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Comment by cousin_it | Hacker News Reader

I think literature (and other arts) is primarily entertainment. You start with easy works and then gradually find that you're interested by deeper and deeper works. And at some point you start noticing that the best modern works are less deep, less able to interest you, than the best past works.

It's a bit of mystery why this happens. Since there are many more creators today, it seems their best output should be above the best of the past, but no. My best hypothesis is that we're in a phase of decline: all Western arts peaked at the end of the 19th century, then the world wars broke something important, and it's not going to recover. Similar to how Rome's decline was accompanied by a decline of art quality.

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I do think it's just a lot harder to find good modern works.

There was plenty of trash written in the early 20th century. We've forgotten about it, for the most part. Anything still in print from 100 years ago is probably the best that the early 1900s has to offer. We've had 100 years to curate the list of the "best literature of the 1910s". Easy to find the good works in there.

I think this is almost entirely due to the fact that there are many more modern works than past works and it is much more work to filter the wheat from chaff, especially without the benefit of time. But that doesn't mean dismissing contemporary art is the right perspective either. I don't buy the idea of cultural decline, at any rate. It think the article makes a pretty good case that commodification is the reason for the apparent decline in the average quality of literature.

There are billions of people and thousands of supercomputers working ceaselessly and communicating instantaneously to filter through modern literature to find a kernel in the chaff. In the past there were only a few thousand people in a few small cities filter through a few hundred books to find the classics.

I disagree with the statement ”the best modern works are less deep, less able to interest you, than the best past works.”.

That might have been true for you, but I don’t think it is a general perception for everyone.

The problem I see is just of filtering. The best current works are a few among thousands of new works coming up every year. While the best past works are the only works that remain from the past. You see a good list of past books from some erudite person with similar perception of the world than you and you are set.

While the same person doing a similar list from current works will be much more hit and miss. No one would have the time to read all that is published everywhere.

While the past has a filter that allows you to be able to read such diverse great works as Kafka, Cervantes, and James Joyce.

Once you start claiming that the arts peaked at some point, millions of other informed, erudite people are going to disagree and set it at some other point or not at all. You say the end of the 19th century was the start of a decline? That was before jazz was a thing, and that’s a genre that plenty would defend as high art. It was before plenty of novelists, poets, painters and playwrights that have both popular appeal and have entered the serious canon. Hell, it was before writing fiction even began in some languages, because for whatever reason (such as censorship by a dominating power) speakers of those languages were unable to do so before the early 20th century.

Moreover, claiming such a peak followed by a decline, and drawing comparisons with Rome, is so often linked to a reactionary politics that even many conservatives feel is extremist, your interlocutors are going to be suspicious of your motives.

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