one thing's for sure
mr-president:
foolishoptimism:
mr-president:
foolishoptimism:
history is cyclical
if only because of the limited capacity of the human intellect and ethic
I think this is the main thrust of the idea that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
if you will, it’s a struggle of power between the learned and those who dismiss learning, or something of that manner
And my god, we have too many of the latter and not enough of the former, which is probably the basic pattern of most of human history; the only reason we’re stuck on this miserable rock and not flung throughout the far reaches of the galaxy.
Evolution is ill-equipped to create interstellar explorers, I think.
i mean it’s understandable (which is maybe why we don’t realize we’re so harsh on antiquity/medieval times [which of course are states of being denominated in retrospect])
since all I can think of right now is Melville:
as Ishmael’s project in Moby-Dick shows, education and the pursuit of knowledge are kind of doomed to inaccuracy (like art’s attempt to capture the experience of life [“the Platonic Leviathan” hehe]) and so it’s all kind of silly, but it’s obviously all very important because we obviously all live in a knowledge- and meaning-based world, for us individuals and as societies.
same w/ postmodernism’s rejection of overwhelming narrative structures and ideas of centricism and Truth and Knowledge and Etc.
point is, there’s always a degree of intellectual sophistication in dismissing grand intellectual and academic and social institutions and so on.
but like all things human beings construct, these ideas are a center that cannot hold, and kind of exploded in the second half of the twentieth century, and then with the age of the internet, where basically information explodes into everything and nothing at once, and it has a crazy effect on how we think about things, but most importantly, it makes complex ideas and theories and criticisms so accessible and misrepresentable to an incapable readership, and these ideas previously restrained to dusty, academic offices shelved with old tomes, but now angry 13 year olds are like YEAHH ANARCHY WOOO
it’s a lot like how people misunderstand the complexity and ingenuity behind poetry, and think that poetry is a simple and uncontained act, when even the most liberal “Canon” poets have been well-versed (hehe) in the history of the poetic form and figures
and anyway
it’s all very dumb
and there’s always this imbalance that is hard to put off in a fair and just way
of course
i’m no historian or sociologist or anything………. this all pure conjecture…
