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Replying to
The ‘classic’ designation is purely a non-functional class thing afaict. It’s how civilization-scale polities assert identity by marking out certain dead languages and literary traditions as ‘superior’, but really they just have large corpuses of texts to work with.
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In the West, it’s not clear to me what the special treatment of Greek and Latin (as opposed to Aramaic or ancient proto-German or Gaelic or whatever) accomplishes beyond marking those literary canons as special for identity.
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Princeton move feels like a not-even-wrong move though. If you’re going to keep the “classics” designation at all, keep the languages. Better move: abolish the classics as a major, and redistribute the scholarship between history and dead languages departments.
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In India,there is similar thing. There’s no good reason to elevate Sanskrit above Pali, Prakrit etc. An unnecessary political contest is also created with the non-indo-European dead languages like ancient Tamil, whose proponents fought to get it recognized as a classic language.
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Happy to be corrected, but as I understand it, ancient version is quite different from the modern one? I imagine it is as unintelligible to modern Greeks as old English is to English speakers? I don’t know the technical defn of ‘dead’ re languages. Maybe ‘ancestral’ is right term
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Replying to @vgr
TIL Greek is a dead language
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Fair point, but one that also applies to other languages. Old French was also used beyond France by elites. And in the East, Persian was similar.
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Replying to @gcaw and @vgr
There's plenty of Greek and Latin writings that aren't specifically Greek or Roman, eg medieval Arabic and European scholarship
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One of the effects of studying cultural history partitioned into classic vs vernacular streams is it seriously distorts the actual levels of connectedness across space, time, and class across history.
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If you just give up “classic” status and deregulate history for purposes of identity construction, as a bonus you finesse the culture wars entirely. There can be no battles over diversity and inclusion in canons if canons cease to be privileged lenses on cultural memory.
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Replying to
Fwiw, I’m more a partisan of the future than of other languages, dead or alive. If you assign ascriptive status to things purely on the basis of data availability, you have a drunk-looking-for-keys-under-streetlight approach to scholarship.
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A small effect is that you overindex on Greek/Latin in the study of the past, but a bigger effect is you overindex on the past. The term “classic” is always primarily used to privilege past over future. Privileging centered parts of the past over marginal parts is a side effect.
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Ironically, one of the most pernicious effects of “classic” and “canon” mindsets is that certain *futures* get privileged in the imagination. As in the Jetsons projects 1950s “classic” culture into the future. Futurama does the same to 1990s culture, but with heavy irony.
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This has real effects because even when institutions strive mightily to self-perpetuate and make those futures self-fulfilling prophecies, in the last 2 centuries it’s been working so badly that you can dismiss “classic futures” as almost certainly wrong.
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When you act like they’re self-evidently the most likely futures (and one way you do that is by going around labeling parts of the present and past “classic” to institutionally overweight them), you pay a bigger price when you end up wrong.
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In a way I feel the same about secular classics the way I do about theology. Save it for seminaries. Any “classic” cultural corpus (including “classic rock” and “classic Gmail”) is a religion trying to turn the future into a self-fulfilling prophecy through institutional force.
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You can certainly teach Christian or Scientologist eschatology like it’s self-evidently the certain future. But please do it in a seminary to co-religionists. Ditto Classics. Actually the argument against classics is also an argument against tax-privileging “real” religions.
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If you removed non-profit status from religions, new cults wouldn’t fight to be recognized as such, and the status of Scientology would be moot.
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There’s possibly a case for special status if there is danger of targeted assaults, as with historically oppressed people or endangered species, but even there I’m wary of going beyond basic civil rights into expansive heritage-preservation/hate crime type governance.
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But preserving the past to protect it is different from privileging its role in the present/future. Protect historic monuments? Okay. Demand that new buildings be shaped by the aesthetics and cultural continuity preferences of old-monument-fandom?… errr no.
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Protect the future from the past. It’s the most endangered species. The people and animals and robots who will live in it are worse than merely dead, having shot their shot and left behind a trace. They’re unborn.
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The older I get the more I get nostalgic for the future I won’t live to see and the more indifferent I get to the past I’ve already overinvested in remembering.
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I don’t want to be immortal (that would be trying to make myself a “living classic”) but it sucks that means forgoing seeing how things turn out. Maybe that’s why Wowbagger was so mad. The future didn’t turn out as he wanted, but he was forced to live in it forever.
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