8 ms·

The single greatest benefit of reading old books directly, and not via a modern intermediary, is that you realize the modern era is but one of many. More specif

The single greatest benefit of reading old books directly, and not via a modern intermediary, is that you realize the modern era is but one of many. More specifically, that past people had completely different worldviews and weren’t simply modern humans living 2,000 years ago. The past isn’t just a foreign country, it’s another planet. When you read a summary book or a modern translation, you miss this entirely. Everything is filtered through the worldview complex of 2020 to a much higher degree.

082349872349872 6y ago
I'm curious which parts of the past strike you as being from "another planet", because I tend to get the opposite impression. Past people didn't have our tech level, but otherwise strike me as being very obviously fellow humans. (confer Marcus Aurelius' complaint that even when you're the emperor of Rome, you still have to deal with idiots and jerks all day long)
- dash2 6y ago
  Both are simultaneously true. You get such a strong impression of Pliny from his letters: a sensible chap, a bit Pooterish, really a classic organisation man, but good-hearted. And his appreciation of his new wife is so touching! Then you discover he was 39 and his new wife was about 14.
- keiferski 6y ago
  I had more morality-type issues in mind. Something like The Genealogy of Morality by Nietzsche, in that what we think of as universal human moral attitudes have actually been very different in the past. A modern example might be imperialism and expansionism. Pretty much universally condemned in 2020, yet was the SOP of basically every civilization since the beginning of time.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Human moral attitudes are also very different, in different parts of the world, in the present. As far as imperialism goes, it may be condemned in theory, but in practice it looks to be alive and well, at least as far as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military_bases#/media/File:American_bases_worldwide.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military... indicates (expansionism is a different matter, because how is a global power supposed to expand?)
    - keiferski 6y ago
      > Human moral attitudes are also very different, in different parts of the world, in the present. True, but still much less so than they were before the Modern era. Regarding imperialism, I don’t think your examples are quite apt. While modern nation states have power bases around the world, this is nothing like most historical empires. The American economic “empire” is nothing compared to the Romans, Mongols, etc.
      - 082349872349872 6y ago
        The difference I see is that the Romans, Mongols, etc. were geographically limited and bordered by geostrategic peer powers, with the occasional client states buffering in between. Presumably you see different differences? (I've read a fair amount of Kissinger, and his main contribution to US political thought had been anticipated by the Melian Dialogue, set about 2'400 years ago)
        keiferski 6y ago
        Sure, from a moral standpoint the Romans or Mongols would probably have zero qualms with using biological weapons, nukes, enslaving the conquered populace, etc. These are obviously all totally taboo today. If you read about the Mongol siege of Kyiv, or the Romans destroying and salting Carthage, they are way beyond anything considered acceptable today.
        irrational 6y ago
- try-perforate 6y ago
  I agree. I think one thing I’ve realized is that a few thousand years isn’t really that long of a timespan. And people writing around the time of Rome and even earlier weren’t stupid like I’ve tended to think of them. I think that’s why things like philosophy have persisted through time. It’s not like humans were unable to reason about their existence in the time of Rome. If I read and think about those folks and their experience of the human condition, I am able to relate to someone who lived many generations before me, which I think is pretty incredible to be honest.
- irrational 6y ago
  One example that comes to mind is maps. I tend to think of North as being up, so North should be at the top of a map. I never realized that that is cultural until I learned that many ancient societies considered East (the direction of the rising sun) to be up, so you find ancient maps with East as the top. Another example is their view of history. We tend to see history as needing to describe what is "true", that is what actually happened if we had been there with multiple cameras recording the events as they happened. Many ancient peoples would have thought that is a bizarre and alien view of history. For them history was more about the stories that they could tell and if the stories differed significantly from what actually happened, well, so what? Why would anyone possibly want history to describe what actually happened? Who cares? The story is what is true.
  - lemonspat 6y ago
    > so you find ancient maps with East as the top. I have seen that before with the T and O maps [1], where Asia is presented as North. They are nice, simple maps for their age [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map
  - aksss 6y ago
    To be “oriented”.
  - benjohnson 6y ago
    Some old Greek texts have the Past being what’s ahead of you - you can see it all in front of you. The Future being behind you - it can sneak up on you and you can’t see it.
    - irrational 6y ago
      Not just Greek. Many ancient societies viewed time in this way. It makes sense. You can see the past, so it must be in front of you. You can’t see the future, so it must be behind you.
- misiti3780 6y ago
  How about in 1600s when people in Massachusetts (and in Europe also) were being burned because they were witches ?
  - jonsen 6y ago
    Maybe they got all of them, so we don’t know how we would do today.
  - jecel 6y ago
    That is actually one of C.S. Lewis' examples of how humans have not evolved morally. He claims that the difference is people not believing their child was sick and might die because the weird old lady at the end of the street is a witch. If they were convinced of that then many would almost certainly support burning people. He was sadly proved right in 2014 when someone posted on social media that a 33 year old women was kidnapping babies to use in satanic rituals. Her neighbors beat her to death (news in Portuguese): http://g1.globo.com/sp/santos-regiao/noticia/2014/05/mulher-espancada-apos-boatos-em-rede-social-morre-em-guaruja-sp.html http://g1.globo.com/sp/santos-regiao/noticia/2014/05/mulher-...
    - aksss 6y ago
      He talks about this in “Mere Christianity” and it strikes me as correct: “But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.”
      - wrp 6y ago
- wrp 6y ago
  > ...I tend to get the opposite impression. I think it can go either way, depending on who you read, because contemporary variation has always been greater than difference over time. Much of what I read in Galen or Aristotle sounds like it could have come from a colleague, while a lot of posts on HN strike me as coming from an alternate reality.
brightball 6y ago
I have the opposite take when reading history, especially very old history. The more I read the more I realize that people haven’t changed in thousands of years. The only real difference is speed of travel and communication.
andrew-dc 6y ago
This is a real point. When you read something with a modern perspective, you might get a vague or simple sense of what the author was intending, but a deeper and richer understanding can be misunderstood, or completely missed. Many simple assumptions in the minds the readers of the time, would be totally lost to us today, unless we reached out and studied. For instance, (to steal from an author I can't remember) - try to imagine a culture in 2000+ years coming across an ancient fragment which reads: "The Dolphins went to the air and pummeled the Lions."

082349872349872 6y ago

I'm curious which parts of the past strike you as being from "another planet", because I tend to get the opposite impression. Past people didn't have our tech level, but otherwise strike me as being very obviously fellow humans. (confer Marcus Aurelius' complaint that even when you're the emperor of Rome, you still have to deal with idiots and jerks all day long)

dash2 6y ago
Both are simultaneously true. You get such a strong impression of Pliny from his letters: a sensible chap, a bit Pooterish, really a classic organisation man, but good-hearted. And his appreciation of his new wife is so touching! Then you discover he was 39 and his new wife was about 14.
keiferski 6y ago
I had more morality-type issues in mind. Something like The Genealogy of Morality by Nietzsche, in that what we think of as universal human moral attitudes have actually been very different in the past. A modern example might be imperialism and expansionism. Pretty much universally condemned in 2020, yet was the SOP of basically every civilization since the beginning of time.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Human moral attitudes are also very different, in different parts of the world, in the present. As far as imperialism goes, it may be condemned in theory, but in practice it looks to be alive and well, at least as far as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military_bases#/media/File:American_bases_worldwide.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military... indicates (expansionism is a different matter, because how is a global power supposed to expand?)
  - keiferski 6y ago
    > Human moral attitudes are also very different, in different parts of the world, in the present. True, but still much less so than they were before the Modern era. Regarding imperialism, I don’t think your examples are quite apt. While modern nation states have power bases around the world, this is nothing like most historical empires. The American economic “empire” is nothing compared to the Romans, Mongols, etc.
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      The difference I see is that the Romans, Mongols, etc. were geographically limited and bordered by geostrategic peer powers, with the occasional client states buffering in between. Presumably you see different differences? (I've read a fair amount of Kissinger, and his main contribution to US political thought had been anticipated by the Melian Dialogue, set about 2'400 years ago)
      - keiferski 6y ago
        Sure, from a moral standpoint the Romans or Mongols would probably have zero qualms with using biological weapons, nukes, enslaving the conquered populace, etc. These are obviously all totally taboo today. If you read about the Mongol siege of Kyiv, or the Romans destroying and salting Carthage, they are way beyond anything considered acceptable today.
        irrational 6y ago
try-perforate 6y ago
I agree. I think one thing I’ve realized is that a few thousand years isn’t really that long of a timespan. And people writing around the time of Rome and even earlier weren’t stupid like I’ve tended to think of them. I think that’s why things like philosophy have persisted through time. It’s not like humans were unable to reason about their existence in the time of Rome. If I read and think about those folks and their experience of the human condition, I am able to relate to someone who lived many generations before me, which I think is pretty incredible to be honest.
irrational 6y ago
One example that comes to mind is maps. I tend to think of North as being up, so North should be at the top of a map. I never realized that that is cultural until I learned that many ancient societies considered East (the direction of the rising sun) to be up, so you find ancient maps with East as the top. Another example is their view of history. We tend to see history as needing to describe what is "true", that is what actually happened if we had been there with multiple cameras recording the events as they happened. Many ancient peoples would have thought that is a bizarre and alien view of history. For them history was more about the stories that they could tell and if the stories differed significantly from what actually happened, well, so what? Why would anyone possibly want history to describe what actually happened? Who cares? The story is what is true.
- lemonspat 6y ago
  > so you find ancient maps with East as the top. I have seen that before with the T and O maps [1], where Asia is presented as North. They are nice, simple maps for their age [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map
- aksss 6y ago
  To be “oriented”.
- benjohnson 6y ago
  Some old Greek texts have the Past being what’s ahead of you - you can see it all in front of you. The Future being behind you - it can sneak up on you and you can’t see it.
  - irrational 6y ago
    Not just Greek. Many ancient societies viewed time in this way. It makes sense. You can see the past, so it must be in front of you. You can’t see the future, so it must be behind you.
misiti3780 6y ago
How about in 1600s when people in Massachusetts (and in Europe also) were being burned because they were witches ?
- jonsen 6y ago
  Maybe they got all of them, so we don’t know how we would do today.
- jecel 6y ago
  That is actually one of C.S. Lewis' examples of how humans have not evolved morally. He claims that the difference is people not believing their child was sick and might die because the weird old lady at the end of the street is a witch. If they were convinced of that then many would almost certainly support burning people. He was sadly proved right in 2014 when someone posted on social media that a 33 year old women was kidnapping babies to use in satanic rituals. Her neighbors beat her to death (news in Portuguese): http://g1.globo.com/sp/santos-regiao/noticia/2014/05/mulher-espancada-apos-boatos-em-rede-social-morre-em-guaruja-sp.html http://g1.globo.com/sp/santos-regiao/noticia/2014/05/mulher-...
  - aksss 6y ago
    He talks about this in “Mere Christianity” and it strikes me as correct: “But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.”
    - wrp 6y ago
wrp 6y ago
> ...I tend to get the opposite impression. I think it can go either way, depending on who you read, because contemporary variation has always been greater than difference over time. Much of what I read in Galen or Aristotle sounds like it could have come from a colleague, while a lot of posts on HN strike me as coming from an alternate reality.

brightball 6y ago

I have the opposite take when reading history, especially very old history. The more I read the more I realize that people haven’t changed in thousands of years. The only real difference is speed of travel and communication.

andrew-dc 6y ago

This is a real point. When you read something with a modern perspective, you might get a vague or simple sense of what the author was intending, but a deeper and richer understanding can be misunderstood, or completely missed. Many simple assumptions in the minds the readers of the time, would be totally lost to us today, unless we reached out and studied. For instance, (to steal from an author I can't remember) - try to imagine a culture in 2000+ years coming across an ancient fragment which reads: "The Dolphins went to the air and pummeled the Lions."