Maybe there's something in here that's going over my head, but recently it's seemed our culture wants more than anything to destroy its past. We do not seem to hold it in very high regard.
This is a great tragedy. A lot of these gems of human thought and art have been the privilege of a few wealthy people to read. If you weren't a monk or a noble, you couldn't get close to them.
This is kind of a meme because there simply wasn’t the technology available to put down information at scale, so a community had to set aside a few individuals (in the case of monks) to spend their lives copying text by hand for decades. If everyone did this, then everyone would die of starvation.
Once the books were completed, they were chained to the community center so that everyone had access and no one could take it for themselves.
Even if you had physical access to the priceless books made out of a hundred calf skins and carefully copied by hand, you needed to be able to not only read, but understand Latin.
There was definitely limited access to knowledge too. The Bible for example was a forbidden book for centuries in the Catholic church. Only accessible to the ordained, lest the peasants would ask difficult questions.
Of course most common folk were illiterate back then anyway.
Not quite, these texts were indeed stored in the physical churches and mostly written in the language of the Roman Empire because there weren’t enough scholars and scribes to translate to the thousands of new local languages (since the technology didn’t exist to make it practical).
It’s interesting to consider what it even means to say that the church forbid these hand written Latin texts from getting in the possession of those who couldn’t read. This is why most of the experienced Bible since about 1800 BC was experienced through vocal tradition.
You don't give any specific examples, but is this really true? Is there anyone out there saying we should ignore the past and just move on? I think you'll find a lot of people saying that we shouldn't glorify and worship it, but none saying not to remember it.
I think that's more an American thing than a "western civilization" thing. Of course, the article is talking about America...
You see this in many ways. You see some statistic reported, or some event happens, and they say "It's the highest (or the first) since 2017", like that makes this really unusual.
You see it in sports, where people argue whether LeBron or Michael are the greatest, as if Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson never existed.
You see it in web frameworks.
You see it in the 24 hour news cycle. "Here's what's happened in the last hour, and we'll repeat a few things that happened a couple of hours before that" - as if anything older than 3 hours is no longer relevant.
You see it in video. I once took a half-hour non-news TV show, and for a 12-minute segment, I counted the cuts. It worked out that the average time between cuts was 3 seconds. This was clear back in the 1980s; it may be worse now. So video is tuning us to a world where, if you don't like what you see, it will all be completely different in 3 seconds.
So maybe nobody is explicitly stating as a philosophical that we should ignore the past and just move on... oh, wait. Doesn't existentialism teach that this moment is all you've got?
But American in particular is a place where the past is not relevant. It's a place where you go when you want to leave the past behind - leave the old country with all its constraining history. And you can do the same in America, too - just move to another state when you want a new life. I've heard that the difference between America and Europe is that in Europe, 100 miles is a long distance, and in America, 100 years is a long time. We don't have the sense of deeper history that Europe has.
So, combining philosophy, lack of history, instant-everything society, and media focusing on what's new right now, yes, I'd say that we're effectively ignoring the past - not totally, but more than most cultures have.
Those are interesting points, and I suppose I agree that there's too little "deep thought" and too much "crisis all the time". I'm not really sure if I agree that nobody cares about the past though.
I think what we are seeing in large part is a retooling of the past. America cares deeply about it's past. The only thing you ever hear them talk about is "founding farther this" or "Confederacy that". From my perspective America seems infatuated with its own past. Here in Europe we rarely even talk about that time Germany tried to take over the whole thing, maybe because we all tried to do the same previously.
