The Wrong Side of History

[rowyn]

History is full of things that are abominations in modern Western society but which were not only tolerated but seen as outright positive things in prior eras (and which continue to be treated as such in some parts of the world. Eg:

* slavery
* treatment of women as property
* racism
* sexism
* serfdom
* indentured servitude
* colonialism in the name of "civilizing the savages"
* criminalization of miscegenation

Etc.

These are things that people pretty much don't argue in favor of in modern America. Granted, there are enormous debates over how much discrimination remains based on gender or race. But very few people will argue that discrimination on those grounds is good. In other areas (like sexual orientation or discrimination against those who are not cisgendered), the debate is more vehement. The trend line is towards acceptance but we're not there yet.

Sometimes I wonder what's next. In two or three hundred years, what will humanity be looking back on and saying "How could those 21st century Americans commonly accept something so awful, so abominable, as that"? Not something that we're really debating right now, but something that most people don't even think about. Something that's just the background of our lives, just the way things are and always have been.

Some of my candidates:

* Animal rights: maybe in 2310 "pet ownership" will seem as cruel and inhuman as "slave ownership" today.
* Employment: "employee" will be considered a step up from "indentured servant" -- "It's not as bad as slavery, of course, but still wrong".
* Children's rights: all current forms of disciplining children will be regarded as child abuse.

These aren't things that I actually think are horrible, mind you. I'm just trying to imagine what things I could be terribly wrong about, just as I consider many things people in 1710 took for granted as "part of the natural order" to be terribly wrong. And of course, there are fringe groups on these issues already: PETA, Communists, "unparenting" in its more radical forms.

What do you think that you might be wrong about?

Comments

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

Here's some wild-ass guesses for what will be unacceptable in 2310.

Garbage dumps. ("What do you mean, the wrapping wasn't edible?")
Multiple languages. ("We have always spoken Common.")
Genetic defects. (Note: This one I'm less sure of than the previous two.)

[rowyn]

*giggles at One Language*: "And people actually struggled to *stop* languages from being destroyed? And clung to their own native language instead of adopting Common? Why would they do something so destructive to human understanding as maintain these arbitrary roadblocks to communication?"

[hotspurre.livejournal.com]

It is a great question. Both of our suggestions are good ones. If I had to guess, its our culture of consumption that might be looked upon as wrong. We waste *so* much. That kind of ties back to Chipun's first suggestion, but I'm thinking on a much larger scale.

But this is just a guess. If we discover other resources, it could always swing the opposite way, but I've always thought an economy that is based on buying new things has been pretty weird...

[rowyn]

Planned obsolescence is awfully creepy, too. :/

One thing about your list

[tahkhleet.livejournal.com]

Everything on it is about a normative moral idea that is one (or both) of:
( a ) the powerful have power in a given arena for good reasons, and are using it essentially (or totally) correctly
( b ) those with less power in an arena are relatively deprived of it for a good reason. They should be gracefully resigned to the justice of the systemic and pervasive limits on their power.

So seeing stuff that belong on this list?
I'd say whatever word we use for the way the bulk of academic feminism is practiced. Opting to make women (or a subcategory of women) a power privileged class is going to be seen one day for the hypocrisy it is (however well meaning). I don't care what the theory of feminism is, the way the bulk of the academics practice it boils down to this attempt to create privilege. And I was one of them, so I know :) This doesn't in any way lessen the horror of how many women are treated or the obscenity of the beliefs they're taught. It's just this isn't the cure. Not as it's being spread in the actual world outside our window, anyway.

On the other hand, I think one day we will also have a word for a type of subtler deprivation/power enhancement that most people today don't even recognize as a problem. ( Much less a serious one.) Namely, the type that tells people that a person with "moral authority" can demand _for essentially arbitrary reasons_ that someone change their behaviour. The authority possessor has some spurious rationale that this change is for some indispensable key outcome. But the litmus of this type of imbalance is there is no outcome they are desiring that can only be exclusively gained by the conformity demanded.

To put that kind of awkward generalization into practical example:
Telling a woman because she's female, she should be sociable, emotionally expressive, and concerned with appearances. This are all traits that could be separated from the outright demands of sexism that she accept less pay, being dragooned into being a nurturer, being a sexual object on call for men (there is a new "appearance standard" the makes a credible stab at saying it's not about sexual enticement) etc. This is the less traumatic but still serious deeper layer of what is called sexism (currently) which I think is deeply wrong. And one day I hope it will be recognized as wrong.

Or another example, parents of an upper middle class insisting their offspring must be oriented on maximized lifetime earnings "for their own good". The person's own welfare can be maximized by many paths. Insisting that the only way this can happen is by a preset plan...it's just extremely narrow minded and inflexible. It seems to me most parents force this sort of things on their children because they don't really grasp their child are separate people with unique traits, needs, strengths and weaknesses.

A family counseling psychiatrist I talked to said the majority of parents really don't understand this and can't even grasp the point once it is pointed out. (That is, except by repeatedly having practical demonstration of the fact their child has differences by very vivid repeated examples.) (For a somewhat overdone example, if they have a very socially withdrawn child whom they're trying to turn into a good networking extrovert. They will maybe see their child isn't sociable and this is not necessarily bad for them if the kid goes and wins an award for $100K for some fantastic mathematical proof. Once the kid points out that they live and breathe higher math which they found the time to focus on because they refused to spend energy socializing save when coerced.)

I figure the animal rights thing will hit its stride once we do more work on understanding non verbal communications. We've made some startling discoveries the last thirty years: prairie dogs have shockingly detailed descriptions of relevant information (incoming predators) which we wouldn't intuitively expect simple barks articulated by such a tiny brain could consistently form and recognize. There is so much more going on in nonhuman animal brains than we used to recognize. And in hindsight, I think our ignorance of this fact is going to look partly like we didn't want to listen.

Re: One thing about your list

[rowyn]

I can definitely see "telling people to conform" becoming an evil; it's already trending towards "a bad thing".

Re: One thing about your list

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

It seems to me most parents force this sort of things on their children because they don't really grasp their child are separate people with unique traits, needs, strengths and weaknesses.

With all due respect, I want to amend your statement.

I think that most people don't really grasp that other people are separate identities with unique traits, needs, strengths, and weaknesses.

Both liberals and conservatives forget this fact with their solutions for problems.

continued

[tahkhleet.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't necessarily say all forms of child discipline will be prohibited. But I really do think that there will one day be a parenting license. Especially as we learn the consequences of telling a child consistently that their perspective on the world is irrelevant...yet also the consequences of telling them there are no boundaries, if we overreact and flee from the act of discipline for fear of harm. This is going to take a long time to have good solid information to persuade even the least intellectual people. So that's a far future change. I do think we will eventually see there is a type of implicit contract between parents and children that will be given legal recognition and be enforceable on both parties though.

But this will only happen after we either have renewal of the current society or embark on the early stages of a new society, because it will take a lot of work. People will only find the energy to make such extensive efforts if there is some mythopoetic narrative making them feel the urgency of the problem and the dire necessity of taking action. We're nowhere near having that yet.

Re: continued

[rowyn]

I dunno, I kinda feel like the only thing worse than letting just anyone have kids would be someone else deciding who can't. O.o Which doesn't mean it won't happen.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

* Property. "What a horrible kludge! I guess it kind of sounds reasonable if you don't have proper logistics software, but it never worked very well."

* Privacy. It's comforting when you're afraid of the government, but eventually it's going to be impractical to maintain even from other private citizens. Information wants to be free.

* Criminal law. Just... doesn't... work. Someday someone will invent something that does work to reform criminals, and locking people up just to get rid of them will be seen as horrific torture.

* Animal Rights. I think eventually they'll nail down the difference enough for it to actually sink into the popular conscience and people will quit freakishly anthropomorphizing animals and acting as if they were people who can't talk. Then people will uplift animals just across the line, and we'll get to rehash slavery -- but EVENTUALLY!

* The idea that it's 'immoral' to investigate certain issues. This NEVER WORKS.

Property?

[kelloggs2066.livejournal.com]

No, I'm afraid I can't see that one.

Human beings all have aquisitive instincts to some extent or other. People collect things: (even if they're only computer files, mp3s, or information.) If they didn't, there wouldn't be horders.

Gene Roddenberry suggested that in the future, there would be no money. A lot of people seem to have the idea that the emotion of greed comes from money, and if there were no money, there would be no greed.

Human instincts don't work that way. People want things that they think will give them an advantage. That advantage could be for survival, or social status. People collect stuff they want. What they want is determined by, either what they want, or what they think will give them an advantage. Bottle tops, baseball cards, MP3s, or Paintings by Picasso.

You won't do away with Property, and Property rights, unless you come up with something like a flawless, free Star Trek style Replicator (which will fundamentally change the nature of human society) or you change human nature.
I don't see any evidence of such a fundamental change in human nature since Egypt put up the pyramids.

I'm afraid, if you change property rights, or humanity, humanity won't be recognizable to people walking around today.

[rowyn]

*giggles at property* Yeah, I can see that. Hee!

I think privacy might well go away but I dunno if it'll ever be considered evil to have had it at one time. Maybe!

Jail ... yeah, that could happen. O_O

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

I'm curious:

In three hundred years, how do you see society handle someone who thinks:

I like shiny. That fellow have shiny. I smash that fellow and take shiny!

I hesitate to mention it

[kelloggs2066.livejournal.com]

Most of what you list above are not very contraversial, in that, (with the exception of animal rights) few people are willing to kill and die for it.

If you want one that's likely to really provide a wedge between people on both sides of the issue, I give you Abortion.

Consider: In ancient times, the proper way of dealing with unwanted children was "exposure". Leave the kid on a mountainside to die. This was acceptable because infants were not seen as having recieved their souls until they were of a certain age. (This age being determined by when they were most likely to reach adulthood. In some estimates, as late as being 5 years of age.)

At that point, exposure would be more termed as child abuse, and a crime.

In our current society, the equivalent of "ensoulment" is being born alive.
But, medical advances are being made as we go along. Because of incubators, Premature babies who survive their early births today would have died only a few decades ago. As medical science advances, we push back the date at which survivability becomes possible further and further. That pushes back the date when an abortion is a "choice" instead of a "child."

How far back could it be pushed theoretically?

Imagine the development of more advanced incubators: One that could develop a fetus to a survivable stage from a fertilized embreyo. (Or even farther, from an egg and a sperm cell?)

At some point, the date when a fetus can survive, will be considered the point at which it becomes "human".

If technology reaches that point, abortion becomes child abuse.

Yes, I know. This is a Very Contraversial Point I'm bringing up. That's why I hesitate to mention it. But, I think there are a lot more people who are willing to fight to say that humanity begins at conception than there are people willing to fight to say that animals being kept as pets is an inhumane crime.

Re: I hesitate to mention it

[rowyn]

Well, the approach I was trying for was "what things are we doing right now that hardly anyone right now would say was evil, but which some hypothetical far-future human society might say was, in fact, unbelievably evil".

A substantial number of Americans *right now* think that abortion is unequivocally evil. A substantial number also think that access to abortion is a human right. Having History rule one way or the other on the subject isn't going to surprise a person of today. Having History decide that housecats are entitled to all the legal rights and protections of humans would probably surprise most PETA members. :D. And that's what I was trying to think about -- things I take for granted, like owning a cat, or putting a child in timeout, or throwing out an old mop, that aren't controversial now but might be the battleground for 22nd century civil rights. Or whatever.

Abortion

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

You've got a very controversial point, but you handle it extremely well.

Here's the problem...

Abortion has been an issue for over 2,500 years -- it goes back further than the Hippocratic Oath. I don't see that issue as likely to disappear in just the next 300 years.

[kelloggs2066.livejournal.com]

Okay, I misinterpreted the question.

When you bring up Slavery, I think of the people (my own ancestors) who were abolitionists long before the Civil War.

For the issues you list, I think that most people viewed them as necessary evils for the purpose of maintaining the society they lived in. Thus, something must be recognizable as regrettable before society has the luxury of regarding it as evil.

Abortion is the only real issue I can think of where we're close to that point technologically.

As for animal rights:
Before animal rights becomes an affordable luxury for our society, you're going to have to solve the problem of feeding people meat.

As for pets: Well, certain of our animals will not survive without human assistance. Sheep, cattle, chickens, won't survive in the wild. If you turn loose the dogs, cats and horses, they will turn feral, and be a danger to people.

Also, Consider evolution of dogs. Dogs have been human companions for over 100,000 years. That pre-dates Homo Sapiens Sapiens being Homo Sapiens Sapiens. We affected their evolution, and they have affected ours. We survive better with them, and they survive better with us. It's a symbiosis that would be cruel to break up. To turn dogs out into the world without us would (in my opinion) be cruel to their nature as well as ours.

(On the other hand, cats, seem to go feral and survive and thrive easily.)

But dogs... Apparently, even their brain structure and communication is altered in ways we hardly realize that makes them companion animals. They use techniques to communicate with humans that don't work with other dogs.

To turn human society away from things like running farms and keeping pets will be an extremely difficult undertaking. I don't know if society is going to have the luxury to do that in the next few hundred or thousand years.

[rowyn]

Well, maybe 300 years ago slavery was regarded as a necessary evil by a sizable number of people. But I've never gotten the impression that concepts like "a woman's place is in the home" were regarded as a necessary evil due only to the constraints of technology. Stuff like that was the Natural Order and the Way Things Ought to Be.

I'm not going to argue that animals ought to have all the rights of humans because yes, of course I think that's silly.

But then again, lots of people a thousand years ago thought that it was silly to argue women should have all the rights of men. c.c

Some more ideas:

[kelloggs2066.livejournal.com]

How about regarding these as immoral (based on lessons from the past)

- Racial Quotas
- Gun Control
- Censorship
- Welfare (as it is practiced now)
- Lawsuits (as they are practiced now)
- Class Warfare
- Progressive Income Tax Levels

Re: Some more ideas:

[rowyn]

Lawsuits! One can only hope they are as dead as slavery in a few hundred years. x.x

Re: Some more ideas:

[kelloggs2066.livejournal.com]

Sorry, you found a good topic, and I keep thinking about it, so here's another one:

- The War Between The Sexes

It brought about a good deal of progress, but now that we *are* equal, it's continuation is breeding injustice and discontent.

'Nother Thought

[kelloggs2066.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it's a good idea to think of issues that people at the time thought of as moral issues to crusade their way though that history has judged against them:

- Prohibition laws on Alcohol
(Lots of folks thought that was the next progressive cause after Slavery was struck down.)

- Prohibition on Drugs (it hasn't failed yet, but it's by no means a sure thing one way or the other.)

- Prohibition on Pornography (I remember lots of folks in the 1980's talking about banning porn.)

Keep these in the back of your mind when you're thinking about what moral issues might succeed and those that might not.

Re: 'Nother Thought

[rowyn]

The moral causes that tend to succeed seem (from my perspective) to be those that are about expanding freedom-to (vote, work, marry, speak, assemble, etc.) The ones that seem to fail are freedom-from (pornography, drugs, alcohol). Prohibition on drugs isn't *quite* the massive failure that alcohol was, but it's definitely full of fail.

[sebkha.livejournal.com]

I'm a little surprised nobody has suggested religion yet.

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

Religion has been happening for over 4,000 years.

It's not going to disappear in 300 years.

(Although I absolutely promise that it will change. Heck, religion has changed dramatically in the last 10 years.)

[elusivetiger.livejournal.com]

I think a few.

1) Tribalism in general. We always seem to order the universe of other human beings into "us - like me" and "them - not like me". It will always be something, until we unite and overcome our basic sense of/need for tribe. Then perhaps it'll be the aliens who are "them", and we'll painfully move through that tribal cycle.

2) Agism - more of a cultural thing, but just another "us" and "them".

3) Ugly/pretty - I think we all have deep-rooted associations with pretty/good and ugly/bad. Even when we're conscious of them they're hard to overcome. We trust the professional-looking, smooth-talking and straight more than the stammering, halting and bent. I think a lot of this is an association of beauty with health, yet even that line no longer holds in an era of physical manipulation of the body. What happens when even the trustworthy, sincere sparkle of an eye can be faked with surgery/optics/God knows how?

[rowyn]

New aesthetics for the human form -- radically new, as opposed to preferring a certain weight range or body type -- are pretty likely in the distant future, true. It'll be interesting to see how that affects our associations with each other. Hmm.