It was the day I was looking up the issues of the Nazi's official paper the Völkischer Beobachter, that disproves the claim made by one of the dumber Science Blogs science professionals* of Darwin's Defenders that the Nazis banned Darwin and a related claim that is floating around in the online folklore of the sciency and atheist that they banned Haeckel. They didn't, those are both post-WWII lies of the kind that those who buy them never, ever fact check.
Anyway, I realized how much of that "folk" talk was part of the same stream of romantic so-called scientific lore that fed Nazism.
It put me off the word, entirely. And, to an extent, the romanticized conception of folklore. I see it in sort of the same way that dear, dear Jack Levine saw "modernism" as transcribed by me and posted right below the title of this blog. There's a heck of a lot of baggage that comes with that lore, some of it innocuous, some of it fun, some of it interesting but much of it dangerous. Nothing is so dangerous about it as forming absurdly romantic and unrealistic conceptions of a past built out of it. The regionalism that poisons American democracy is built of such stuff, much of it as filtered through the ignorant and bigoted minds on the make of those in the entertainment industry.
The past, past culture, is something that should be evaluated with a cool eye to leave behind what is best left behind and to keep what's worth keeping. A lot of it isn't. And you should never imagine you're doing what's impossible, recreating the lives and even the minds of those in the past. You can't. You can't help but mix yourself in with what they left and if you're not careful you'll mix stuff from them that you shouldn't into your imagination.
* Ever since I found out Jeffry Epstein and his pimpess-girlfriend were among the main backers of the old Science Blogs, I can't stop thinking of the stable of new-atheist sci-guys who had blogs there as "Jeffy's Kids".
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