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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2658 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Just a fun thought. There’s a notion that “great” contemporary “literature” ought to be appreciated along the same lines as older literature. The idea is that they are both approximately the same quality, one just happens to be newer. Hidden within this sentiment is perhaps the assumption that any time period and culture can produce literature of the same quality, you just have to find it. Why would one time period produce better literature?

But actually, a culmination of different factors led to 19th century literature culture and its great works. The culture was far more word-driven, with writing rather than imagery and speech being the primary method of communication. If you wanted to experience something far away you would read about it, and professing love to a girl far away would be done by letter. The tradition of Protestant Bible study gave birth to a rigorous study of Greek and Latin among the upper classes and an emphasis on grammar and rhetoric. Morality de-prioritized entertainment as a good unto itself and was skeptical of newspaper culture. The novel quickly became the method of massed produced artistic creation. If a young writerly man wanted fame, a hot wife, glory, and even his pick of concubines and a great state, he had to pen a novel which was then proclaimed as good by a class of well-trained critics and filtered through a moral and slightly religious lens.

So there’s very good reason to believe that no century will compete with late 18th to 19th century in the novel format. The men had more training, more cognitive capacity for the written word, more incentive, and a better filter through which literature was judged.

I'm skeptical that old literature actually is better than new literature. Many classics seem boring, bloated, and not that deep to me, but it's low status to criticize them. In any objectively measurable art or science, or even arts that are technically subjective but kinda not like photorealistic painting, 21st century skill puts our predecessors to shame. How coincidental is it that the only field where the old masters outclass us is one where the judgement is purely subjective?

You've written a plausible sounding story for with the 18th and 19th century produced better literary iron than the 20th or 21st. These factors are a rounding error to the fact that great literature was written by a tiny subset of the Western leisure class that didn't go for parties, hunting, politics, business, science, or surrogate activities; and the circles that judged their output were a self-congratulation society.

I imagine median people would consider the greatest achievements in architecture and painting to be from the past. With music too, many would place Mozart, Bach, Wagner, and Chopin above modern composers in their ability to express inexpressible things.

There is no objectively measurable art, apart from what people find truly beautiful and great and enriching. “Photorealistic painting”, the point of painting is not and has never been to obtain photorealism.

Yes a moral leisure class is probably necessary to create good novels but their works were consumed by much of the leisure class

Nope wasn’t self congratulatory, were many authors they did not like and whose works failed

There is no objectively measurable art

You're only thinking of aesthetic considerations. The craft of modern architects, designers, engineers, educators, bureaucratics, welders etc etc blow their premodern equivalents out of the water by any objectively measurable metric. Like, say, how much weight a bridge can support. How far an athlete can train themselves to throw a javelin. Only in totally subjective considerations is there even an argument to be had -- which I attribute to people's predisposition to ancestor worship and IAmVerySmart-signaling status games.

While I would say your point holds true for materials science, physics, and chemistry (though we didn't figure out how to make Roman concrete until earlier this year), I'm not sure what the objective measures are for architecture, design, and bureaucracy. Premodern homes built with a knowledge of the surrounding climate often require much less energy to heat in winter or cool in summer than modern homes, design seems by its nature concerned with aesthetics, and the recent growth in the number of administrators in just about every organization imaginable seems to have had no apparent benefits.

Yet, technological know-how is almost a separate domain of knowledge from ought-to. Artists don’t just show their technical skill, but they arrange things in a beautiful order.

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