Parochialism in time and space (2021)

I quite like reading old stuff though as you go really far back what you read is likely written by/edited for/dedicated to some slave-owning warlord of one kind of another, so maybe that explains something about the 18th century that they looked to these for wisdom.

Why was slave-society artistocrat Plato so skeptical of democracy? What did the slaves think about this?

>one reason is very simple. Society produces more information every year. Counting in bytes, humans have produced more information in the past year than all of the rest of history.[...]

In raw bytes this may be true but in terms of cultural output above a certain threshold I don't think it is and for me this has always been the most simple and straight forward reason to not be "time parochial".

Most books, music, films, what have you are old, so all you really need to concede to dig into older works is that most good stuff is probably old just because most stuff is old. How high is the chance that every great movie has been made in the last five years? Just not having a recency bias is enough.

I use this as a strategy even. Time is one of the simplest filters to just avoid all the mediocre ephemeral slop that ends up being advertised everywhere and the longer something has advocates and passionate audience the more likely it is there's something worthwhile in it.

minor pedantry: 50 years ago was the mid 1970s, and there was a not insignificant amount of concern about gender and sexuality back then (especially in my college town). 50 years before that would be the 1920s, and although I wasn't around then, I believe the suffragettes in those days (would we guess Mary Olive Byrne to have been one?) had had their concerns as well.

Lagniappe: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eine_Frau_ohne_Mann_ist_wie_ei...

"...an ordinary 19th century family’s one book beyond the Bible (thousands of years old) might be Pilgrim’s Progress (about two hundred years old)." I think that is part of the reason speech has changed. I am reminded of this snippet of dialog in the film True Grit. The language used sounds so archaic, even though the fictitious event is just over a century and a half old.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMPr9rchJMs

A people cannot understand themselves without understanding their past. We not only become small-minded, parochial, and petty by forgetting our past. We forget who we are. We become enslaved to passing fads and silly nonsense of the day instead of aiming for the eternal. We lose perspective and become pusillanimous, obsessed with ourselves while remaining ignorant of our place in the tapestry of time. By forgetting the received tradition, we forfeit a goldmine of wisdom developed and communicated over the ages that we, too, should embrace and develop. We exclude ourselves from a dialogue with our ancestors who have much to share with us, from whom we have much to learn, and whose efforts we should continue, refining, correcting, expanding, elaborating what came before. We should engage with the endoxa of the ages. That doesn't mean thoughtless acceptance of a calcified mass, but entering into relationship with a living inheritance with the requisite humility.

We have chosen foolishness and mediocrity, and spiritual and intellectual poverty, savagery over humanity. And in our foolishness we cannot help but walk in circles, repeating the same errors, because we do not remember where we have already been. It is the story of modern philosophy which rhymes with and echoes the errors of the presocratic philosophers.

> When people who haven’t been to America talk about it, they get their ideas from the distorted cliches of the media. A land of gun nuts and COVID deniers, rife with racism and obesity! This annoys me. I’ve lived in the US and have family there. I know these views are absurdly one-sided. People who’ve lived in Africa get a similar twinge when the clichés come out: “Africa, land of rape and lions”, as the Wronging Rights blog puts it. Not going abroad makes people parochial. Their experience is limited, and what they know of other countries is refracted through the biases of the local media

Public relations was invented in US and the whole establishment of the United States is rooted in manipulation of the public opinion. The African examples are not a distraction of real issues but some real issues while in the US there is, I think, much less actual issues than thought. For example there are probably no major racial issues in the US today; localized racism exists but everyone can vote and has roghts. Poverty on other hand is an issue. Of course you can say you have evidence against this point, but note that it's probably just confirmations of the narrative, not a relative comparison of societal challenges.

This would imply there exists a confusion between issues per public opinion and issues per literature. We can further deduce this is probably caused by the lack of separation of these in context of foreign talk about Americans; others satirisize Americans for being fools to falll into focusing on issues of public opinion and others only recognize the social hotness of the issue per public opinion without recognizing they are a distraction.

The 2D histogram is very interesting, but difficult to interpret, because of the various samplings and normalizations that could be relevant: number of books published; number (fraction) of books digitized.

If I had to summarize the big picture, taking the contour at the top of the dark blue band: coverage was sporadic until ~1700; then more books were published, and the references gradually moved back to 1500 over the next 100 years, but did not consider the future very much. 1800 seems to be a singularity (but perhaps due to sampling effects), where interest in the deep past and the future exploded in a short period.

There are also interesting lines in the plot. First the vertical lines. There seems to be one (or more) books in 1530 that discussed the far future up to 1900. Then another futurist work around 1610. There's a history book published ~1580, that covers then recent past, and another cluster around 1650, perhaps including Hobbes's 'Leviathan'. Of course we miss Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall' because it covers antiquity, off the chart.

Secondly, the horizontal lines. There is a bright line at ~1100, perhaps the First Crusade, and more at ~1300, ~1600 ~1800. The line at ~1350 could be the Black Death.

Finally, there are the shadows of the 20th century wars, when history was not so popular, because there were more pressing current events to be written about, and all the historians were fighting at the front.

That is some interesting data analysis.