It feels a bit like religious fundamentalism with a different veneer.
“You shall not steal” is the eighth commandment from the Bible, two thousand years ago.
What is bad is insisting that no one can point it out. That we all must pretend that acting like that is being cool free-spirit and visionary. That we cant analyze a book and make conclusions about what it celebrates, what it criticizes and what it just describes without any value judgement attached.
Somewhere along the lines people developed extremely thin skin toward what you can say about famous pieces of art. You cant really analyze them nor their characters. You must show only unfailing admiration of the characters and the book itself.
That was always one of the appeals of the Seinfeld show for example. Well written show about some really horrible people. Fun for the whole family.
But text is a serialization of an idea and it's entirely possible I have the wrong deserializer. So that's one thing perhaps you and I now have in common. And I suspect Scott Alexander just lacks the deserializer for Jack Kerouac.
It is not that much exhausting to not celebrate abuse. In fact, most people are not abusers, most books are not celebrating it. But, there are subcultures that do treat abuse as a cool inspirable thing to do. That is what the quote references. And it is exhausting to be around such cultures once you have seen or understand consequences of what they celebrate. And that ideology is how one gets Epstein enablers.
Vice signaling and principled opposition against "acknowledging there are victims here" are weird and destructive taboos.
>I guess all biographies of influential people are basically out, as being successful in 1000BC or 1500AD required one to do things considered unethical today.
Maybe this means we should not celebrate success itself, but acknowledge harm many successful people do to make themselves famous, rich and powerful. But more importantly, this claim of yours is frequently just not true. It is something people say to defend their heroes, trying to defend unusually horrible stuff that back then people themselves found horrible back then, fought against and criticized a lot. You can write about bad stuff historical person caused without framing it as good or cool thing, really. You can even acknowledge that their opposition had a point.
We know that being abuser is something that makes certain people admire you more.
It’s not really surprising to me that the author didn’t like it; Kerouac is probably the exact opposite person to him. But that doesn’t make it a good review.
But I read old books for their interesting stories, viewpoints on life, literary quality, etc. – not to tut-tut someone for having different moral views than me, a hundred years later.
So it doesn't bother me. Like I said, I really cannot understand the mindset of someone that reads a book from another era/civilization and focuses on critiquing the author's ethics. Just feels like such a limited way to interact with the world.
Personally speaking, I found the book very 'awe-inspiring'/it made me go 'wow' a bunch, because I found the author's experience so completely different from my own :)
The best person to ever have lived, was thus a baby born to a prisoner in the 1600 which spend his life in prison doing nothing. We should all aspire and be inspired to be like that. Childlike and horrifically controlled by external systems.
It's more: wow these guys are jerks, and they get on my nerves.
A protagonist doesn't need to be perfect. But, ultimately, you should be rooting for him.
And I don't agree that you should be rooting for protagonist. That's an extremely limited way of looking at literature, much less history. I can think of half a dozen books offhand that have unpleasant or anti-hero type protagonists.
I was not a fan of Thomas Covenant. What a prick.
I don’t know if it’s him or me, but the last book gave me the feeling Ellroy has fully embraced the man-o-sphere. I can hardly judge him, given the story of his upbringing, but I think I am going to catch the next stop on his bus line.