Your Reading Assignment
From the Pen of the RPGPundit:
http://therpgpundit.blogspot.com/2017/02/harry-potter-and-way-millennial.html
…..during the midst of the Twitterstorm around these riots, I saw what must be my 50000th incidence of a Leftist millennial using a “harry potter” metaphor to try to explain current politics.
Dumbledore Wouldn’t Have Let This Happen
I swear, it’s all you ever see from them.But something happened to me last night, I had a kind of realization. It suddenly hit me WHY that is.It’s because Harry Potter is literally all they collectively know.Schools don’t teach history anymore.
They no longer teach the canon of Western literature.
They certainly don’t teach the Bible.So Millennials literally have no points of common reference. It’s not that they all just want to look like complete morons by infantilizing their political metaphor to the level of a children’s book, it’s that they have no other choice.They’re literally bereft of the allegorical language of the West.…They can no longer express or understand the set of references we have from our past, our most prized stories, and our culture’s religious quotations. They can’t do Shakespeare, Milton, or even Mark Twain because they’ve never learned any of these …They don’t know what happened at Hastings in 1066, at Runnymede in 1215, or even at Sarajevo in 28th June 1914…They certainly don’t know what “the least of these” refers to or where it comes from…
Read the whole thing, and lament.
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget…
Ironically, I only know this poem, and what it means, because I first came across a reference to it in a SF novel by Piers Anthony, and the poet, Kipling, is one that Robert Heinlein praised and recommended in his stories. Even the lightest-hearted of juvenile fiction writers, back in the day, were part of a tradition which they kept alive and passed along.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
