I suppose that’s why I have a qualified sympathy for people who go trad. It’s overall a life-positive turn, even if it seems to me like cutting off a leg to stay alive. Possibly from their point of view the leg is gangrenous or something. Would fit the disgust reaction angle.
Conversation
But it’s hard to stay interested even if I am interested in the particular historical era they anchor on. I’m not interested in history in the same way as trads seem to be. Like being interested in how an obsolete old engine worked rather than the colors/styles of old cars.
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There’s I think 3 ways of being interested in history:
1. Unironic Trad: how things were, what it was like to be there
2. Ironic trad: how things worked and why that was good/best
3. Philistinism: how things *could* work, given the existence proof of how things *did* work
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For the longest time I’ve had a visual image of “history” that sees the past as a single trajectory, the future as a garden of forking paths, and the present as a sort of 💥 explosion-break-point computation for which the past is an input but not a constraint.
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Every moment having revolutionary potential in a politically neutral sense, as in utterly unconstrained by the past that we imagine having a historicist shaping force on the future that necessarily must act, but... really doesn’t. And then breaks surprise us.
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The necessity of historical continuity is almost entirely in our heads. That’s a neutral operating assumption for me. Perpetuation of tradition is a choice. One that might have some Lindy merits going for it, but is never actually necessary.
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But my sense is that trads see it as necessary in a way, almost like flirtation with discontinuous futures is an unrealistic childish affectation/fantasy that they set aside when they turn trad. I suspect it feels like “growing up” into a tragic adult posture.
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I’m pretty much pure philistine in the Vonnegut sense. “History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”
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Replying to
I’ve quoted him a few times, but mostly a college era memory for me. Binged him in the 90s and it’s largely forgotten now.

