose to dispute this axiom, understood in this sense, are being, quite literally, un-American.
Fine, but it seems foolish to set as an axiom a statement that is so obviously wrong in its literal interpretation. And even on its metaphorical interpretation, it's not at all obvious that the government should care equally about the happiness of a criminal as about the happiness of the criminal's victims. Or, say, someone with a naturally low set point for happiness, relative to someone with a higher set point, *if* the government is going to be expected to try to achieve equality of happiness for its citizens. "The government should not treat anyone a priori as being more deserving special privileges than anyone else" seems defensible, but you don't need to believe that we are all created equal to endorse that, you just need to think that the government wouldn't do a good job of deciding who was and wasn't entitled to special privileges if it thought that some people were.
I'm not sure I entirely understand your comment. Jefferson's phrase, "created equal" clearly does not refer to things like intelligence, good character, and the like. How can we know that? Because Jefferson himself clearly recognizes that these differences exist (as does every half-way observant person) in his Notes on Virginia, private correspondence, etc. I think this misreading is, especially among highly intelligent people coming upon this phrase for the first time, the most common. Chalk this up to a failure to our educational institutions, which have largely abandoned history as an essential part of a liberal education.
A second point that perhaps needs to be made is that this axiom does not rule out inequalities of income, wealth, political power, and the like in so far as they increase the well-being of the less successful members of society, which is generally the case. The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the overriding consideration in situations of this kind. [See here for an example of what good policy would look like if implemented: https://shorturl.at/vCIJ7 ]
As for criminals, clearly they lose their equal human rights as citizens (for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness") during the period of their incarceration. This exception does not nullify the general principle. In fact it helps to establish it.
This comment is amazing. A excellent demonstration of how Boomer History tm is not just wrong but maximally incorrect in every possible way.
Martin Luther was motivated by the blatant lies of the church. The Revolutionary war was fought on "no taxation without representations". The great propaganda of every age, and downstream of that the great social movements of every age, are abundantly negative.
Okay, sorry for taking long to reply. Was actually thinking of how to put this, but fundamentally, you have a very pessimistic view of history which I find quite distastefully cynical. Martin Luther was motivated by blatant lies, that is correct, because the Catholic Church at that point in time has for long been corrupted by political and institutional power. Yet the terminal state is not the origin. During the times of the Romans, this was a religion that gave people the faith to defy the Emperor, even when threatened with crucifixion. That is action motivated by genuine faith, and a belief in what is True. And that defilement of that faith by the pope and all his religio hustlers and cranks in the Vatican, was what set Luther to endanger his own life for the Truth. And from his Reformation, history was changed forever. And look, I'm not even really a Christian myself, so it's not like I'm shilling for the home team. Faith and beliefs move eras, not lies
The misinterpretation of Winston Churchill’s performance as prime minister is an enduring example of this. The popular belief is that he turned the war around with stirring speeches to his scrappy underdog country. In fact his insight was to understand that even after Dunkirk his empire was still more powerful than Germany’s and to clearly communicate that to his people.
Why are old books are worth reading; because in an era when printing books was super expensive, only the best works got printed. These days, there are hundreds if not thousands of new books published every week. Just imagine a histogram based upon the quality of the thinking, but likely the left half is mostly chopped off by the publishers; so it's just the right half of the slope. If you read a book and like it, maybe you'll keep it on your shelf, or lend/gift it to a friend. If you don't like a book, you'll throw it away, or take it to the used book store where it ends up on the shelf or in the trash.
But as to the question of which old books are worth reading. I refer to 'The Western Canon.' Caveat here: I mean the oft-argued list of books comprising the canon, not the standalone book with that title. The canon is the set of books which sparked and molded the enlightenment.
There's bad ideas in the canon too. Consider The Communist Manifesto is in the western canon, as is Mein Kampf. Its good to read bad ideas to see how they're formed. For instance, the current anti-Semitism craze didn't just jump-up out of the mud overnight. For the past ten years ... when it became acceptable to single out 'that basket of deplorables.' Only no one mentioned; 'that basket' of mostly WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) also contained about 85% of the WASPs fellow travelers—the religious Jews. My point is that any time a group is being singled out—for their two minutes of hate—you know things are going south. The secular Jews today are all 'why me, why me' when just last month they were all about "That basket of deplorables." If you read the good works, you may learn to step above the fray—act like a Daoist Monk with a Zen Garden—walk around the edges and view the problem from all perspectives.
In The Western Canon, is the book Two Years Before The Mast. Written by Richard Henry Dana. Dana was a student at Harvard in the 1830s. His eyesight was failing, and he thought—probably correctly—that he needed to take a break from books and get outside. Against his parent's wishes, he signed-on as a sailor on a trading ship bound for California. After his voyage Dana returned to Harvard, completed his education, and became instrumental in writing maritime law. The important thing, is you can spend a week reading this work, and take in the defining moments of Dana's life. You can turn these defining thoughts into your own thoughts, let them mold your thinking, view the problem from Dana's perspective. This is how the canon makes you a better person.
In my edition of Two Years Before the Mast, the introducer wrote that the book would eventually be measured above Melville’s Moby Dick as a work of literature. I don’t think it’s happened yet although many of Melville’s literary heirs in high Modernism have been downgraded. They remind me of modern buildings with sleek surfaces that attract graffiti.
Art and Illusion by EH Gombrich traces the development of representation over the centuries. It’s more interesting now as the value of photographic realism is so downgraded in the art world, but so attractive to everybody else. I read it in my 20s and it spoke to me as an exploration of the formal goals of art. I returned to it many years later after understanding much more about history and the development of moral understanding. representation develops but then has a breakdown in Modernism. Maybe there are cross references between that history and the history of how we came to believe who we are.
Most great hypotheses are obvious to most people ie don't have kids out of wedlock, don't smoke crack. There are some that apply to you and are exceptions to the great hypotheses for most other people. Maybe you should try to make lots of money outperforming the stock market even if most people can't do that if you have a good enough idea on how the stock market works.
It's very hard to judge the counterfactual though of following vs not following the hypothesis since you can't rewind your life. It kinda reminds me of that experiment where people made major life decisions on a coin flip and seemed no worse off whether or not they did it
Why not just read critically instead of discarding great works? For example, in Herodotus or Thucydides you can extract that the Greeks were a group of petty, vain, and prone to self-interest resulting in their near destruction. In the other hand you can critically infer that the Persian Kings were lording over a diverse, tolerant, empire who thought and generally acted in a much more recognizable manner to us in the west today they were when dealing with troublesome Ionians.
This is in part what I advocate for. I definitely don't think great works should be 'discarded', people should at least be aware of them and the general point they try to make.
In practice, people have a limited amount of time and weighing books by how likely they are to reveal a lie of our era is a way to choose between them. This changes from era to era, so a great work which mainly reinforces lies of our era could in another era reveal important truths.
Lol all eras are defined by their lies .. is max pessimo. How about all eras are defined by their truths?
This is a perfect example of a hypothesis that is literally worthless
When Martin Luther was compelled by his faith to put his life on the line to challenge the Papal authorities at the council of Worms, was he inspired by Truth or deluded by a Lie? When Thomas Jefferson declared that all men are created equal before God, do you think he was motivated in his heart by the Truth of America as a land of freedom and opportunities, or did he architect the cornerstone of our great Republic on a Lie?
Lies can't push an era forward, only genuine belief and faith. And those who push the farthest are the ones who define their eras
To be fair, the hypothesis that all men are created equal is not only not self-evidently true, I would go so far as to say that, to the degree that anything can be self-evident, that hypothesis is self-evidently false. We are surrounded daily by the evidence of people's inequality relative to each other, on just about any quality you could possibly think to compare them on, and the only way you can salvage the statement is by interpreting it as an aspirational slogan that basically means "we reject the idea that our new country should have a hereditary aristocracy", or by appealing to a deity who values us all equally - a deity whose existence is less than self-evident.
Benjamin Franklin substituted the word "self-evident" for Jefferson's "sacred and eternal." It comes from mathematics, specifically the axioms of Euclidian geometry, the truths of which are "self-evident" (for example, that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line).
In other words, the idea that all men are created equal is an assumption on which the American republic is founded. Its practical significance is that the new government should govern in accordance with the principle that not only is the happiness of every citizen is equally important (in so far as the design of good public policy is concerned), but that, as a general rule, a dollar is worth more to a poor man than a rich one. Only in this latter sense does it say we are all alike, that being the very axiom upon which our republic is founded.
And being an axiom, it is not up for debate. Which is a good thing too, since it is neither provable nor disprovable.
Or put another way, those who choose to dispute this axiom, understood in this sense, are being, quite literally, un-American.
Fine, but it seems foolish to set as an axiom a statement that is so obviously wrong in its literal interpretation. And even on its metaphorical interpretation, it's not at all obvious that the government should care equally about the happiness of a criminal as about the happiness of the criminal's victims. Or, say, someone with a naturally low set point for happiness, relative to someone with a higher set point, *if* the government is going to be expected to try to achieve equality of happiness for its citizens. "The government should not treat anyone a priori as being more deserving special privileges than anyone else" seems defensible, but you don't need to believe that we are all created equal to endorse that, you just need to think that the government wouldn't do a good job of deciding who was and wasn't entitled to special privileges if it thought that some people were.
I'm not sure I entirely understand your comment. Jefferson's phrase, "created equal" clearly does not refer to things like intelligence, good character, and the like. How can we know that? Because Jefferson himself clearly recognizes that these differences exist (as does every half-way observant person) in his Notes on Virginia, private correspondence, etc. I think this misreading is, especially among highly intelligent people coming upon this phrase for the first time, the most common. Chalk this up to a failure to our educational institutions, which have largely abandoned history as an essential part of a liberal education.
A second point that perhaps needs to be made is that this axiom does not rule out inequalities of income, wealth, political power, and the like in so far as they increase the well-being of the less successful members of society, which is generally the case. The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the overriding consideration in situations of this kind. [See here for an example of what good policy would look like if implemented: https://shorturl.at/vCIJ7 ]
As for criminals, clearly they lose their equal human rights as citizens (for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness") during the period of their incarceration. This exception does not nullify the general principle. In fact it helps to establish it.
This comment is amazing. A excellent demonstration of how Boomer History tm is not just wrong but maximally incorrect in every possible way.
Martin Luther was motivated by the blatant lies of the church. The Revolutionary war was fought on "no taxation without representations". The great propaganda of every age, and downstream of that the great social movements of every age, are abundantly negative.
Okay, sorry for taking long to reply. Was actually thinking of how to put this, but fundamentally, you have a very pessimistic view of history which I find quite distastefully cynical. Martin Luther was motivated by blatant lies, that is correct, because the Catholic Church at that point in time has for long been corrupted by political and institutional power. Yet the terminal state is not the origin. During the times of the Romans, this was a religion that gave people the faith to defy the Emperor, even when threatened with crucifixion. That is action motivated by genuine faith, and a belief in what is True. And that defilement of that faith by the pope and all his religio hustlers and cranks in the Vatican, was what set Luther to endanger his own life for the Truth. And from his Reformation, history was changed forever. And look, I'm not even really a Christian myself, so it's not like I'm shilling for the home team. Faith and beliefs move eras, not lies
The misinterpretation of Winston Churchill’s performance as prime minister is an enduring example of this. The popular belief is that he turned the war around with stirring speeches to his scrappy underdog country. In fact his insight was to understand that even after Dunkirk his empire was still more powerful than Germany’s and to clearly communicate that to his people.
Here is a re-reading of one of the oldest, most foundational texts in our literature: https://shorturl.at/clxQ7
Why are old books are worth reading; because in an era when printing books was super expensive, only the best works got printed. These days, there are hundreds if not thousands of new books published every week. Just imagine a histogram based upon the quality of the thinking, but likely the left half is mostly chopped off by the publishers; so it's just the right half of the slope. If you read a book and like it, maybe you'll keep it on your shelf, or lend/gift it to a friend. If you don't like a book, you'll throw it away, or take it to the used book store where it ends up on the shelf or in the trash.
But as to the question of which old books are worth reading. I refer to 'The Western Canon.' Caveat here: I mean the oft-argued list of books comprising the canon, not the standalone book with that title. The canon is the set of books which sparked and molded the enlightenment.
There's bad ideas in the canon too. Consider The Communist Manifesto is in the western canon, as is Mein Kampf. Its good to read bad ideas to see how they're formed. For instance, the current anti-Semitism craze didn't just jump-up out of the mud overnight. For the past ten years ... when it became acceptable to single out 'that basket of deplorables.' Only no one mentioned; 'that basket' of mostly WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) also contained about 85% of the WASPs fellow travelers—the religious Jews. My point is that any time a group is being singled out—for their two minutes of hate—you know things are going south. The secular Jews today are all 'why me, why me' when just last month they were all about "That basket of deplorables." If you read the good works, you may learn to step above the fray—act like a Daoist Monk with a Zen Garden—walk around the edges and view the problem from all perspectives.
In The Western Canon, is the book Two Years Before The Mast. Written by Richard Henry Dana. Dana was a student at Harvard in the 1830s. His eyesight was failing, and he thought—probably correctly—that he needed to take a break from books and get outside. Against his parent's wishes, he signed-on as a sailor on a trading ship bound for California. After his voyage Dana returned to Harvard, completed his education, and became instrumental in writing maritime law. The important thing, is you can spend a week reading this work, and take in the defining moments of Dana's life. You can turn these defining thoughts into your own thoughts, let them mold your thinking, view the problem from Dana's perspective. This is how the canon makes you a better person.
In my edition of Two Years Before the Mast, the introducer wrote that the book would eventually be measured above Melville’s Moby Dick as a work of literature. I don’t think it’s happened yet although many of Melville’s literary heirs in high Modernism have been downgraded. They remind me of modern buildings with sleek surfaces that attract graffiti.
So any interesting book you would recommend to get a very different perspective than what we can get nowadays ?
Art and Illusion by EH Gombrich traces the development of representation over the centuries. It’s more interesting now as the value of photographic realism is so downgraded in the art world, but so attractive to everybody else. I read it in my 20s and it spoke to me as an exploration of the formal goals of art. I returned to it many years later after understanding much more about history and the development of moral understanding. representation develops but then has a breakdown in Modernism. Maybe there are cross references between that history and the history of how we came to believe who we are.
Most great hypotheses are obvious to most people ie don't have kids out of wedlock, don't smoke crack. There are some that apply to you and are exceptions to the great hypotheses for most other people. Maybe you should try to make lots of money outperforming the stock market even if most people can't do that if you have a good enough idea on how the stock market works.
It's very hard to judge the counterfactual though of following vs not following the hypothesis since you can't rewind your life. It kinda reminds me of that experiment where people made major life decisions on a coin flip and seemed no worse off whether or not they did it