i of course have had the experience of reading an article where the author is responding to like 5 different intellectual currents that i am not familiar with and consequently gleaning only like 20% of their message from it as a result. i still had to write papers on those articles
@Lady Where does "Protestant" come in here? Is it essay-things from the Pope (like the recent Magificent Humans one), if Catholic?
@Lady But I dunno, I think you can just do that to yourself? I can't imagine it's THAT uncommon. I first read The Cyberpunk Manifesto in late-middle-school or early-high-school? Shoutout to the Old Boys Network. I didn't understand a word of it.
@gaditb oh, i definitely agree that you can give yourself humanities training, but that is not to say everybody does
@gaditb the dominant culture in the United States is (a couple of specific kinds of) Protestant, so they would be the most likely to view their worldview as default. i think Catholicism (and, for the record, things like Mormonism) are different enough that you build some level of awareness that not everybody thinks by you by the time you reach adulthood
for people who are white and Protestant and who never had any humanities training, i wonder how familiar they are with that situation. i wonder what their response is to it