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It must be so exhausting to go through life only enjoying things that match one’s up-to-the-minute current moral views. I guess all biographies of influential p
by keiferski 5mo ago
It must be so exhausting to go through life only enjoying things that match one’s up-to-the-minute current moral views. I guess all biographies of influential people are basically out, as being successful in 1000BC or 1500AD required one to do things considered unethical today.
It feels a bit like religious fundamentalism with a different veneer.
- saagarjha 5mo agoOk but you do realize that he was alive in the 1900s, not 1000 BC.
- keiferski 5mo agoThe moral views of the average person circa 1930 are very different from one today. But I read old books for their interesting stories, viewpoints on life, literary quality, etc. – not to tut-tut someone for having different moral views than me, a hundred years later. So it doesn't bother me. Like I said, I really cannot understand the mindset of someone that reads a book from another era/civilization and focuses on critiquing the author's ethics. Just feels like such a limited way to interact with the world.
- saagarjha 5mo agoPlease point to the things being described in that comment and explain what the average person in 1930 would have felt about them.
- breezybottom 5mo agoI don't see it. The 1930s weren't that long ago, there are still people alive who lived through them. If you were talking about ancient Egypt, you might have a point.
- keiferski 5mo agoThe 1930s had radically different opinions on race, gender, religion, and a host of other things as compared to today.
- breezybottom 5mo agoDefine "radical"
- keiferski 5mo agoThe world has entirely different values today than circa 1930. This is...obvious? Read a book or Wikipedia page? I don't know what else to tell you.
- breezybottom 5mo agoThe world doesn't have values, people do. And many of them are the same.
- NooneAtAll3 5mo agoit's usually inappropriate to feed a troll, but I'll just say "olympic gold champion was congratulated by literally Adolf Hitler, but not his own country the Unite States - because he was black"
- watwut 5mo agoYou had your fascists and you had your anti-fascists where antifascists were blamed for what fascists did.
- pixelatedindex 5mo agoAs a brown person in the US, I certainly would have felt a difference between then and now…
- breezybottom 5mo agoThe United States isn't the entire world.
- smogcutter 5mo agoIt is, however, the setting of On the Road.
- achenet 5mo agoI recommend you read the book "Pimp" by Iceberg Slim, about a Black America in the early/mid 20th century. Personally speaking, I found the book very 'awe-inspiring'/it made me go 'wow' a bunch, because I found the author's experience so completely different from my own :)
- huhkerrf 5mo agoYou're jumping to some wild conclusions there. This isn't about wokism (if you know the author, that would be clear) or political correctness. It's more: wow these guys are jerks, and they get on my nerves. A protagonist doesn't need to be perfect. But, ultimately, you should be rooting for him.
- keiferski 5mo agoI wasn't making it about wokism at all. And I don't agree that you should be rooting for protagonist. That's an extremely limited way of looking at literature, much less history. I can think of half a dozen books offhand that have unpleasant or anti-hero type protagonists.
- huhkerrf 5mo agoFair enough, I withdraw the "rooting for" comment. More accurate to say that you shouldn't be actively annoyed at the protagonist.
- cassianoleal 5mo agoIsn't art supposed to elicit an emotional response in the audience?
- ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago> I can think of half a dozen books offhand that have unpleasant or anti-hero type protagonists. I was not a fan of Thomas Covenant. What a prick.
- keiferski 5mo agoI just finished American Tabloid and I don’t think there was a single honorable character in the whole novel. Not one, out of dozens.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago
- jodrellblank 5mo ago> up-to-the-minute current moral views “You shall not steal” is the eighth commandment from the Bible, two thousand years ago.
- keiferski 5mo agoSo you don't read or enjoy any books about people that have broken any commandments?
- jstanley 5mo agoYou can enjoy a book while still noting that the characters in it are not doing good things.
- 21asdffdsa12 5mo agoYes, but the public denouncing of the books signifies that one views all books as moral instructions aka there are not fiction books.
- watwut 5mo agoNote that comment is toward "then going into rhapsodies about how free-spirited and unencumbered and holy and mad and visionary it all is". It is entirely valid comment. It is entirely 100% valid to make such comment even if you actually like the book. What is bad is insisting that no one can point it out. That we all must pretend that acting like that is being cool free-spirit and visionary. That we cant analyze a book and make conclusions about what it celebrates, what it criticizes and what it just describes without any value judgement attached. Somewhere along the lines people developed extremely thin skin toward what you can say about famous pieces of art. You cant really analyze them nor their characters. You must show only unfailing admiration of the characters and the book itself.
- 21asdffdsa12 5mo agoYou definitely should have the right- and there should also be a firewall to socializing such experiments damage and fallouts. I just had also very negative experiences, where the mere thought experiment was considered "heresy" and as an attempt to recruit people for such a lifestyle. I can defend the freedom while defending the freedom, while not pushing the freedom from consequences.
- Jtarii 5mo agoMaybe try reading the review first before criticising it.
- keiferski 5mo agoI have, awhile ago. There isn’t much more to it than the quoted section. It’s not really surprising to me that the author didn’t like it; Kerouac is probably the exact opposite person to him. But that doesn’t make it a good review.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- arjie 5mo agoScott Alexander is a smart guy, but not everything needs to match taste. For instance, he describes the writer of the book Sadly, Porn as remarkably erudite and so on. The community he belongs to has the habit of describing each other as very smart, certainly, and particularly having pretensions to Hegel but overall he's quite trustworthy. In any case, on actually reading the book I found it less interestingly smart and more like something the character Salvatore in The Name of The Rose might say. But text is a serialization of an idea and it's entirely possible I have the wrong deserializer. So that's one thing perhaps you and I now have in common. And I suspect Scott Alexander just lacks the deserializer for Jack Kerouac.
- mc32 5mo agoIt’s true we should not judge people by today’s morals -one can’t be a visionary and predict tomorrows morals; but, that said it seems those people strayed well beyond what was acceptable even back then. So there is room for criticism.
- bshepard 5mo agoIt is less exciting than religious fundamentalism!
- watwut 5mo ago> It must be so exhausting to go through life only enjoying things that match one’s up-to-the-minute current moral views. It is not that much exhausting to not celebrate abuse. In fact, most people are not abusers, most books are not celebrating it. But, there are subcultures that do treat abuse as a cool inspirable thing to do. That is what the quote references. And it is exhausting to be around such cultures once you have seen or understand consequences of what they celebrate. And that ideology is how one gets Epstein enablers. Vice signaling and principled opposition against "acknowledging there are victims here" are weird and destructive taboos. >I guess all biographies of influential people are basically out, as being successful in 1000BC or 1500AD required one to do things considered unethical today. Maybe this means we should not celebrate success itself, but acknowledge harm many successful people do to make themselves famous, rich and powerful. But more importantly, this claim of yours is frequently just not true. It is something people say to defend their heroes, trying to defend unusually horrible stuff that back then people themselves found horrible back then, fought against and criticized a lot. You can write about bad stuff historical person caused without framing it as good or cool thing, really. You can even acknowledge that their opposition had a point. We know that being abuser is something that makes certain people admire you more.
- 21asdffdsa12 5mo agoIts quite simplifying though, if you can discount a ton of people and experiences. The best person to ever have lived, was thus a baby born to a prisoner in the 1600 which spend his life in prison doing nothing. We should all aspire and be inspired to be like that. Childlike and horrifically controlled by external systems.