Context
These thoughts rambled on from my post about reading-fiction-as-information but I've broken them off into their own post because they are a different-but-related thing.
Something I struggle with is locating stuff in its context in order to appreciate how groundbreaking / different it was.
Jane Austen is great, yes. Big tick. Jane Austen was revolutionary, groundbreaking. Yes, I nod my head. Except... Of what? All I know is Jane Austen. Or Gauguin. Or Wordsworth. Or whoever. The best. So when I'm told they were groundbreaking I have to trust that because I don't know what the general standard was, what the fight was against.
The stuff we have from the past has a lot of survivorship bias. What survives, why, is interesting to me. It's too simple to say 'the best' survives because the past was not a meritocracy. The now is certainly not a meritocracy. And what is 'the best' anyway? (Turning this into its own post when the ramblings got too long!)
All that aside, let's say that on average what we have now of 'the past' does in fact - on average, again - reflect some of 'the best'. And generally most of the chaff has flown away. It's a distorted picture of what was actually going on. Which brings me back to: It's hard to appreciate the rebellion if you don't know what someone is rebelling against.
Wordsworth I mention above specifically because from my vantage point, now, Wordsworth is very traditional, often stuffy, old school business. It's hard to think of him as ripping up the status quo.
So, context. Putting things in context helps me understand and appreciate them better. And learning about these things helps open up stuff I would have missed that has been pretty deliberately suppressed.
As it happens, I wrote most of this post in the morning and then, that evening, unexpectedly ended up at the cinema watching One to One: John and Yoko. Which I thought did a pretty great job at establishing the context in which all the main stuff was happening. Showing the adverts, the news, it all built a picture of what was considered traditional and mainstream and proper at the time. Thank you to those documentary makers.