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Comment by papito | Hacker News Reader

Instead of trying to hide from the past, how about we use the art of that era to teach the new generation why certain things are wrong?

It's like drinking to forget instead of confronting the issues head on. You pretend it's not there, then you sober up - nope, still there.

I don't think the people who want to sanitize our past and who want to cancel others based on something done or said 20 years ago (when it was acceptable) understand that THEY will be judged by a different set of rules decades from now.

Laws are not retroactive.

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> how about we use the art of that era to teach the new generation why certain things are wrong?

Better yet, let people decide for themselves what is – and isn't – "wrong".

It is strange, that in the post-modern era there seems to be a desire to prevent harm by curbing freedom of choice. The ability to choose what constitutes right or wrong isn’t even on the table, because you may draw the wrong conclusion. There is an effort to dictate what media is disseminated and consumed, because some(or a lot) of it has been deemed potentially harmful.

There is nothing new about this. If anything, you have much more choice then you used to have in the past. In the past, when the artist got "cancelled" because of politics or gender or race, that was complete and absolute game over.

The amount of stuff that was seen as acceptable was much lower.

> The amount of stuff that was seen as acceptable was much lower.

I used to take that for granted as well, until I realized that I had never actually seen any evidence to support it, and my own observations have led me to conclude that it is quite possibly false. Many great books from the early and mid 20th century would never get published today.

There is a lot going out now that is actually "politically incorrect" or whatever you want. Or outright fashist or communist or what have you.

Truly radical ideas have almost vanished from mainstream works. As a random example, the famous science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, published in 1961, contains passages that pretty openly advocate for cannibalism. Time Enough for Love by the same author presents incestuous relationships as positive and completely normal. I dare you to show me anything comparable to that in today's literature.

You mean 60ties era famously tolerant to interracial relationships in literature or art in general? That is just example from top of head.

The Hays Code was in full force at that time, you might want to read it.

That has nothing to do with how radical the ideas presented in literature were. The 1960s were a cornucopia of literary exploration, massively expanding the horizon of what is thinkable.

The past 20 years have not only failed to contribute to this exploration, they have actually reversed some of the progress made back then, and lots of what had already been made thinkable is now unthinkable once more.

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