I was on an 1851 media diet in late 2021 and early 2022. I was reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, (1852), a chapter a week to match its serialization 170 years before and added a media diet to it: most (but not all) of my reading, news and music also had to come from at least 170 years ago.
I modelled my media diet on what Thoreau said in “Walden” (1854) just a few years later: that most people in his town of Concord read just the Bible, the newspaper and cheap, contemporary fiction. So that is what I did, though the fiction would be a cut above since the trash fiction of 1851 has not survived, just the classics, like “Jane Eyre”, “Moby Dick”, and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. And I read non-fiction too.
What I read:
- Bible: King James Bible, a chapter a day
- news: The Economist, Frederick Douglass’ Newspaper
- books:
- Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852): a chapter a week
- Thoreau’s 1851 journal.
- Frederick Douglass: Speeches, 1841-51
- Nov 2021: Phillis Wheatley: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773)
- Dec 2021: Olaudah Equiano: Interesting Narrative (1789)
- Jan 2022: James W.C. Pennington: The Origin and History of the Colored People (1841)
- Feb 2022:
- Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre (1847)
- Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1849)
- Mar 2022:
- Sojourner Truth: Narrative (1850)
- Melville: Moby-Dick (1851)
- Apr 2022: finish reading “Moby-Dick”.
- May 2022: Josiah Henson: Life.
- Jun 2022: read half of Martin Delany: The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (1852)
What I listened to: Mainly classical music, like Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin, which I just could not get into for the most part.
Remarks: I was left with two main impressions:
- How the King James Bible loomed over everything – except for The Economist. Religiously, morally, even down to its taste in English. Charlotte Bronte and Frederick Douglass clearly breathe the same Anglo-Protestant air. The Authorized King James Bible was their Iliad, their Koran, their Dante. Its only rivals were Shakespeare and the Book of Common Prayer – the two main things this media diet lacked in hindsight that it should have had.
- How narrowly ethnic it all was! It was like reading 16th century Ukrainian literature or something. Their world seemed to be shrunk down to the Anglosphere of the past 300 years or so – to 8% of mankind and 6% of history. This is seen best in the Bible itself: the King James translation is a heretical Protestant translation and, as stripped back and watered down as that was, they twisted it and stripped it down even further so that only two passages mattered in the end – what I call the Slaveholder’s Bible. But, if you are going to limit yourself only to the newspaper, cheap, contemporary fiction, the King James Bible – and to pastors who depend on Sunday collections, giving them every reason to tell you what you want to hear – this is what you get. And now it is even worse than that for most people in the US.
– Abagond, 2023.
See also:
- books
- 1851:
- media diet reviews:
- Thoreau’s library
- Anglo-Protestant culture
554
Abagond 
So what version Bible do you read, the Apocrypha etc. I heard the 1611 version of KJ is the most accurate or as close as its going to.get.
LikeLike
abagond,
I have to say your findings are a little underwhelming for 6+ months of research.
People were more religious back then. Shocking. You really don’t like Christians do you. Yet you call the KJV a “heretical” Protestant translation, as if you were a 17th century pope. Then you flippantly say all these super religious Christians only really cared about a couple passages in the Bible used to justify contemporary slavery, as if the map you included doesn’t demonstrate that most areas of the South had practically no slaves at all. As if the Christians in the North weren’t the main force of abolition, a movement which would soon embroil the country in a massive, bloody civil war.
You are also seemingly shocked that the country was a “nation” back then, drawing on the rich traditions of the “Anglosphere”. You’d never criticize an African country for being too African or an Asian country for being too Asian or denigrate them as only representing “8% of mankind”. People from the North and South had common traditions and famously got along very well outside of disputes relating to the Civil War (for most Southerners, very few of whom were actually slave owners, they cared more about states rights than slavery itself). The current divide between SJWs and Deplorables is much deeper and more comprehensive.
Of course you can write about Antebellum US, 1619, or even ancient Egypt as much as you want, it’s your blog, but there’s so much of interest happening in the world these days, which you practically ignore. You said “now it is even worse than that for most people in the US,” but it seems like you swallow everything you see in the MSM from the woke media elites hook, line and sinker and (as they advise) you only have issues with Fox News and the like, which, though popular, is not consumed by “most people”.
LikeLike
@biff
Funnily enough, some of Abagond’s older writings are actually quite based, from a religious perspective. Certain posts from 2006-08 could have come from First Things or other good, conservative, Catholic sources of note. His condemnation of moral relativism was particularly striking. Latent traces of that Abagond may still exist, dormant yet present — such as in his rightful characterization of the KJV as heretical. In short, he has not always, and perhaps still does not, dislike Christians per se.
Unfortunately, it appears that the bulk of his writing devolved into Woke Leftist woo-woo shortly thereafter.
The rest of your comment is spot-on.
LikeLike
Return,
I never knew the based abagond. Do you know where I might find him? Links would be appreciated. The best I could do in terms of searching re: moral relativism was this post from 2010: https://abagond.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/it-was-the-times/
The money quote from that is as follows:
“To a degree it makes sense. For example, the ancient Greeks left baby girls in the woods to be eaten by wolves. That might seem shocking, but at the time they had neither safe abortion nor the Christian ideas by which to judge it as wrong and condemn it.
But the argument can be taken too far. It can be used to excuse great evils, to avoid facing up to an ugly past.
A good example is Jim Crow, the laws and customs in the American South that kept the races apart and blacks down from 1877 to 1967, featuring such practices as lynching and Klan terror.”
So, in case you missed it, it’s understandable to kill baby girls based on their gender because the moms couldn’t go get a “safe” sex selective abortion. Meanwhile, it’s totally not forgivable for a society to try to limit black criminality in any way (of course it would be racist to look at crime statistics or recent number of black on White murders vs. historical numbers of those lynched for no reason like the sainted Emmett Till, who absolutely wasn’t like his convicted murderer/rapist father and didn’t threaten to rape a young mother tending her store, no matter what she said–believe all women unless they are White).
LikeLike
@biff
Off the top of my head:
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/why-i-am-a-christian/
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2008/07/19/am-i-homophobic/ — he walked this one back in 2018, but this passage is quite trenchant:
“I know that Catholic ideas of sex go flat against human nature. Certainly my own. Does that mean it is wrong? Not necessarily. In my own case it has kept me from making some huge mistakes in my life, even apart from whatever divine authority I believe it has.
Am I applying my religion to people who do not believe in it? Yes. But that is unavoidable. I have to function from one set of moral beliefs or another and apply them to the world.”
LikeLike
Thank you for the links, Return.
Were you on this site much earlier under a different name? I guess I didn’t start visiting here till mid 2013. Can only recognize a few names from 2010 and almost none from 2008. It was a much busier place for quite some time. 200+ comments on many posts with input from a lot of different people. Now it often takes a post war with 2-3 people (including a designated heel like myself) to get to 20.
Anyway, from abagond’s 2018 follow up post: “Therefore I am now for same-sex marriage… I do not like saying that – because now I am sounding just like my father. Word for word. In my youth I saw him as what I called a Cuomo Catholic. Like Mario Cuomo, then the governor of New York (and father of the present governor), he left his Catholic beliefs outside the voting booth.”
I used to think Catholics were all “heretics”. Now I am more careful with that term, as I’ve encountered people I believe to be very devout and careful followers of God who are Catholic. God is the ultimate judge, but I feel I can have fellowship with them in a way I couldn’t with a devout Jew or Muslim, for instance. I understand Christians who struggle with sin and don’t live the kind of life they want to. I totally get that and that’s me too! However, I don’t sympathize with people who say, yeah I understand God’s perspective, but I intentionally reject those things and will internationally vote for evil stuff like abortion and same sex marriage because I intellectually support people’s rights to practice wickedness that God says harms society. abagond is a smart guy. He should be able to step back and see that his “transformation” in views about same sex marriage, just as it was being heavily supported by the anti-Christian MSM and people like Obama (as well as newer stuff like “trans rights”) was anything but organic and natural. If/when a big push for pedo rights is made (it won’t be framed that way, but for instance it starts with saying young kids can make decisions about being trans/permanently castrating themselves, which they are doing now, and easily moves into lower voting age, age of consent, etc.) abagond will find he eventually supports all of that as well.
LikeLike
@biff
I have been perusing this site for a long time, including the archives — what digital reams of content one finds there! — but just delurked the other day.
The same grace that you extend to Catholics, I extend to Protestant error (just yanking your chain 😉)
I enjoy reading old battles deep in the bowels of this blog. My favorite has to be xPraetorius! (Rest in peace, fallen warrior.) Unfortunately, it does look like most dissent has been inexorably drummed out. It’s funny, because even though the most hysterical posts about evil, horrible, nasty, no-good, racist, enslaving, unicorn-murdering, dirty-rotten white people seem to come from around 2011-15, there appears to have been a much more robust culture of disagreement back then. Now the comments have largely devolved into vapid echo chambers.
Your point about the ever-moving Overton window in America (although it is pushed by the militant Left, rather than moving of its own accord!) is well taken.
The Woke pathogen that infected previously normal American institutions and communities as a result of the Mephistophelian events of June 2020 is now working its poison far beyond race issues alone.
Rod Dreher’s reports from the frontline of the culture war have been particularly instructive.
LikeLike
Return,
“Delurked” is a nice turn of phrase. I wouldn’t say dissent has been actively drummed out here. Abagond at least let dissenting voices comment, while a lot of mainstream sources that just wanted to propagandize turned comments off completely a few years back and now, if they allow commenting at all, feature very heavy moderation, with AI and humans feverishly working to suppress anti-Narrative voices (including by manipulating visibility, likes, etc.).
A lot of interesting past commentators from this site, who were not “dissenting” per se, just seem to have moved on. A couple of Asian guys used to produce tons of comments and discussion and there were a lot of great posts on Asian related topics. Those seem far rarer in recent years.
There are now fewer posts that aren’t standard boomer liberal positions, and I think the political environment was a lot more conducive to good natured discussions re: interesting topics in the pre-Trump era (though I think Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of political bifurcation, as things have only gotten worse with Let’s Go Brandon in office).
abagond used to draw an edgy crowd, as his frank discussions of race, etc. were pretty unique. In going through old posts, I saw he referenced Heartiste and even had a visit from the real Steve Sailer. Now, I doubt he spends much time on Gab seeing what the dissident right is talking about. He has stayed away from controversial stuff and seems to be more busy with personal things these days. All of that is understandable I suppose. Glad you’re enjoying the archives and battles past. Hope you are on Gab thinking about the future as well!
LikeLike
There also seems to have been a nuclear explosion at some point in 2017, like unto the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which resulted in a number of dissenters either storming out or being shown the door. It was likely a symptom of the general chaos brought about by the 2016 election.
Most of the people who have commented since that year are either in agreement with the blog’s editorial line or able to keep their mouths shut about points of divergence. You, of course, are a notable exception.
It is interesting to see that, looking through the archives of Abagond, several distinct epochs come into view:
Before 2008/09 — lots of posts about literature and Western history, and even some based Catholic content! Could be mistaken for a conservative at points.
Roughly 2010-16 — hard Left turn into Wokeness. 95% of posts revolve around how evil racist white people triggered Abagond by stealing all his lunch money. Or something like that.
(As a side note, one of the old, relatively obscure threads I was recently reading, “Mock Spanish,” saw Abagond desperately turning over rocks in order to prove that white people were nasty racists because they added a C sound to the pronunciation of “Tucson.” Ah, yes, that evil C! The calling card of our nasty, meanie racism. He’s got us dead to rights!)
After 2017 — boomer liberal.
I am not on Gab, but perhaps I should be!
LikeLike
Sorry — removed a C, from the original Spanish. You get the idea, though.
LikeLike
Return,
Very interesting observations about the site. It’s good to step back and look at things in a larger context every now and then. I don’t even remember the 2017 nuclear explosion here, but I do remember that Trump’s winning changed a lot of perceptions. It was good for the failing MSM, because they had a super villain to attack everyday (even though Trump didn’t actually do anything too radical). Maybe not as good for this site, which covers a lot of different topics and didn’t only focus on Orange Man Bad (though there was certainly some of that) .
For me, 2020 was the bigger shock, after which I stepped away for a while. I was actually prepared for Trump to lose, but not like that. There were so many layers of rigging (starting with the easily provable, like the MSM covering up the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in lockstep and Pfizer delaying announcement of their vaccine, moving to many near statistical impossibilities and beyond), and most people on the right felt something was very off (even before we saw 2000 Mules or got confirmation that the intelligence agencies were involved in the steal), while most on the left (including almost all the regular commentators on this site) said it was a complete conspiracy theory to think anything untoward could have happened. Hard to imagine a more divisive issue. In retrospect, it hasn’t been all bad. It’s woken a lot of people up at least.
LikeLike
@ Abagond
Would you be willing to expand on your comment that the KJV is stripped back and watered down? I’m not exactly sure of your meaning. Are you referring only to the Apocrypha being left out? Or is it something about the translation itself that feels watered down? Something about the word choices, or its take on things like the Johannine Comma, or….?
LikeLike
“the trash fiction of 1851 has not survived”
Unless Thoreau named names, I can’t be for sure which authors he was talking about. But he might have meant those novels and stories that fell under the categories of domestic realism and sentimental fiction, which were mostly written by women:
https://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/domestic.htm
There are author lists towards the end of that webpage, and one of them, Mary Jane Holmes, was the second best-selling author of the time, right after Harriet Beecher Stowe.
The “trash fiction” of that era hasn’t stood the test of time to become classic literature, so it hasn’t survived in that sense. But quite a bit of it hasn’t been lost, just forgotten.
LikeLike