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.
Conversation
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.
