Thread by @jposhaughnessy

1/ “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.”
~Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new."
~Henry David Thoreau

Context--A thread

2/ One of the things that challenges our perceptions and mental models today is a seeming lack of context. Many articles and thought pieces I read today all too often judge a historical figure or idea by the generally accepted standards of today, ignoring the prevailing views

3/ of the society in which that person lived, acted and thought. Art offers us an excellent example.

The Uffizi Museum in Florence houses some of the greatest masterpieces from the Italian Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries. Masters such as Sandro Botticelli painted

4/ masterpieces such as the Primavera (shown below) that while beautiful to modern eyes cannot be fully appreciated without an understanding of an early Renaissance love poem it was based upon. I'm not doing a history lesson here, but the painting can only be understood fully

5/ by knowing that the painting needs to be read left to right and what all the figures represent allegorically. People of that era understood the poem, the allegories, the naked nod to its patron (Lorenzo De Medici is depicted as Mercury on the right, pointing to Heaven)

6/ But studying it with this knowledge reminds us that to fully understand our own place in history, we must understand and know how those who went before us thought and what moved them to act, believe and behave in the way they did. My point is, by knowing history, you would

7/ know that paintings like this were of NO interest to people around 200 years ago and that patrons of the Uffizi didn't even look at the painting until the 1880s! The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) visited the Uffizi every day he was in Florence

8/ and only took notes on the sculptures, for in his era, it was believed that sculptures and not paintings were the more important art.

Consider the "Medici Venus," a Roman copy of a Praxitelean sculpture of the 4th century of the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite

9/ that Cosimo De Medici III removed from pubic display for fear she might corrupt the morals of art students (!?) For 200 years, this statue remained a potent sex symbol for educated Europeans and was the *only* statue in Florence that Napoleon brought back to France with him.

10/ The author Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of "The Scarlet Letter" actually began to pant heavily as he approached her. Look at her again. How in God's name did a statue that to modern eyes isn't even *slightly* titillating cause such rapture and heavy breathing in those from

11/ an earlier era? Simple. By understanding the context of their times, we see that sometimes things are "important" only because everyone in society thinks they are.

Moving forward in time, many Impressionist paintings are now seen as masterpieces, yet many are unaware

12/ that the name of the movement was bestowed on it as an insult by the then fashionable powers that be in the French academic school of art who commented on the paintings only to deride and ridicule them. Vincent Van Gogh, today considered one of the greatest painters of all

13/ time and yet sold only one painting during his life, "The Red Vineyard" to the heiress Anna Boch for what amounts to $2,000 in today's dollars. No one, even the connoisseurs and "experts" of his era, saw much value in his work because they weren't conditioned by the

14/ societal belief systems of that time to be able to "see" its value. Today the painting would probably sell for over $100 million dollars.

The point is simple and straightforward--it's easy for we citizens of 2020 to see these things and laugh at those of earlier eras

15/ and to judge them by the prevailing beliefs and standards of today. Simple and wrong. By understanding the context of beliefs and events of past eras, we develop a much better mental model for how we should think today. We are also forcefully reminded that people a few

16/ hundred years from now may look at many of our beliefs and customs and laugh out loud at how wrong or "primitive" they were (are.) To truly remove yourself from the dominant thinking of your era is incredibly hard and if you can do it, becomes a superpower for understanding

17/ our situation and beliefs of today and how they may change. This understanding is powerful--Ludwig Wittgenstein said "to understand is to know what to do."

But to gain this superpower, we must constantly and ruthlessly challenge all of our beliefs, which is extremely hard

18/ to do consistently. It requires constant uncertainty and the willingness to always be open-minded to ideas, but also a predisposition to let data and consistency of a model be your guide. As Jed McKenna said "If the facts are at odds with the theory, the theory is wrong."

19/ This goes against almost every fiber in our being. We hate uncertainty, allow ourselves to become prematurely certain, sometimes only look for data that supports our beliefs and seek out "tribes" that share our values and beliefs. The cost of this is incredibly high.

20/ But improving our perceptions and mental models pays enormous dividends. It allows you to "see around corners" and understand things that very few others do. Is it worth it?

Let's revisit Vincent van Gogh. His "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" was originally sold

21/ in 1897 by Van Gogh's sister-in-law for 300 francs (Approximately $50) It was resold by Christie's New York in 1990 to Ryoei Saito, honorary chairman of Daishowa Paper Manufacturing for the equivalent of $162 million of today's US dollars.

So, yeah, it's worth it.