[HN Gopher] It's Dante's hell - we're just living in it
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It's Dante's hell - we're just living in it
Author : pepys
Score : 48 points
Date : 2024-04-08 14:14 UTC (8 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.neh.gov)
| araes wrote:
| She was dressed in "a decorous and delicate crimson." (Virgil)
| 'Were you listening to me, Alighieri? Or were you looking at the
| woman in the red dress?'
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Like Huxley after him, Dante made the first circle sound somewhat
| appealing. No doubt the food there could be much better, but the
| attraction would be the company, not the cuisine. (somewhat like
| Peter Wimsey visiting the Soviet Club, where his host tells him
| "...the cooking isn't very good here, but the subscription's so
| small, you see"?)
| nineplay wrote:
| I've been reading Paradise Lost and Satan gives off major "sexy
| villain" vibes. The hosts of hell remain strong and defiant
| even while in their realm of eternal torment - "Better to reign
| in hell than serve in heaven" and all that. Meanwhile heaven is
| pretty bland and the angels come of as a bunch of milquetoasts.
|
| I don't know enough about Milton to know if he intended to
| write a cautionary tale vs. an interesting tail, but I can
| imagine readers thinking "f** it, I'd rather hang out with the
| cool kids"
| tharmas wrote:
| I highly recommend you read some William Blake. He was
| Milton's greatest critic (but a great admirer too):
|
| "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels &
| God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was
| a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it."
| --The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
| tivert wrote:
| > The hosts of hell remain strong and defiant even while in
| their realm of eternal torment ... Meanwhile heaven is pretty
| bland and the angels come of as a bunch of milquetoasts.
|
| That reminds me of the observation that happy lives make
| boring stories, so fiction tends towards showing
| dysfunctional characters, awful environments, or both.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I believe it was Tolstoy who said something to the effect
| of "Happy families are boring, because they're all the
| same. Unhappy families are interesting because they're all
| different."
| perihelions wrote:
| That's the opening line of Anna Karenina.
|
| https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1399/pg1399-images.h
| tml...
| wredcoll wrote:
| Also what we perceive as "heroic" especially in a
| fantasy/super-hero context, tends to ultimately be status
| quo preserving, which frequently means the villains tends
| to be the "cool" "disruptive" characters, and if the world
| isn't sufficiently perfect then it's easy for some people
| to start believing that any disruption is justified.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Just to stir the pot and throw C.S. Lewis into the mix [0]:
|
| > To admire Satan, then, is to give one's vote not only for a
| world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda,
| of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography. Yet the
| choice is possible. Hardly a day passes without some slight
| movement towards it in each one of us. That is what makes
| Paradise Lost so serious a poem. The thing is possible, and
| the exposure of it is resented. Where Paradise Lost is not
| loved, it is deeply hated. As Keats said more rightly than he
| knew, 'there is death' in Milton.
|
| > We have all skirted the Satanic island closely enough to
| have motives for wishing to evade the full impact of the
| poem. For, I repeat, the thing is possible ; and after a
| certain point it is prized. Sir Willoughby may be unhappy,
| but he wants to go on being Sir Willoughby. Satan wants to go
| on being Satan. That is the real meaning of his choice
| 'Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n.' Some, to the
| very end, will think this a fine thing to say ; others will
| think that it fails to be roaring farce only because it
| spells agony. On the level of literary criticism the matter
| cannot be argued further. Each to his taste.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Preface_to_Paradise_Lost
| nineplay wrote:
| It's interesting to me that Lewis is so engaged with it. I
| read Paradise Lost as a sort of fanfic. Milton does not
| claim to be a prophet or that it is some literal
| representation of heaven and hell. Within the book Satan is
| a fictional character with the same sort of appeal as
| Walter White or the Joker or Severus Snape. They seem cool
| as long as you don't think about it too deeply.
|
| But I don't mean this as a criticism of Lewis who I adore.
| I'll have to read his Preface, since I'm sure they'll
| deepen my understanding.
| rocmcd wrote:
| There's a quote from Zach Weinersmith (author, cartoonist)
| during a podcast a while back that stuck with me about
| Milton's depiction of Satan:
|
| "I will say Milton is great and readable as long as Satan is
| talking. [...] the joke on Milton is that he was the greatest
| gift to Satan in history. He did everything short of giving
| him a two-headed guitar. It is just like, Satan is so cool."
| [0]
|
| I highly recommend giving it a listen (and Econtalk more
| generally!) if this is something that interests you.
|
| [0] https://www.econtalk.org/zach-weinersmith-on-beowulf-and-
| bea...
| matwood wrote:
| Or as Biggie put it https://genius.com/407104.
|
| "God'll probably have me on some real strict sh*t
|
| No sleepin' all day, no gettin' my d**k licked
|
| Hangin' with the goodie-goodies, loungin' in paradise
|
| F*k that shit, I wanna tote guns and shoot dice"
| nineplay wrote:
| There must be some psychic link, I was tempted to quote
| Biggie in my post. I kept waiting for Satan stand up in
| front of his crew and say "Raise your hands in the air if
| youse a true player"
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Such a Christian portrayal of hell and heaven.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Just to stir the pot even further:
|
| I recently picked up Dante and enrolled in an online course.
| Inferno and Purgatorio: no problem. I wouldn't say "couldn't
| put it down" but it was no problem to read. I also watched
| the Ken Burns special.
|
| Paradiso: hate it. Beatrice is _boring_.
| keybored wrote:
| Our culture is saturated with this trope. Compare:
|
| 1. Health nut who lives on salad, low-fat yogurt/everything,
| jogs endlessly, frets about his body being a temple[1]
|
| 2. Sex, drugs, good food, rock & roll
|
| Miserly wholesomeness vs. exciting, short-lived
| unwholesomeness.
|
| [1] The point here is the self-denial. Some people
| intrinsically likes these things; however, they would then
| not fit the trope
| quesera wrote:
| And confounding things further, there's little evidence
| that group one lives a longer -- much less happier -- life,
| than group two.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| God's Word says Satan is permitted to run this world,
| encouraging us to think his way, until judgement comes later.
| He does it by appealing to their sinful desires. Our own
| selfishness does the rest.
|
| "in whom the god of this world has blinded the minds of the
| unbelieving, that the light of the Good News of the glory of
| Christ, who is the image of God, should not dawn on them" (2
| Cor. 4:4)
|
| So, let's contrast the truth. In my other comment, I
| mentioned what the sinful kids and Satan are destined for.
| It's not pretty.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39973866
|
| What about heaven? In Genesis 2, before the Fall, man had
| fellowship with God, hung out with each other, did work, and
| rested. God said all good things are a gift from Him. If it's
| not sinful, it might exist in heaven. For its nature, fruit
| of the Spirit is "love, peace, patience, kindness, goodness,
| faithfulness, gentleness, and self control." So, imagine all
| human activities that are fun and embodied with those
| virtues. That's Heaven.
|
| We have a taste of it here on Earth in the Church. We mostly
| go about our day, do our jobs, spend time with our families,
| and enjoy our hobbies. In church service, we worship God
| together and serve others in love. In spare time, we hang
| out, enjoy good food, go on vacation together, play games,
| share stories, etc. The problems in churches come from our
| sinful natures which God will eliminate (called
| glorification) once our time here is up.
|
| So, one place has us separated from everyone, in a lake of
| fire, and burning non-stop. Satan will be there, too. The
| other is every good thing you can imagine on Earth done in a
| better way, other things you can't imagine, your friends
| there, and the very presence of God giving you fullness of
| joy. Christ and His Heaven are the obvious choice. Anyone
| suffering here on Earth are also told to keep their eye on
| the prize which is our future inheritance.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| While I will Vouch for your right to say that, and I find
| the professional atheists like Dawkins to be a bunch of
| a-holes:
|
| Personally, I think that when you're dead, you're just
| dead. Like sleep, except you don't wake up or dream. When
| your neurons are shutting off, they probably put on one
| hell of a show for you. Just like the show they put on that
| convinces you that "consciousness" is a real thing, and you
| have a "soul." It's not and you don't.
|
| But like I said, I think what you believe is probably good
| for humans, on the whole, and I don't condemn it _at all_.
| owendlamb wrote:
| > Meanwhile heaven is pretty bland and the angels come of as
| a bunch of milquetoasts.
|
| You reminded me of that Simpsons bit about Protestant Heaven
| vs Catholic Heaven:
|
| https://youtu.be/-4IletJ7-Tw
| jf___ wrote:
| "One of President Kennedy's favorite quotations was based upon an
| interpretation of Dante's Inferno.
|
| As Robert Kennedy explained in 1964, "President Kennedy's
| favorite quote was really from Dante:
|
| 'The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of
| moral crisis preserve their neutrality"
|
| [1] https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/life-of-john-f-
| ke...
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > 'The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in
| time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality"
|
| I think with a hindsight of history, my view is different:
|
| 'The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who push
| people into active enmity claiming a moral crisis'
|
| The Thirty Years War was a result of this and never needed to
| have happened.
|
| More recently, and dealing with Kennedy, the Vietnam War was
| result of this kind of thinking. (Domino theory and that unless
| we opposed every single advance of communism the entire world
| would fall and be plunged into darkness).
|
| The Cultural Revolution was another manifestation of this kind
| of thinking.
|
| Someone, much wiser than both Dante and Kennedy once said:
| "Blessed are the peacemakers".
|
| EDIT:
|
| And even prior to Dante's time, there were the Crusades, where
| in the name of a "moral crisis", people were mobilized, and
| great atrocities were committed and much death and destruction
| resulted.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| > The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who push
| people into active enmity claiming a moral crisis
|
| This statement usually implies that people who act according
| to a moral framework that isn't "Live with the minimum amount
| of intrusion to other people's lives" are doing wrong. I
| personally don't buy that.
|
| _When they are told, "Do not spread corruption in the land,"
| they reply, "We are only peace-makers!"_
|
| _Indeed, it is they who are the corruptors, but they fail to
| perceive it._
|
| - The Holy Qur'an (2:11)
| ant6n wrote:
| How will the war in Ukraine be viewed from this perspective
| in the far future?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| It appears that only Russia could prevent or end the
| conflict. On the territory that Russia controls they have
| build concentration camps to torture and murder the
| insufficiently loyal as they set about grinding their
| cities to dust their people to gore and erasing a culture
| and a people.
|
| It seems like ceding any territory now would lead to
| further conflict soon both in Ukraine and elsewhere based
| on both recent history and Russias statements.
|
| Furthermore it would abandon those in these territories to
| privation and mass murder same as the soviets perpetrated
| against them in the past.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I think there is some moral clarity in the Ukraine
| situation. There was simply no good reason to attack
| Ukraine. I understand that the Russians may be worried
| about the NATO expansion but that doesn't justify to lead
| such a war.
| tejohnso wrote:
| There was also concern about ethnic and cultural genocide
| of ethnic Russians in the eastern Ukraine regions.
| Promises broken.
| wredcoll wrote:
| The sheer irony of you citing the vietnam war, which for the
| americans, was literally defending a nation against an
| unprovoked invasion, hurts my brain.
| manquer wrote:
| I did not follow ,Which nation were the Americans defending
| an unprovoked attack on ? are you referring the French ?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Charitably, one could also read the quote as saying people
| should be actively opposing these atrocities, instead of
| staying neutral during them.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| The US parties love this: "vote for us or the country as you
| know it won't exist anymore". Much easier than actually
| solving real problems.
| petsfed wrote:
| I think on one extreme you have the failures of neutrality
| that contributed to WW2, and on the other you have trumped up
| "moral crises" that characterized much of the Cold War.
|
| Arguably, the reason the Nazis came to power was that a great
| many right-leaning German voters looked at their options and
| thought "this Hitler guy seems pretty crazy, but that'll
| probably cook off, so long as he helps us beat the
| communists", which is a special kind of neutrality that
| people can never seem to shake free of.
|
| I get what Kennedy was responding to, his sin was in failing
| to understand (just like the German right) that "leftist" !=
| Stalinist/Maoist, and that a communist takeover need not look
| like the October Revolution, and the regime need not look
| like Russia ca. 1935, nor China ca. 1960.
| soperj wrote:
| > I think on one extreme you have the failures of
| neutrality that contributed to WW2, and on the other you
| have trumped up "moral crises" that characterized much of
| the Cold War.
|
| I don't know that I would characterize giving pieces of
| another country to the Germans as "neutrality".
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > I think on one extreme you have the failures of
| neutrality that contributed to WW2, and on the other you
| have trumped up "moral crises" that characterized much of
| the Cold War.
|
| I would guess for every moral WWII, there are 10 (if not
| 100) other wars that use the language of WWII and result in
| a complete waste of lives and money and cause far more
| problems than they solve.
| tptacek wrote:
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/01/14/hottest/
| keybored wrote:
| I can imagine George Bush Jr. saying something similar.
| duxup wrote:
| Amusing as a big part of his platform when running for
| president was "no nation building". Things change quickly.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| It's not like NATO did any major nation building in
| Afghanistan or Iraq, at least nowhere near close to post-
| WW2 Germany... so in that point he did keep his promise.
| The entire world lost out as a result of that - there is a
| _direct_ link from the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq to
| the Russian invasion into Ukraine.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| There's a whole lot more direct link between the
| appeasement of Russia at the 2008 NATO summit to the
| invasions of Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014), but I
| suppose Iraq and Afghanistan are distantly relevant.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| I'd argue for the following chain: the failure of NATO in
| Afghanistan and US+allies in Iraq to (re)build a
| democratic nation led to a rise of radical Islamism. That
| in turn led to the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war,
| causing not just a truckload of effort for Europe to deal
| with the refugees on top of those we already had from
| Afghanistan, but especially Assad was left free to ignore
| any and all "red lines", especially the 2012 warning of
| Obama against chemical weapons usage [1], and Russia
| itself was allowed to act with impunity as well.
|
| Then came the 2014 invasion of Russia in Crimea - IMHO a
| direct "test bed" to see if the Western nations were
| willing to step up this time, and they didn't despite
| Russia literally shooting a passenger plane out of the
| sky. Syria completely exploded, and Russia slowly kept
| increasing the pressure on Ukraine. Had covid not
| happened, Russia would have invaded some time in 2020 to
| take over Ukraine, but the pandemic derailed their plans.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_the_U
| se_of_M...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| See, that's much too complicated.
|
| Russia, sometime in or before 2008: "by infiltration or
| by force, we are going to force Georgia and then Ukraine
| to submit. But there is talk of NATO admitting them,
| starting with MAPs potentially as early as the 2008
| summit, so step one is get NATO not do that."
|
| Russia (to NATO, in advance of 2008 summit): "Don't offer
| Georgia and Ukraine MAPs, it would, um, destabilize the
| region and, uh, make it more likely that we'd feel it
| necessary to invade."
|
| NATO: "Seems a little paranoid, but, sure, we like
| stability. Georgia and Ukraine, we really like the idea
| of you guys joining some day, but no membership action
| plan or security commitments for now."
|
| Russia: (invades Georgia almost immediately).
|
| Russia: (Gets friendly leadership in Ukraine in 2010)
|
| Russia: (loses friendly leadership in Ukraine 2014)
|
| Russia: (invades Ukraine immediately)
|
| > Then came the 2014 invasion of Russia in Crimea - IMHO
| a direct "test bed" to see if the Western nations were
| willing to step up this time, and they didn't despite
| Russia literally shooting a passenger plane out of the
| sky.
|
| I mean, they actually did, which is a big reasons why
| Ukrainr's forces were in a better condition when Russia
| launched the wider invasion in 2022 than they had been in
| 2014 (Ukraine made a lot of its own investment, but they
| also got a lot of Western aid, both material and
| training, throughout the war starting not long after the
| 2014 invasion, though not much lethal aid was sent before
| 2021.)
| cherryteastain wrote:
| Ironic, considering the last circle of Hell in Dante's Inferno
| is actually a frozen wasteland with Satan encased in ice in the
| middle up to his waist.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| About to watch some Netflix while reading this
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