{"id":100356,"date":"2017-07-14T09:34:32","date_gmt":"2017-07-14T17:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gnxp.nofe.me\/?p=188761"},"modified":"2017-07-14T09:34:32","modified_gmt":"2017-07-14T17:34:32","slug":"the-past-was-not-pg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2017\/07\/14\/the-past-was-not-pg\/","title":{"rendered":"The past was not PG"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Week<\/i> has published a screed against the low moral quality of Game of Thrones<\/a>, Game of Thrones is bad \u2014 and bad for you<\/a>. Obviously there is something<\/i> to this insofar as one can see a coarsening of entertainment, or at least a decline in the stylized aspects of the depiction of reality.<\/p>\n

But one of my initial reactions is that much of the narrative that we value from the past was not particularly PG.<\/b> If you read The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible<\/a> you see that the “Good Book”, in fact the only<\/i> book many read front to back by many after the Reformation in Protestant Europe, has some quite unsavory tales. The story of Judah and Tamar<\/a> in particular is hard to digest from a modern Western perspective because many of the elements are understated and workaday. Greek mythology is no better obviously. From Zeus raping Leda<\/a>, Achilles throwing a fit because his sex-slave was taken away<\/a>, to the tradition of Agamemnon sacrificing\u00a0Iphigenia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In some cases the shocking aspect of ancient stories is because moderns have different values.<\/strong> Slavery and concubinage were taken for granted during the period that the Hebrew Bible and Classical mythology crystallized into the forms which came down to us. In other cases I presume that it was unlikely that small children were going to ever read the original stories themselves, so sexual elements that might confuse were probably omitted in some oral tellings.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that\u00a0Game of Thrones<\/a>\u00a0is a modern masterpiece. But some of the disquieting, and frankly perverse, aspects of the narrative are only shocking if your standard is the relatively antiseptic literary fiction<\/a>\u00a0which one finds between the Regency and the cultural revolution of the 1960s. That is the aberration in human history, while gritty genre fiction much closer to primal human storytelling.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Week has published a screed against the low moral quality of Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones is bad — and bad for you. Obviously there is something to this insofar as one can see a coarsening of entertainment, or at least a decline in the stylized aspects of the depiction of reality. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1594,8,1437,2729],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bible","category-culture","category-game-of-thrones","category-mythology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100356"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100357,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100356\/revisions\/100357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}