"Do the democracies want music? In the old days they would have made it themselves. Now, they merely turn on the gramophone."
"Kids these days bad, older times good!" - as far as humanity has existed.
"Kids these days bad, older times good!" - as far as humanity has existed.
0. https://historyhustle.com/2500-years-of-people-complaining-a...
We can make the world an undeniably better place while also loosing vital things. It's not a zero-sum game. Have we been doing this for 2,500 years? Probably.
It feels like a contradiction only if it's zero sum. But we generate more vital things than we lose, so it feels like (is) progress. But that doesn't mean we're not losing vital things.
Aristotle saw the end of Athenian democracy and the rise of the Alexander the great, and the following Hellenistic period of mediterranean disorder. Horace was hardly the only one to discuss roman decline, look for Suetonius, Juvenal or Petrone for other examples of same era romans lamenting the decline of Rome.
As for Huxley, it is interesting that much of what is pointed out in this short commentary echoes Ortega y Gasset on the "Revolution of the Masses", Oswald Spengler also comes to mind.
Human history is that of the rise and decline of civilisations, we may well have already been on a downward slope for the past 100 years.
Nothing atrophies when it's needed.
Plato in Phaedrus warned about the forgetfulness implicit in the invention of writing as oral traditions would no longer need to be remembered and passed down...
More like things atrophy when not needed and then one day fuck.... "We didn't realize there was a cyclical component to this process"
I can play the piano and I can done some improvisation but, everyone doesn’t care about my improv because I’m not good enough but frequently you will get famous song is asked to be played live.
Comparing end products and foregoing the process itself, people don't know what they're throwing out.
It's not about old vs new, it's about consumption vs creation.