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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 8251643" data-attributes="member: 85555"><p>Again, I am not saying views and morality don't change. They were very different in 1990 versus the 19th century as well. You can still enjoy older material. Dear lord, how do you even deal with things like primary sources in history if a book like Dracula is a problem for you? We read lots of classics and old books we disagreed with in 1990, but we were able to contextualize them, extract meaning from them and use them to help us understand the evolution of art and expression over time. Definitely there were bad ideas in the past. History is filled with bad ideas, bad events, etc. One way to make sure those don't happen again, is to have a full awareness of the mentalities that were present during those times (for example you really can't understand something like the holocaust if you don't read material from the periods leading up to it that contained anti-semitic assumptions and racialist scientific theories). We are getting into real world politics here though, so I don't want to get into it more than that. But I think that is an important point to make because people seem to think folks like me, who came of age in the 90s, are saying you should read and enjoy old tropes because they are evil and we want you to be evil too. The point is you will have a real broken understanding of history if you aren't even able to contend with books from the past that contained ideas you don't agree with or are not considered acceptable any more. At the same time, you can enjoy a 19th century vampire without embracing the 19th century mindset of its writer. And you will also discover, humans are more complicated than just being products of their time. You will encounter things distasteful to modern readers but you will also encounter surprising ideas. There is still plenty of reason for example to read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or watch some of those old Universal movies based on her book like Bride of Frankenstein.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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