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Comment by TheUndead96 | Hacker News Reader

The School of Life infuriates me for many reasons, but I will restrain myself and talk just about this specific post.

Perhaps the small libraries of historic figures has more to do with the availability of books than it does their minimalism. I agree that people should not be reading every new self-help or business book that gets published. The majority of new books are bad. History acts as a great filter, which is why focussing on old books is a strong heuristic to find good books. I also agree with Nassim Taleb, who says that you should try to read the works from people who have actually done something (opposed to modern pseudo-philosophers like Alain de Botton, who is just trying to capitalise on the religion-shaped hole in western morality). I am not a religion apologist, but his videos and lectures are structured exactly the same way as sermons. He even feigns a false pastor modesty. Ugh I am beginning to rant now.

As a civilisation I still believe that we are not reading enough. I can feel my reading habit eroded and tugged by modern media. I feel fulfilled after reading in a way that YouTube or Netflix cannot provide.

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> I am not a religion apologists, but his videos and lectures are structured exactly the same way as sermons. He even feigns a false pastor modesty

I highly recommend Jacques Ellul's "Les nouveaux possédés." (translated in English as "The New Demons" [1]) an analysis written back in 1973 describing this exact process you're describing, i.e. modern stuff (rock stars among others) trying to fill the hole of the disappearing religion. Ever since I've read the book I cannot attend a big music concert or a crowded football match without thinking about it (before this pandemic started, of course).

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1362676.The_New_Demons

Nowadays I am thinking that the 'we are more popular than jesus' quote is actually deeper than it was probably intended.

Sport is not so much a modern relaxation as a new religion; and is more serious and unsmiling even than most new religions. - G. K. Chesterton

"Sports is to war as pornography is to sex." — Jonathan Haidt

Except that the universal adoption of sports would result in a net positive. The same cannot be said for pornography.

Also it makes just as much sense like this: 'sports is to sex as pornography is to war.'

Presumably that is because war is bad and sex is not bad?

It's easy to miss the point of any analogy if you try hard enough.

I think it referes to the spectactle aspect of sports

> Except that the universal adoption of sports would result in a net positive. The same cannot be said for pornography.

By adoption of sports, do you mean universal participation or spectation?

The former I suppose would be a net positive, if you limit the requirement to just making sure everyone does at least some physical activity every day, but if you mean that everyone should be required to play some sport as a significant pastime the negatives start reducing the net positive.

If the latter, I must vehemently disagree. We would probably be better off banning spectator sports entirely rather than making everyone watch.

Just a quick way to say that I think a little exercise goes a long way :)

Not sure it is that new - Constantinople had feuding groups who supported different chariot racing teams.

As a Scot I can't help be amused that the greatest rivalry was between the Blues and Greens:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Firm

I can’t help but take this chance to recommend Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sailing to Sarantium. It’s an absolute masterpiece of a novel set in Byzantium just after the Nika Riots; the chariot races and Blue/Green dynamic play a big role in the plot.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/104097.Sailing_to_Sarant...

I can recommend Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities by Bettany Hughes:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22711736-istanbul

That’s interesting, I’ll check it out. I often tell folks that without concerts I am going on without my religion. And the best concerts are those where the most attendees most actively participate. This human need for group belonging will be fulfilled one way or another. Concerts, sports, protests, war - go on down the line (granted I think churches fit in further towards the end ...). There is a psychological cost to shutting these events down that must also be considered.

Thanks for that, very interesting topic. But surely large sporting events have existed alongside large religion for some thousands of years (Roman events are the obvious example). Perhaps both trying to get at the same thing but not being that thing themselves.

> Jacques Ellul

doesn't seem to fit gp's "people who have done something" crietia.

This is a cheap shot at Ellul, as he has been proved more right than wrong even though he was writing about technology and our technological society since the 1960s-1970s (a very difficult thing to achieve, being right on technology, that is). As such, I personally think that he has “done” a lot more compared to other people, witness how even FB multi-millionaires have started following him and his ideas (knowingly or unknowingly).

> This is a cheap shot at Ellul,

No i was questioning GP's point. Nothing to do with Ellul. I personally don't care if the author has "done something"

Odd comment, given that aside from writing a few ephemeral books and engaging in a ton of pontificating, the only thing Taleb has ever done in his life is move money around on computers for the sole purpose of enriching himself, while Ellul was active in the French Resistance and was honored for his actions to save Jews from the Nazis.

I guess it depends on what one means by "doing something."

Ellul, I would like to think, is someone who came back from the Abyss without losing himself.

Preserving once sanity while reading him is difficult enough, imagine what you would have to go through while you think through these things for years.

I was raised in a highly devout religious environment. I was a true believer myself.

One of the more remarkable experiences of my early adult life was attending a sales conference. I couldn't believe how much that business event felt like a _religious_ event to me. The format, the language, the emotions... I recognized all of these.

I'm no longer religious in the same way, but those experiences have made me particularly sensitive the power of faith and community. Once you know what you're looking for, you start to see it everywhere: in businesses, in politics, in fandom. People want belonging and a sense of being part of something greater than themselves. Belief in the supernatural is not required to engender that feeling.

> People want belonging and a sense of being part of something greater than themselves. Belief in the supernatural is not required to engender that feeling.

I agree, but feel like this is a not a bad thing most of the time (even though it can be), and I say this as an atheist in the traditional sense, with iconoclastic tendencies when provoked...

The problem, is the same faults of religious movements happen with these religions-without-the-supernatural, but as an atheist you don't have the same supernatural to mock as a defense.

You see faith based reasoning and very strong emotional reactions to things that are not real.

On second thought you are right, there is a lot of faith base nonsense going on, especially post-facebook.

You can also think of it as religious events are a lot like sales conferences.

My background is pentecostal/evangelical, and I was also a true believer well into my twenties. I mostly left on good terms with God; not being able to believe in his existence just made it difficult to be in a relationship.

The expertise in 'marketing' in this environment was incredible, and I've been both surprised and somewhat relieved to find that for the most part nobody 'outside the fold' seems to properly study how it works and apply it to stuff like selling their startup, especially startups that rely on some degree of community... Some do, but it's surprisingly rare to me.

For a brief time I got involved with the School of Life / Church for Atheists stuff in a desire to find some of what I've lost since leaving church, and I was astounded to find that they seemed to mostly try to emulate all the worst parts of what made 'church life' work.

For examples, the Evangelicals/Pentecostals figured out that rock concert-style Sunday services work to get people interested, but the attrition rate is terrible. Instead, to get people to stay and become part of the church, emphasizing the 'small groups' (~12 people meeting weekly) is by far the most effective strategy. Make people spend time in a small subcommunity and eat together, and you got a member!

So what does School of Life do with their 'Sunday Assemblies'? Awkwardly emulate church but neglect the 'small group' aspect, and hoping that somehow this is more successful than, say, the rapidly-dying Catholic/Protestant churches that mostly rely on boring Sunday services.

“The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.”

— C. S. Lewis

source: https://reasonabletheology.org/cs-lewis-on-reading-old-books...

We're supposed to be civil here but frankly the linked post is twaddle. You can't give the reason for not having unaffordable personal libraries and then disregard it immediately because you're selling your theses, whatever those might be.

The thing is books used to be very expensive, yet people managed to read as many as they could get their hands on and even spend crazy money on them. Open any book from say the 17th century and you'll see how they quote as many works as they could. Take the Quixote for instance, there's a famous chapter about the library of Don Quixote, the whole novel is built around satirizing a popular genre that Cervantes as an avid reader also knew well.

> Perhaps the small libraries of historic figures has more to do with the availability of books than it does their minimalism.

The article also appears to be conflating the number of books owned (or more precisely, being depicted as owning) with the number of books read, which is supremely, jaw-droppingly dumb:

> We can pick up the minimalist attitude to reading in early visual depictions of one of the heroes of Christian scholarship, St Jerome – who was by all accounts the supreme intellect of Christendom, who translated the Greek and Hebrew portions of the Bible into Latin, wrote a large number of commentaries on scripture and is now the patron saint of libraries and librarians. But despite all his scholarly efforts, when it came to showing where and how St Jerome worked, a detail stands out: there are almost no books in his famous study. Strikingly, the most intelligent and thoughtful intellectual of the early church seems to have read fewer things than an average modern eight year old. To follow the depiction by Antonello da Messina, St Jerome appears to be the proud owner of about ten books in all!

How am I supposed to read this but as a claim that Jerome wrote more books than he read, based on a painting made a millennium after his death?

> I also agree with Nassim Taleb, who says that you should try to read the works from people who have actually done something (opposed to modern pseudo-philosophers like Alain de Botton, who is just trying to capitalise on the religion-shaped hole in western morality).

And is reading and writing books not 'doing something'? I don't know exactly what Taleb means by it, but it smacks of plain elitism.

I suppose more concretely "doing something related to what you are writing about". On principle I have nothing against pure philosophers, who integrate old theories and formulate new ones. However, in my experience, writings like that of Marcus Aurelius are more compelling, who was a success in his own right before ever writing anything. Most modern "business" authors don't have any business (other than selling books to people). Taleb is just warning people to not take advise from authors who don't actually have "skin in the game".

De Botton does not write about things he cannot know about. He has not proposed a Grand Unified Theory of Physics or a mechanism for how matter becomes conscious. He writes about things everyone can relate to, which means he can relate to them as well -- but the work seems to be in thinking about things in non-obvious and novel ways and in the actual writing process. The quality of de Botton's writing really speaks for itself.

It must be difficult work in itself because even Taleb, when he took a stab at this 'pseudo-philosophy' genre with his book The Bed of Procrustes, managed to produce absolute piffle which would never have been published if Taleb weren't already famous for his popular finance books.

There seems to be an underlying presumption that writing is not real work and so people should be successful in the real world before they should feel entitled to write anything.

Couldn't agree more. There's something to be said for life experience which filters out the irrelevant and the non-important. I've always appreciated the story about the pit trader that earned millions in his career trading green lumber, all while assuming it's just lumber that's been painted green. It's too easy to theorize in an ivory tower and miss what's actually important.

It's elitism and it's a bad heuristic. There are lots of situations where someone might know a lot about X yet for some reason never did X. Being able to do X, and being able to usefully explain X are two different skills and few people can do both.

> I agree that people should not be reading every new self-help or business book that gets published

You could spend the remainder of your life trying to read every worthwhile book that has already been written and still not finish them all.

Whatever its faults, most of the works in Bloom's list at the end of The Western Canon are probably very much worthwhile, yet appreciating them could occupy more than a lifetime for anyone whose job is not reading literature, even if other pastimes be largely avoided.

And it's mostly limited to fiction, drama, and poetry! It omits almost all math, science (including social science and history), and philosophy that's not of literary significance. Even within those restrictions, it's by no means a comprehensive list of every worthwhile work or author ever (if nothing else, the "Western" qualifier makes that plain).

We're even there for film, and we've only meaningfully had that medium for ~130 years. One may watch thousands of movies without ever leaving the realm of "widely regarded as excellent, meaningful, and/or important". I'd imagine there's far more than enough very, very good recorded music that it's in the same situation. Many lifetimes of top-notch media exist. Reading/hearing/watching anything that's not very good is entirely a choice.

>Reading/hearing/watching anything that's not very good is entirely a choice.

Stimulating, contemporary, convenient. Pick two. It is as much of a choice as home made food over fast food is a choice. But it is not always convenient.

Personally I just cut out the contemporary stuff and there is an abundance of good material. When I find something modern and stimulating, it usually involved a certain amount of luck, a lot of trial and error, or just perseverance scouring wikipedia, magazines, blogs, whatever. Most people don't choose what they're into, it is dictated to them by producers. And there is a widespread fear of b&w / classic definition films, stringed classical instruments and literature.

I think there is some stimulating, contemporary stuff. But I agree it can be difficult to find conveniently. I mostly follow a lot of you-tubers and subreddits that follow this stuff and then use them as a filter for it. But even then it's like something good once a month or two. Though I prefer the contemporary stuff for some reason and can't really give it up, so I am willing to put in that effort.

History doesn't only filter on quality though, but also on contemporary morals and whims of the powerful.

I feel like focusing on whether we read too little or too much is missing the point. There are things to be gained from a meticulous read and deep discussion of Pride and Prejudice via a book club, but there are also things to be gained from watching shallow educational channels on Youtube. Likewise, there are things to be lost from spending all your time reading every classic just as there are things to be lost from binging Youtube. It's not black and white, but it is a zero-sum game.

IMHO, what matters more is what you're hoping to get out of deep reading and/or shallow infotainment. Maybe reading the Odyssey leads you into lateral shallow entertainment regarding different mythological figures. Maybe a Vsauce video leads you down into deep reading about game theory. Who gets to say which of these activities is "wasted" time?

> The School of Life infuriates me for many reasons

"Alain de Botton [owner of The School of Life], for example, has built an international self-help empire, offering lessons in self-love to CEOs and yummy-mummies (and daddies). But what actually drives him, underneath the bonnet? What dirty fuel keeps him motoring? It's the fact he had a violent tyrannical father [1] who never accepted little Alain or made him feel good enough. All his books, he has said, were an attempt to connect with Pater Horribilis. The School of Life should offer a workshop in Radical Self-Loathing."

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/alain-de-...

Source: https://www.philosophyforlife.org/blog/the-secret-of-success...

I think this article is perhaps meant for you. Just to show there is more than one way to think about something. Different perspectives can help you refine your thoughts and help with forming a more refined view on a topic, even if you disagree. In my view reading is just a hobby like netflix or youtube, not something I do because it has any value.

Hah. I appreciate the School of Life rant. Something about it bugged me, but I never bothered to articulate it or think very hard about it. I think 'pseudo-philosopher trying to capitalize on the religion-shaped hole in western morality' get pretty close to it.

> the religion-shaped hole in western morality

Religion and morality aren't distinct concepts. What's lost in the west is the stability of having an orthodoxy.

I think this might be what is meant by religious people when they say that nothing is "sacred" anymore. Meaning that there is no longer any value or virtue high enough to not be questioned, even if these are the axioms of the society.

Well, those religious prejudices and injustices aren't sacred anymore, but if you have a public reputation to loose, or don't want to get burned as a company, you should avoid being associated with stuff like gender- or racial-inequality.

(as long as you aren't targeting the Q-Anon or KKK crowd)

So it seems the definition of sacred is simply changing. (luckily)

At the time around '69 it maybe was like nothing was sacred anymore, and everything was being questioned, but i don't think you can apply this anymore. People later settled on some moral progressions, which are now being defended.

I think we might be talking about different things here. Up until very recently it was against the code of most publishers to broadcast things like murders, offensive language, acts of violence and gore. Some might say that the societies of the past were overly prudish, but I believe that this development is predominantly negative. For a modern Netflix series to take off, it is basically mandatory to have full-frontal nudity in the first season. Nothing is shocking anymore, which is what I meant by "sacred".

Growing up I had a mathematics teacher that told me that if companies could get away with it, they would just show real murders all day on the TV. In that way, popular culture is like a barometer for morality of a population.

I don't think anyone here is arguing for gender or racial inequality.

> For a modern Netflix series to take off, it is basically mandatory to have full-frontal nudity in the first season.

Really? As much as nudity in television content has grown, I think showing genitals is still pretty much not done. For example, Narcos didn't do it, as far as I watched it.

I don't think is is true at all. In anything, the past was much more into reporting sensationalist news about murder than now. The infamous UK "News of the World" tabloid, which existed to give titillating reports of murder and rapes, started publishing in 1843. It closed in 2011 in the wake of the phone hacking scandal because society began to care about victim's rights. The idea that the past was more moral than the present is just rose-tinted nostalgia without support.

> For a modern Netflix series to take off, it is basically mandatory to have full-frontal nudity in the first season.

I can't really see why this is bad, which is kind of what we're talking about. I can see why full-frontal nudity is a tactical error in some contexts, in that you shouldn't do it because you'll end up in a worse position if you do, but I really don't get the apparent moral revulsion some people have regarding the naked human form.

This is part of what we're talking about because it signals that the traditionalists can't impose their revulsion on the rest of us. The recent successes of the Queer Rights movement also prove this: Same-sex marriage has gone from unthinkable to unremarkable. So has transitioning. The people who are most opposed to those things were utterly incapable of making cogent arguments sufficient to sway the societies in which they lived, so now they're widely accepted.

> Growing up I had a mathematics teacher that told me that if companies could get away with it, they would just show real murders all day on the TV.

No. Most people don't want to see that. Most people have a serious aversion to seeing real death and gore and so on, and it isn't feigned "virtue signalling" or similar.

> I don't think anyone here is arguing for gender or racial inequality.

Except the arguments against, say, nudity on TV come down to "I don't like it, so it's immoral" and that exact same argument has been used to argue against social equality of all kinds.

> Religion and morality aren't distinct concepts

How so? They seem pretty orthogonal to me.

I imagine there is a typo, and they meant to say they are distinct. I can't make sense of the comment otherwise.

meta comment: If a comment generates good discussion then why should it be downvoted.

> Religion and morality aren't distinct concepts.

This is only true if you define the "Religion" out of religion; that is, shear it of any dogma or faith claims or even the "funny hats social club" cultural aspect, and then say that all of the remaining guidance is the religion. This isn't what religion means to most people, regardless of whether they have one or not.

On my analysis, I'm shearing what I believe you mean by "faith claims" from the term "religion". But I'm definitely leaving in dogma and the funny hats social club cultural aspect.

For example, look at the scandal from some years back in which some European (Spanish?) meat products were found to include horse meat. Everyone agreed that (1) there was no risk of any kind involved in eating the "contaminated" products; (2) you could not taste the difference; (3) a recall was in order; (4) this was and deserved to be a HUGE scandal.

I'm saying that the modern Western prohibition on eating horse is a religious phenomenon, regardless of whether people are comfortable calling it one. If you are using a definition of "religion" that doesn't include things like this, your terms do not carve reality at the joints.

> I'm saying that the modern Western prohibition on eating horse is a religious phenomenon, regardless of whether people are comfortable calling it one.

And this is contrary to what people understand as religion, which seems to avoid carving reality at the joints: All of a sudden you can dispute the notion that people can be irreligious by pointing to some social conventions they follow, and demanding that those conventions are religion. That does not seem very respectful to personal self-identity.

> And this is contrary to what people understand as religion, which seems to avoid carving reality at the joints

It's not. It matches exactly what people understand as religion in any context that doesn't involve themselves.

Compare the Roman Emperor, who was never referred to as a "king" -- by the Romans -- because the concept was taboo. The Greeks went ahead and referred to him as a king. Who was right? What would we gain by excluding imperial Rome from a study of monarchical societies?

if anyone thinks this is being unfair, they literally titled the book "A Replacement For Religion" https://www.booktopia.com.au/a-replacement-for-religion-the-...

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