/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6631590]

>if it's old it's better
Why do people always have to think this way? It's far too prevalent in discussion here about economics and history. I mean, there's nothing /wrong/ with reading The Wealth of Nations or The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but they aren't good sources for contemporary discussion as they are just so dated. They come from fields that advance with age, as more knowledge is uncovered they grow for a sounder picture of what they wish to describe. You can read Plato for philosophy, as philosophy doesn't advance, outside of logic and the like, along with the advancement of technology. So please don't try to cite Das Kapital as a source on 21st century issues, it will only fail.

[Anonymous No.6631597]

>>6631590
>The Art of Manliness

kek

[Anonymous No.6631620]

>>6631590
>that meme beard and hairstyle

[Anonymous No.6631623]

Here's your reply.

[Anonymous No.6631630]

>>6631623
You think Edward Gibbon knew more about Rome than modern scholars?

[Anonymous No.6631660]

>>6631630
he knew more about Rome than you.

[Anonymous No.6631661]

>>6631630
people read the decline and fall of the roman empire for different reasons
same with the wealth of nations
even more so for the wealth of nations, really, as adam smith covers a lot of different topics despite his main intentions concerning economics

[Anonymous No.6631664]

>>6631620
>I can't grow a beard nor can I have a hitler youth cut
>I wish I were current
>but I'm neckbeard

[Anonymous No.6631666]

>>6631630
Gibbon shills suck cock

>>>GTFO

>>>/r9k/
>>>/lgbt/
>>>/a/
>>>/pol/

[Anonymous No.6631684]

>>6631660
Nope, I have a PhD in history.
>>6631661
>muh prose
Plebs.

[Anonymous No.6631689]

The behaviour of young men today is not what it was when I was young. In those days men hankered after deeds of derring-do, either by going raiding or by winning wealth and honor through exploits in which there was some element of danger. But nowadays young men want to be stay-at-homes, and sit by the fire, and stuff their stomachs with pork and ale; and so it is that manliness and bravery are on the wane.
>Ketil the Large, Vatnsdaela saga, c. 11th century

[Anonymous No.6631691]

>>6631590
manly poser. it's got to be very manly, caveman like. another manly hipster poser with flashy gay little tattoos on his arms.
another one of those

[Anonymous No.6631698]

>>6631684
>has a PhD
>still shitposting
You're living the dream, man.

[Anonymous No.6631701]

>>6631684
i'm not talking about the prose
why would i be talking about the fucking prose?

[Anonymous No.6631703]

>>6631684
>Nope, I have a PhD in history
I doubt that.

[Anonymous No.6631712]

>>6631689
Thought this was OC but wow.

[Anonymous No.6631714]

>>6631660
He absolutely did not. Gibbon flirted with the idea of dismissing the existence of the Byzantine Empire as Christian propaganda. He was very nearly willing to disregard the majority of the Roman Empire's history just because he didn't like their religion.

[Anonymous No.6631717]

>>6631590
It's because it's hard to judge new things the way we can judge old things.

At the very least, old things have proven that they can stand the test of time, whereas something new might have some inherent flaw that we haven't discovered yet.

Mind you, the old stuff might have some inherent flaw as well, but the idea is that someone would have found it by now it there was.

[Anonymous No.6631723]

>>6631701
That's what everyone likes about Gibbon the gobbler.

[Anonymous No.6631730]

>>6631714
except he didn't do that and instead wrote the best known book on the history of Rome that has stood the test of time and is still held in high regard by contemporary historians.

>>6631590
is this pasta?

[Anonymous No.6631740]

>>6631698
hehe

[Anonymous No.6631745]

>>6631730
>stood the test of time

Only the parts that weren't his insane desire to find a matching parallel between the decline of Rome and the decline of the British Empire. Mommsen overtook and surpassed Gibbon long ago as being the most highly-regarded Rome authority in academia.

[Anonymous No.6631760]

>>6631745
I remember you from that thread yesterday where you were shitting on Gibbon. I have to ask did you have an abusive stepdad who beat you with a copy of the decline and fall?

[Anonymous No.6631771]

>>6631730
He's not well regarded, nobody uses him anymore because his information was so limited about Rome and he had an obvious agenda.

[Anonymous No.6631774]

>>6631590
If a thing is 100 years old i can guess that it will be around for another 100 years. If a thing is 30 years old i can guess it will be around for 30. I can not guess that either will be around for 1000. God knows how old the fucking chair and table are.

The merit that is given to these things is that over the course of X years they have not been eliminated from the environment by being replaced by more sophisticated tech, nor have been harmful enough to be rejected and forgotten, nor found to be useless. So age is a positive signaler for sophistication, utility and safety.

The point is its a heuristic signal. There are false positives. Just because a thing is old does not mean that it is always good, but things that are bad are cast out when it's appropriate to replace them. The power to make this decision is not owned by analysts or smart men because analysts and smart men is pathetic compared to the experience of the masses and always has been because they cannot guarantee margins of safety, utility and sophistication as well as history.

[Anonymous No.6631778]

>>6631771
>Gibbon’s methodology was so accurate that, to this day, little can be found to controvert his use of primary sources for evidence. While modern historical methodology has changed, his skill in translation of his sources was impeccable, and contemporary historians still rely on Gibbon as a secondary source to substantiate references. His literary tone is old-fashioned, skeptical, and pessimistic; it mirrors both his own character and the topic under discussion, the gradual decay of a mighty empire.

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Edward_Gibbon#Gibbon.27s_Legacy


BTFO
T
F
O

[Anonymous No.6631779]

>>6631590
>21st century issues
According to Ecclesiastes, there's nothing new under the sun, so...

[Anonymous No.6631781]

>>6631723
maybe the plebs here
i'm not talking about the prose
i could not care less for monkey man's prose, as far as the discussion in this thread is concerned
it is an entirely extant work that covers a large swath of history while giving the plebs a sense of satisfaction after having completed it
that, and its size lends it a sort of trustworthiness: surely someone who spent so long a time, writing so many pages, can't be wrong
i'm not really arguing that or agreeing with it, don't sperg out like a faggot

what else of such size is still around? livy's works? polybius's?

also, as mentioned here >>6631771, probably by you, he had an agenda and when people agree with that agenda they're more inclined to hold it up over time as the definitive work on something because of its subversive qualities (in this case the anti-christian and byzantine sentiments)

[Anonymous No.6631783]

>>6631778
Atheist tripe.

[Anonymous No.6631789]

the only people who claim to dislike Gibbon are 4chan contrarians. Show me one real academic who dismisses Adam Smith or Gibbon as irrelevant and backs it up with specific examples besides your argument is,
>they lived along time ago so we must be smarter than them

[Anonymous No.6631826]

>>6631783
>says anon on the anonymous message board
I guess you've refuted the encyclopedia bub.

[Anonymous No.6631835]

>>6631789
Smith used the labour theory of value.

[Anonymous No.6631841]

>>6631826
>the new world 'encyclopaedia'

[Anonymous No.6632671]

>>6631760
Whether I had one that did or not isn't relevant to the fact that Gibbon's work, while being impressive for the time, is now so dated it's fallen out of favor as being the go-to for Roman history, and his well-known biases render it a poor treatise. Gibbon was surpassed a hundred years ago, and in another hundred years Mommsen will be, because that's how historical study is. Slavish adherence to a dated work like Gibbon is like Einstein clutching feebly at classical physics while his peers obliterate it with quantum theory just because he didn't want to change his mind.

[Anonymous No.6632730]

>>6632671
Do you have a single citation or credible academic source to back any of this up or should I take your word for it?

seriously what is the point of this thread? You have no argument other than you personally don't like him.

[Anonymous No.6632741]

>>6631841
Dr. "shitposter"

[Anonymous No.6632768]

>>6632730
David Womersley tears him apart for his treatment of Byzantium in the intro to the 3-volume critical edition of Decline & Fall published in 1994. Henry Edwards Davis took him to task for using his work as an anti-Christianity vehicle by using deliberate misrepresentation of citations to support a personal agenda, something no historian today even remotely doubts. Witty irony does not good history tell, and the study of the Middle Ages was actually set back by Gibbon's failure as an historian to properly cite his "findings".

[Anonymous No.6632784]

>>6632768
Literally every historian has a bias. Is that your deef with gibbon, he's not a robot? they cover this in day one of any intro to history class. Also speaking of citations, do you have any? All that can be reasonably raised against him is he has a anti christian bias and a disdain for the period after Rome fell.

[Anonymous No.6632785]

Gibbon is excellent, people who recommend Gibbon on /lit/ are cretins.

People on /lit/ have an almost mystical belief in the power of the book. They believe you can plunge in to the most complex, erudite, advanced or profound work and understand it inside out just like that. It would kill them to recommend Marx for Beginners or a Dummies Guide to The Roman Empire. No you should wade through a 19th century doorstep understand both the milieu it was written in and the subject it is about. Any developments since are clearly tainted by pomo or some other boogeyman anyway.

A book like Gibbon's Decline and Fall also has the "final boss of literature" aura around it: you wont be reading it to understand, you'll be reading it to conquer it and claim mastery over the whole subject at which point you won't need any more history.

These books still have importance in 21st study of their respective subjects and you are unlikely to be led astray into believing ridiculous things, so long as you keep in mind they are of their time.

Oh wait I have lost enthusiasm for this, /lit/ will be doing the same stupid shit anyway.

[Anonymous No.6632789]

>>6631590
The filter of time.

If it's not shit, it has passed through the filter and survived into the modern day.

[Anonymous No.6632790]

>>6632784
His anti-christian bias was his tendency to actually critically address the official church histories rather than swallowing them whole as unbiased and truthful.

[Anonymous No.6632796]

didn't even read op but

kill all men still trying to do this look (most of them who got sick of this are making pathetic millimeter big manbuns that just look like the hair tie is a piece of gum stuck in their hair)
kill men obsessed w/ "manliness"

[Anonymous No.6632809]

>>6631689
You know, it's entirely possible that he was right. Maybe everyone everywhere complains about kids these days. However, an alternate hypothesis is that (strong version) MASCULINITY has been in a monotonic decline since the Neolithic or (weak version) that such things are cyclical. Perhaps Ketil et al's valor made it possible for his sons and grandsons to get fat on pork.

>Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
>are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
>are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

[Anonymous No.6632819]

>>6632784
Every historian has a bias; every historian that uses their bias to push an agenda when their task was to report actual history is a blight on academia. A factually unreliable narrative cannot and should not be trusted, period.

David P. Womersley (Allen Lane, London; Penguin Press, New York: 1994). cited as 'Womersley ed., Decline and Fall'.

Henry Edwards Davis, An Examination of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of Mr. Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

http://glamourousrags.dymphna.net/reviewgibbon.html

That's all the spoonfeeding you'll be getting. Feel free to discuss it with any Roman historian in a university and they'll tell you exactly the same thing I have.

[Anonymous No.6632843]

>>6631590
>tattoos
>manly

There are a myriad of reasons why the old books we read today are typically better than contemporary works. That they've stood the test of time is evidence enough of their greatness, but it's also worth considering that the writers of old were typically writing for an elite, highly-educated upper class. Since the twentieth century, as literacy rates have gone up, the average level of education and literacy of the typical reader has steadily declined, so it should come as no surprise that the quality of literature has also declined. And it's worth noting that people tend to be against elitism and excellence, because they wish to be accepted by the average person and not shamed for being arrogant, but also because they aren't willing to make the sacrifices that it takes to become great at something (e.g., writing).

[Anonymous No.6632855]

>>6631620
quite possibly the worst look of all time

[Anonymous No.6632884]

>>6631590
If something has survived for a long time, it will likely survive far into the future. Stuff that is timely is useful for a very short period of time. In a couple of years, most of the contemporary books will be forgotten, and the trends will have changed. There's nothing wrong with reading this stuff, but a lot of it is noise. I'd rather spend my time learning enduring principles that are less likely to change; I only have so much time. I have spent a lot of time reading more timely things and, looking back, I haven't really got much out of it.

You might think this doesn't apply with history books, but I argue that it does. History books are almost always written about something that has proven it's relevance. The book might be new, but the topic is still old.

If something has recently changed along with the advancement of technology, you can expect it to change again. And quickly. You end up chasing the noise.

I think reading older things will give you perspective into current trends. You can see trends for what they are. People that only read contemporary things tend to think that we are on the cusp of significant change. Current examples: world peace will be achieved if we just let everyone express themselves (like the child-artist culture of the 70s), people think that a significant leap in human consciousness will be achieved because of the internet, technology has the power to make our lives perfect, leisure is ruining the younger generation, standards about sexuality are changing when really they are not, social media is ruining peoples' brains, we can achieve immortality. People that actually believe all of this have no context because they keep too current. People who have read what endures will say "oh yeah, the Greeks were worried about that too."

[Anonymous No.6632895]

that's one hell of a beard. I hope I can pull that off

[Anonymous No.6632932]

>>6632843
>being overweight 4chan fag with no social life
>has an opinion on manliness


top kek dick sucker

>>6632855
I so desperately wish I looked like him

[Anonymous No.6633001]

>>6631590
>sipping at a shot

well gayed

[Anonymous No.6633073]

>>6631778
This is low quality b8, and you've misunderstood the quotation you've greentexted if you think this refutes the other anon's point.

As someone who studied Classics, Gibbon was never required reading for secondary source analysis unless you were doing your dissertation on classical antiquity's historiography.

None of his arguments about the decline of empire stand up to scrutiny. He relies on the assumption that Christianity had distinct and superlative agency during a time that we know it did not. It did not suddenly become an authoritarian imperial doctrine following Diocletian's reign, nor is any political power of the Church even apparent until centuries following the sacking of Rome by Alaric.

The notion that a mysterious religious fifth column suddenly captured the main apparatus of an imperial state is nonsense. More importantly, Gibbon's theory has *nothing* to say about the tangible instability of the Roman state following Severan mismanagement and the Third Century Crisis.

[Anonymous No.6633719]

>>6632884
>people think that a significant leap in human consciousness will be achieved because of the internet, technology has the power to make our lives perfect, leisure is ruining the younger generation, standards about sexuality are changing when really they are not, social media is ruining peoples' brains, we can achieve immortality.

Oh God I hate this futurist shit.

[Anonymous No.6633735]

>>6631590
>Why do people always have to think this way?

>If it's new it's better

It works both ways.

[Anonymous No.6633740]

le urban lumberjack

[Anonymous No.6633758]

>>6633719
Vote for the Transhumanist party, vote for the future.

Zoltan Istvan for president 2016. The Hero the future deserves.

[Anonymous No.6633797]

>>6631590
>>6631664
>>6632895
>>6632932
>all these beaded manchildren
Nice meme look bitch boy, I suppose you like to wear boat shoes without socks on the way to your Reddit meetups.
>>>r/MFA

[Anonymous No.6633811]

>>6632884
Really good post. I think you articulated my own thinking better than I could have.