Imo the greatest issue surrounding modern socio-political discourse is our extreme presentism. We assume the way we think & act now -- literally at this exact moment -- is the way everyone everywhere throughout all of history has thought and acted, and not contingent on a certain confluence of factors which aren't objective truths but subjectively part of a certain time and place. Darnton does a great job of exploding this notion, showing how people of all strata of French society during the so-called "Age of Enlightenment" viewed their world in a distinctly alien way from us now. Fairy tales helped peasants make sense of a violent world which appears to have changed little since the High Middle Ages, printers' apprentices violently murder cats as a protest against their working conditions (again, the cultural connotations of cats was vastly different than it is now), and a bourgeois man expresses his adorably fervent parasocial love for Rousseau (l'ami Jean-Jacques, as he calls him)
We didn't always think the way we do now
demiurgelovato
Jul 06, 20244 comments
ardent_tricknologist1 year ago
It begins https://imgur.com/a/mFqfXiy
demiurgelovato1 year ago
Spot on. And even in ancient Greco-Roman accounts of Carthaginian child sacrifice, the tone is more "these people have a weird local custom" and not "these people are evil baby-murderers." It's only bc in the contemporary era there's a strong universal taboo against human sacrifice and we're used to complex, government-mandated propaganda so we presume the Romans must've thought and acted just like us (especially given how much they HATED the Carthaginians)
ardent_tricknologist1 year ago
Sounds neat, definitely picking this up. Puts in mind the archaeologists who thought the Carthaginian practice of sacrificing their first born children in times of need must certainly have been Roman propaganda, that no one could possibly have done that, until they found the skeletons.
hell yeah