,
12 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
Thread: the fascinating history of how long it took Europe to start questioning the ancient assumption (shared by Plato & many) that people automatically absorb/imitate behavior they see in fiction and thus that depictions of bad behavior would lead to bad behavior.
Medieval education made wide us of the idea that reading about people's lives leads to imitating them. Lives of saints or great men, chronicles of great deeds, these were didactic/educational genres intended to make the reader absorb the virtues displayed.
A major challenge to this came in Boccaccio's Decameron (1353), which relates many tales of adultery, charliatinism, clerical hypocrisy, tricksters & fools. Immensely popular, the book was criticized 4 presenting bad role models, but Boccaccio defended himself in the afterward...
Boccaccio argued that presenting bad behavior in ways that makes us criticize it, scorn it, & especially laugh at it, teaches readers to distance themselves from the bad characters/actions and actively desire to be better. That which we mock & condemn we are inspired to surpass.
Boccaccio's argument & work were both widely popular AND widely criticized, and the Decameron was intermittently banned & censored while also becoming a mega-bestseller surpassed only by Dante & Virgil.
The Renaissance thereafter debated this question: do we imitate art or do we judge it? Renaissance biographies & histories continued to present deeds & sketches of "great" men & women with the intention of inspiring people to absorb/imitate them, a style of education advanced by
...Petrarch & humanism, who advanced the idea that reading about the ancients, and reading their works, could not only teach individuals to be virtuous but let that virtue penetrate whole societies to make them more stable and functional.
Renaissance Europe's educational system involved surrounding young leaders & merchant prince(sse)s with ancient examples & role models hoping they would osmotically absorb their courage, honor, & successes. This system dominated & developed from the late 1300s to 1500 when...
...Machiavelli observed the moment of its crisis. The wars that ravaged Europe and Italy between 1494 and the 15-teens were vaster, more destructive than any the Renaissance had experienced, led by ferocious power-hungry men like Julius II, Alexander VI, and Cesare Borgia, yet...
...all these men had had a classical education, surrounded since toddlerhood by depictions of Cicero, Caesar, Seneca, the best role models available, yet they reared selfish warmongers & killers as well as rearing scholars and poets. Machiavelli called for a reexamination of...
...how role models & examples affect education and morals, opening the ongoing debate: do we blindly imitate examples we see/read about or do we analyze, critique, & judge them? To this day this debate underlines how we think about the influence of media/fiction.
Post-scientific-method we can use data to defend one side or the other, and it consistently supports the idea that we don't blindly imitate as Plato thought, but the assumption that we do continually resurges, feeding movements from the Comics Crase, to videogame censorship 
