"Most likely they will still remember Hitler. The US presidents are probably too numerous for them to remember any"

I have to take issue with that since if they remember Hitler, they'll remember WWII...meaning they'll in all likelihood remember FDR and Truman (and Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin as well, non-Presidents that they are.)

"Maybe everyone likes comedy in the future, so Jerry Seinfeld is thought of like Shakespeare."

Maybe they'll remember Hitler AND Jerry Seinfeld, and so "The Soup Nazi" will be thought of as the 20th century's great comedy, worthy of Aristophanes' "The Frogs."

(And if you don't think so...NO SOUP FOR YOU!) ;)

"As far as artists - that's even more arbitrary, but I somehow doubt hardly any of our modern thinkers, writers, and so on, will be very well remembered, much less read. Oh sure, someone in 2000 years will have read Camus for example, but widely known? Don't count on it."

But how can you say that when, by all accounts, Shakespeare would've just been an acclaimed and popular but by no means "immortal" playwright in the 1600s?

450 years or so, he's...well, Shakespeare.

And again, Thucy, we lost so much when the Library of Alexandria burned down...who knows who and what and how much we lost? Maybe someone in there was so great he would have dwarfed Sophocles or Aristophanes in the current estimation, and we'd be reading their works instead of "Oedipus Rex."

I really think preservation is the key here...

The English language has changed radically in 1000 years, but whereas most only know of "Beowulf" from Old English, imagine how many pieces of great literature we can have preserved digitally, on film and otherwise for people 1000 years from now, when English sounds COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. :)

We still read Chaucer, though Middle English sounds different to the untrained ear than even Elizabethan English...and that's because Chaucer was the great English writer of his age, and arguably the first truly great English writer period, if we take "Beowulf" as an anonymous piece, as we must. (There are some others in between worth noting, but most will have heard of Chaucer.)

So being arguably the best and most important English poet of the 20th century will help T.S. Eliot. So will his having written about WWI, since the World Wars would be a strong candidate for something we'd study as long as there was a record of it having occurred. So will his having written for America and Britain, thus broadening his base.

Excuse me, but who is T.S Elliot?

And then there's the question of the rise and fall of ideals.

I said earlier that Shaw was on the downswing in the 1980s and 1990s because communism and socialism around the world went into a nosedive. If, say, in 500 years (or earlier) we had a sort of "Socialist/Communist Renaissance" for historical reasons we cannot possibly fathom yet, interest in George Bernard Shaw, with witty repartee on capitalism and women's liberation and the place of the individual in the society and the functionality of people vs. the idle rich...all that could resonate once more, and thus be valued and read and see his popularity skyrocket, the way interest in the Greeks and Romans did in the real Renaissance.

We could even imagine it going the other way where (sadly) the world descended into fascism again, where suddenly Ezra Pound and Martin Heidegger and a whole slew of Antisemitic fascists pr Nazi affiliates climbed back to the top.

And then there's the question of WHO reads. When D.H. Lawrence wrote his books, it was still a more upper-middle class and up thing to do.

Scale ahead 20 years from his death in 1930 to the 1950s, when the working class begins to read in a big boom, the censorship case surrounding "Lady Chattley's Lover" has been decided in his favor, or the 1960s when the Sexual Liberation movement gets going, and suddenly his works featuring working class people and a lot-lot-LOT of sex really resonate and his trajectory's upward.

Jump ahead to the 1970s and 1980s, with Second Wave Feminism, and he gets kneecapped and how by Second Wave Feminists who see him as a sexist pig.

And then there's the present, where he's on the upswing again, because Third Wave Feminism has a different attitude towards sexual liberation, and potentially because the LGBT movement has gained traction and recognition, and Lawrence was writing man-on-man action way back in the 1920s, and so from a Queer Studies standpoint, he could be considered ahead of (and in some way a part of) his time.



A LOT goes into who gets read when...what happens historically, politically, who's allowed to read, what the prevailing theories are, what the popular tastes are...

The 20th century had a boom in literature and art, and was the first century to be able to really preserve it well with film, TV, radio and the Internet, so as long as we don't bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age or die off, and at least the knowledge of how a movie or book preserved digitally is passed on, I think we'll see a lot of artists and authors from the century survive.

The retention of vast amounts of data is a double edged sword. Yes, it could potentially be a treasure trove for academics, but to average people (which is what I took "remembered" in the OP to be referring) it will only serve to water down historical figures and events. Many historical figures and works are ubiquitously known today precisely because so little remains it guarantees most people a familiarized with the same things.

Also, obi, do you seriously think people will be watching Seinfeld two THOUSAND years from now?

@abge: While they might not, I think it is hilarious to consider a class in the far off future trying to analyze the themes and motifs, along with cultural impact of "the show about nothing."

Walt Disney will be remembered so long as the company bearing his name continues to exist- i. e. forever

Oppenheimer may be remembered. Particularly if nuclear weapons see use in the interim.

"Excuse me, but who is T.S Eliot?"

Oh, please don't be trolling me... :)

Thomas Stearns "I am the Smartest Elitist Poetic Snob Ever and Don't You Forget It!" Eliot was...well, the smartest elitist poetic snob ever...and don't you forget it. :p

He was born in Missouri, moved to the East Coast, studied at Harvard and Oxford and in France (hence how he was able to become Mr. Know it All...he could read Latin, Greek, Italian, English, Middle English, French, German, Sanskrit...if it was part of "The Western Tradition," he knew it, and even some outside there, as he references some Hindi in his poems as well) and moved to England, converted to Anglicanism (because he really-really-REALLY wanted to be "more English than the English" in a way), palled around with E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and a lot of other great English writers of his day...

And wrote works in the shadow of BOTH World Wars which were at once huge tributes to the whole Western tradition and a reworking OF that tradition.

For example, he would give epigraphs of his poems in Ancient Greek, quote Dante's "Inferno" with the original Italian, put a spin on Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" in the opening line of his poetry, and then from there reference and twist one trope of the Western tradition after another, everyone from Tiresias from Greek Tragedy to Shakespeare to the myth of the Fisher King to plays on other texts and so on.

For example, the opening lines of "The Waste Land," 1922, the same year as Joyce's "Ulysses"--
"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain."

On the surface, that's an inversion of how we generally see spring--a time for renewal, but a few years after WWI, that's now cruel and dead (for a variety of reasons) and we're left with just "memory and desire" to stir those deadened roots. In addition, as stated above, it's an inversion of CHAUCER'S opening lines from "The Canterbury Tales"--

"Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;"

So where Chaucer depicts the season in the traditional sense, as one of renewal of virtue and life, Eliot twists that, and focuses on the deadened nature of it all, and so how it's cruel that these rains come, to summon up that "memory and desire" of that which is now part of the "waste land" of Western culture which Eliot saw as being devastated in a modernized, mechanized, and now devastated post-WWI world.

The poem itself flows from one speaker and vantage point to the next, not always with a clear transition, and uses references and the internal rhythms of each line to dictate sections and line breaks, rather than the more static and rigid structures used in, say, a sonnet, or a lot of Victorian poetry.

Eliot's poems in general and "The Waste Land" can in one sense be seen as the Western canon at its zenith--even as Eliot writes his work, as he shows and says, the canon has been shattered in a way by the forces which were changing the world, and so now his poetry reflects, as he puts it, "a heap of broken images." Eliot transformed what poetry meant as much as Joyce transformed what a novel could be or say or do, and both men both represented and in their own way signaled the beginning of the fragmentation in the Western canon that's occurred in the last 100 years and which would especially kick into high gear in the 1960s and 1970s.

He won the Nobel Prize, he started Faber and Faber, one of the major publishing companies out there, and of course he has his many huge works--

The Waste Land, which again, is probably the most famous and one of the most cited poems in English of the last century...

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which was arguably his first big "hit," which deals with the decay of old ideals and romances as well, and from that point onward (1915) English poetry really began to embrace what Eliot and other poets were doing in relation to form and content.

Gerontion, which is also fantastic...and sadly contains what is probably Eliot's worst instance of Antisemitism in his poetry, but I'll get to that in a minute.

The Hollow Men, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, Four Quartets, a play called Murder in the Cathedral...all widely read, quoted, and huge in the English language to varying degrees. Then there's his critical work. It wasn't enough for Eliot to just be the most celebrated English poet of the century--he's arguably one of the best essayists of the period as well.

Eliot is unique in his essays in part because, where the 20th century was dominated by essayists who generally started or followed one movement or another, Eliot was both sort of part of one and yet still is read today as his own separate entity. Modernism was his background artistically and ideologically, and he represented a strain of what literary theorists termed "The New Criticism," which he has now essentially outlived because THAT strain of it was 1. somewhat limited and 2. populated by a lot of American Southerners with some rather poor views (to say the least) on race, religion, and gender, and while Eliot has a big strike on him there, he's aged a LOT better than those guys.

His most famous essay is probably "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in which he examines the concept which really preoccupied his whole writing career--the relationship of an author to a tradition or canon...what a tradition is, what it means to be part of a tradition, how and why traditions are separate, what we should say or think about that, how they can be mixed or interact, and where the individual fits into all that. For Eliot, the big thing is servicing a tradition while at the same time adding something new to it, and thereby changing it in a way where it is still recognizable, but at the same time new and revitalized...this is naturally extremely difficult to navigate (how do you create a work that both reaffirms and changes a cultural idea or literary tradition?) but he felt that was what had to be done in a world where everything was changing if tradition was to survive, and how traditions do survive period...and did he ever want traditions to stay alive.

Eliot LOVED tradition...which probably was given away by his absolute nerdiness for referencing things in his work in ways which gave them different connotations from before, or putting different works against one another and letting them "talk" to one another (ex., he loved Shakespeare but actually didn't care for "Hamlet," but still uses Ophelia, Hamlet and Polonius as stand-ins for their characters and what they represent while juxtaposing them with modern day equivalents, or, even more famously, ending "The Waste Land" with "Shantih Shantih Shantih," a repetition of an Eastern--Sanskrit--phrase referring to bliss and healing...after 400+ lines of showing how damaged and maimed the WESTERN tradition was.)

As a result, he felt that good writing cannot be done irrespective of tradition. If he had natural antagonists in the literary canon, it would be the Romantics in general, and writers like William Wordsworth in particular, who both felt and wrote that writing should be like "a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," whereas for Eliot, it's more like a carefully-constructed symphony or opera or painting...Eliot hated that "write whatever your feelings are" approach...for him, your feelings are not just secondary to your thoughts, but your thoughts are in turn shaped by a tradition you were born into (like it or not) and therefore have been shaped by. If you are a child of two or more traditions, you have even more which you need to remember and keep in mind while writing, since ideas in your tradition may be different from those in mine, BUT if you are oblivious of both, and just write what you feel, you'll write something which makes sense to you, maybe, but may not communicate with me, because I don't have the same shared tradition and thus don't speak the same cultural language as you do.

So rather than just riffing, it really was like a carefully-fitted symphony or opera for Eliot...

Which is where the Antisemitism comes in. Eliot LOVED Wagner's operas, and cites him several times in his poetry. For Eliot, Wagner got the same love of tradition he had...which makes sense, as both men really loved both tradition for its own sake as well as the Germanic/Anglo/Northern European legends of yore. What's more, for Wagner, you MUST be in and of his tradition...or else. Wagner was composing decades before Eliot began writing, but his ideas of uber-nationalism were of course really popular in the early 1900s...Eliot was more attracted to the tradition side of things than the nationalistic side--but that wasn't the case with the man who helped him edit "The Waste Land," Ezra Pound. Pound was a big figure in the literary scene at the time, and jump-started a lot of now-legendary literary figures, from Eliot to Hemingway and back again. He also was about as Antisemitic as you could get (that is, as Antisemitic as Wagner) and a HUGE fan of fascism, since it had the uber-nationalism and devotion to tradition he loved. Pound wound up writing speeches for Mussolini during the war, pulling for Hitler, and was captured by the Allies after the war and charged with treason...he would spend most of the rest of his life in various institutions, refusing to be treated by "Jewish-sounding doctors" and ostensibly being an all-around spiteful individual (with KKK connections to boot!)

Eliot's own Antisemitism is a mater of hot debate. That he expresses Antisemitism in his poetry isn't really up for debate, but due to the NATURE of his poetry (again, it's a bunch of disjointed voices, and it's clear some aren't ones Eliot agrees with as, form example, some are blind to tradition, or examples of the modernized individual whom Eliot found lacking) it's up for debate what he thought about Jews, how much or how passionately he held those opinions, when those opinions change (and they do) and so on and so on. Part of the problem is that Jews were a pretty easy target for Modernist writers, because nearly all of them hated the modernization/commercialization of the world...and while D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot were three very different writers with very different ideas and one could argue the three wouldn't have cared for one another too much, ALL still used "jew" (lowercase) as a pejorative adjective in their works...sometimes in the narration, and sometimes in the mouths of characters, again complicating what each men felt.

Eliot himself uses both "jew" and "Jew" in his works, and uses them in different ways, which I feel reveals, in part, how he may have felt. In the poem "Gerontion" he writes:

"My house is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London."

He uses the lowercase "jew" again in another poem, "Portrait of a Lady"--

"The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs."

He also cites Christopher Marlowe's Antisemitic "The Jew of Malta" as the epigraph...which, if you've never read Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice," is commonly seen as the story Shakespeare took inspiration from...and while "Merchant" is hotly debated as being Antisemitic, a plea for tolerance for Jews, or anything in between, even those who view it as Antisemitic generally agree its milder and somehow more tolerant than Marlowe's play.

Then there's "The Waste Land" where he uses the uppercase "Jew"--

"As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you."

Of the five sections of "The Waste Land," this fourth section is by far the shortest (I've actually quoted most if it here for you, whereas the other sections are FAR longer, sometimes hundreds of lines) and here, instead of reinforcing the stereotype of jew = commercial, greedy, having rat-like connotations, etc., Eliot is giving a scene from myth (again) and describing how both Gentiles and Jews are falling prey to the same ills of the world, here being given in that mythic context as a whirlpool.

And as I said before, Eliot was friends with Virginia Woolf, whose husband was Jewish.

So for me, Eliot's Antisemitism is more against "jew" than "Jew"--that is, that he's more against the idea of Jews than actual Jews themselves, whereas Ezra Pound really, REALLY hated the Jews in proper, to the point he was convinced "The Elders of Zion" and Jews running the world was reality, and was fine seeing them exterminated.

If I am to be fair to the other side of this, however, and fully truthful, it isn't as if Eliot particularly "liked" Jews, either, even though the man was generally anti-war, anti-fascism and didn't want to see people killed, let alone something like the Holocaust to occur. But, occur it did...which leads to the final episode here. Eliot at one point gave speeches on tradition and all manner of other topics, and stated that from that vantage point, a large number of Jews wouldn't be something he'd want for England...because, again, he converted to Anglicanism mostly because he felt that was the traditional, cultural heritage of his adopted new country, as well as the Anglican strains in the Northeast of America as well.

If that wasn't contradictory enough, one of his minor works, a play named "The Rock," takes a swipe at Oswald Mosley and fascism of the time...*while* including a line about "anthropoid Jews."

AFTER World War II, and the horrors of the Nazis destroying not just his beloved sense of tradition but all those human lives in both the war and Holocaust, Eliot discontinued those speeches, took back prints of them, and essentially all but recanted that statement. (You can decide for yourself whether he was doing that for PR reasons or whether it was sincere...suffice it to say he never went off like Ezra Pound did, continuing to loathe the Jews and publicly excoriate them.)

There's a famous incident wherein Eliot was attending the reading of Emmanuel Litvinoff, a Jewish writer who had some acclaim but is probably most famous for this particular instance. The poem he read was one in lamentation of the dead of the Holocaust, and blaming those he felt were Antisemites...and he named Eliot. Eliot's fellow writers were outraged at this--another Jew actually got up and said that as a Jew as Jewish as Litvinoff, he felt this was unfair towards Eliot--but all Eliot said on the matter was "It's a good poem."

Make of that what you will.

T.S. Eliot...my favorite poet...after Shakespeare, probably the person I cite more than anyone else...along with the Bard, Dostoevsky, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and George Bernard Shaw, one of my 6 favorite writers of all-time...winner of the Nobel Prize...the most celebrated poet of his time, and the most influential and important English poet of the 20th century...one of the most prominent critics of the century as well, and one of the English language's major essayists in the early-to-mid part of the century...A really, really, REALLY bad reader of his own poetry:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixX32WKN5Y

And enough of a literary force to rank as the greatest poet of his time and century while still winning awards AFTER death...as some of his poetry was used and quoted in the musical "Cats."

"Rhapsody on a Windy Night" in particular lends some of the more memorable lines to what is the most memorable song from that show...which I don't care for overall, BUT, it's a great song, and now pretty much a standard, so, here it is, to end this Obi-Length gush-fest on an author I love...

"Memory." :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TRB-rdGexE

Kant, Wittgenstein, Marx - generally philosophers should do relatively well - the biggest ones anyways

and Socrates...of course.

"Also, obi, do you seriously think people will be watching Seinfeld two THOUSAND years from now?"

Don't make me get a Second Spitter in here, abgemacht! ;)

(But nah...I just had to make a Hitler/Soup Nazi joke. That episode's amazing.)

"Name 5 people off the top of your head who lived in tbe period 101-200 AD."

Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Galen and Ptolemy. Ignatius of Antioch and Plutarch.

Just because you are ignorant doesn't mean everyone is.

to the OP,

Really, doesn't it depend on who is still around? Y'all assume a continuous forward progression of our current civilization. It's more likely that at some point in the next 2000 years there will be some serious turnover.

So if there is some third or fourth iteration of the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian Western civilization, then much that we would have remembered will be. If the Chinese or the Turks or the Peruvians or the Zulu are dominant, then memory/history will be quite different.

Guys remember that world outside the US exists... To OP, Hitler. Universally known in 90% of the world I'd say, and his "feat" will be known as long as there is Germany. Also @dipplayer just because you can recite them doesn't mean that people are ignorant for not knowing them. Mind telling me the differences between Sandy Bridge and Nehalem? Or events that led to the Winter War? Or some other obscure bullshit I know but you don't? You not knowing them doesn't make you ignorant.

No, but Thucy generalized his own ignorance on to the rest of us. I am well aware that there is plenty that I do not know anything about, which other people do. Thucy is too young and arrogant to know this.

lol dipplayer, you overestimate the public hugely if you think any average person knows who any of those people are. I know who they are because I'm a history nerd, but your next server when you go out to eat is unlikely to be able to say anything about any of them. Hate to burst your bubble but not that many people give a shit about ancient history.

And so it will be in 2000 years - but even more so, because there will be an extra 2000 years of history in addition to everything else

And abgemacht is right - our increased records of events, assuming the records survive 2000 years - will only dilute, and add more and more noise. If the Internet and it's descendants exists for 2000 years straight there will be such a huge overload of historical information that your average person will probably only be able to name one to three people per century at most, and since we will be a very old century, I double we will be some kind of exception.

You might want to argue, but this is when the Internet was invented! The future person will probably laugh and say "we haven't used the "Internet" in 1800 years"

Also, people will probably not speak our English language, so it's unlikely people will remember our specific quotes an writings, except for some punchy translations a la Socrates.

These discussions always annoy me because you tell how temporally parochial people really are. Even I am probably being too charitable with what will be remembered in the extreme long term. I annoys me because I think it's a symptom of people's fear of change, and ultimately death. We want to believe that even if we and our personal legacy will be dead and gone by century's end, that our times will live on beyond us. But they won't. Even the greatest kings' names will one day be forgotten and the site of their tombs will be lost, along with Ozymandias who stands in for these anonymous "greats." Given time enough, no one is great - everyone is dead.

"9 History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new. 10 Sometimes people say, “Here is something new!” But actually it is old; nothing is ever truly new. 11 We don’t remember what happened in the past, and in future generations, no one will remember what we are doing now." -Ecclesiastes (author unknown)

Also people won't be able to read things like "yo fam fkn general sherman muthafucka da fuck he playin marchign to the sea bruh wtf"

Draugnar

" I know who they are because I'm a history nerd, but your next server when you go out to eat is unlikely to be able to say anything about any of them. "

But you were talking to us, not a random person.

I feel as though it's probably worthwhile to note that my interpretation of "this generation" isn't done and all out in the world. Millineals are still being pumped out of high school. Our impact on the world exists only in the future. My "joke" was partially meant to highlight that. This generation isn't done, and its most important figures are still largely unknown.

Dipplayer, the public's memory of ancient history in the year 4015 has nothing to do with the average level of historical literacy on a board game Internet forum in 2015.

Fine, I suppose "universally known" should include the hoi polloi. But even a moderately educated person will have heard of Marcus Aurelius or Ptolemy. And you did ask us, here, to name some people.

Edi Birsan will undoubtedly be remembered and worshipped as a God-King.

I think it's important to accept the fact that the hoi polloi is all that actually matters and that any small minority, however well educated, must play second fiddle in substantive discussion, since small minorities are less substantial, even physically, than the common people, who of course, are common - and therefore more important. Not everybody knows who Ptolemy was much less when he lived, nor do they care, and it is a bit pompous to say they ought to know. Who is Ptolemy to them? A dead man, an ancestor, but ultimately, of little practical value to anyone.

I love history more than most, but I will be the first to tell you that I do not try to oversell it's importance in life. It's nice to know our story in full, or in detail at least, but the benefit this provides is largely intellectual, and not of much practical use. It's an irrational love in many ways. History is of course important, but not so important that we can really admonish someone for not knowing or caring about the feats of the Emperor Trajan, anymore than we should admonish someone for not knowing the story of Persephone.

I do not diminish my own and your own love for and value of such things by saying this, I just think it's important to be non-judgmentally democratic about such matters and remember that Vox Populi, Vox Dei.