Okay, let's just sit here and impotently judge and condemn them to satisfy our own sense of moral superiority. I'm sure there will be no shortage of moral condemnation of our current worldview in another 200 years.
One reason to be careful with that whole "Of course we have the right to pronounce sweeping moral judgement on whole eras of history" thing is that we haven't the slightest idea what coming ages will say of us. And what the next crackpot who claims to be more enlightened than you or I will claim that they will, so they are just a little ahead of the curve -- but obviously right, of course! -- in condemning you or me, personally, for whatever moral position we hold obviously just and right.
I think we can only evaluate things on their present merits. One can't go back in time and indict previous cultures for their norms. So, perhaps one day in the future people will look at us and find it repugnant. That may very well be the case, but that's how it has to be. You evaluate by your current standards not by an undetermined future enlightened state (or who knows, things could all go backwards some day just the same.)
2018 isn't that far from ~200k years ago. People have always grabbed pitchforks and it is unreasonable to expect them not to. Only the comforts of civilized living gives us enough room to think about morality and act on it. If these comforts disappeared, it would take humanity less than a generation to go back to a time when people paid money to buy the best seat at a public torture/execution.
Do you think that your current views will be acceptable by the standards of society 20 years from now? 50 years from now? If not, you are basically guaranteeing that on a long enough time scale, you (along with everyone else) will be cancelled.
I could see future societies tearing down statues of anyone who ate meat. Or anyone who opposed the legalization of cannabis. Society's morals drift in unpredictable ways. If we choose to judge everyone (past and present) by our current views, we'll never stop tearing down statues and renaming things.
The only way to prevent this is to recognize that people are products of the societies they grow up in. If either of us were born in the 1700s, we'd probably think slavery was acceptable. In general, people back then weren't evil, they were mistaken. And you don't punish mistakes by ruining someone's life and legacy, especially if the society around them is the reason for those mistakes. The same should be true for us today.
My entire point is that we need to give people from centuries past some leeway and make an effort to view their lives through the lens of their time. And we should view them through our current lens as well but we're not likely to learn anything but that we think our morality is the best morality.
My chain of responses is meant to highlight this tension. That I can personally find something reprehensible in 2020, but taken in it's cultural or historical context, also find it enlightened or inspiring. In the USA we have an increasingly militant progressivism and we close ourselves off to our own history if we can only judge things by one set of standards.
Not only is the past being judged retroactively, but PC judgement is increasing to absurdity. It's the crybullies and control freak lynch mob who want to find the next scapegoat to "cancel" to feel self-righteous, like a damn French Revolution crowd eager to see the gore. Since they're never going to "solve" human biases with nitpicking, they can go home now and have a "Mission Accomplished" party... they only made the world suck more, disappointed millions, and accomplished nothing.
And what's acceptable changes over time. I have no doubt that 100 years from now they'll look back and think many things that we feel are acceptable are immoral and shameful.
As uncomfortable as it is, this is all true. I'm not saying that means we need to 'cancel Jefferson' but maybe we should take notice of the ways in which standards of acceptability have changed throughout the ages. These changes in morals continue, one has to wonder what we do today that will be seen as barbaric in 100 years
I agree that it isn't the same motivation but we're on trend to seeing a similar result. If we do get to that extreme then by that time, we'll have a new moral system which won't allow these types of conversations, in the same way certain extremist sects of christianity didn't allow dissidents to live. However, the form of christianity that we have now simply hurts peoples feelings. Hardly cause for such outrage. Though today hurting someones feelings is the equivalent of violence and there is no way to be forgiven except a life of apologizing and groveling. Exciting time to be alive.
Completely agree but don't think that changes the likelihood of future generations looking back shamefully. They'll look back just as we do and say "at least we don't do that anymore". They'll be hypocrites, but it doesn't mean they'll be wrong about us.
Oh don't be such a pessimist. Two thousand years ago, a dude with his hands nailed to a wooden cross was just a routine thing people would walk by on the street. Hangin' people from cranes was routine just a couple years ago in Iran; throwing them off buildings was normal in a big part of Syria. Indonesia just banned unmarried sex. A fucking internet-connected sex toy is not on God's list of shit the human race should be punished for. Most of what it should be punished for is the ignorant shit done by ignorant people in God's name and the name of "morality".
I think if anything, the talk about moral decline can be ignored completely. It seems people have been complaining about moral decline since earliest written records.
This is just heartbreaking. If you're inclined to take a dim view of human progress, think about where we started. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice, and all that.
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