Wife-beating and slavery were once acceptable: How will the future judge us?

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10276/1091912-109.stm?cmpid=newspanel

by edw519 • 16 years ago

87 203 16 years ago

imr2• 16 years ago

These are things that should change, however future generations will only judge us on the ones that progressive politicians are able to legislate away. The rest will be just as normal for future generations.

The good money is on environmental change. There are already tax incentives and other programs for that. How society treats both the young (education) and old (retirement and end of life decisions) will never change.

sigzero• 16 years ago

Except slavery was not legislated away by progressive politicians. Unless you are using "progressive" in an unusual way.

badkungfu2• 16 years ago

If "progressive" is a relative term generally taken to mean "gradually advancing in extent" or "favoring or promoting reform". It seems perfectly reasonable to call the extension of freedom to black people a progressive political action for the 1860s. This is in contrast with a "conservative" action of resisting change.

Lincoln was a Republican who favored a policy that was progressive in its time. Progressive Republicans are now an extremely endangered species.

parallax7d2• 16 years ago

I doubt how we treat the young and the elderly will stop changing. Just look at child labor laws and social security, medicade/care in the US for one example of radical change.

imr2• 16 years ago

The major changes you mention are from 40+ years ago. Social security is only played with when there is a funding problem on the horizon. I don't see what is changing for the better.

reasonattlm• 16 years ago

That we were a culture that had it within our power to stop aging and age-related death, and chose to bury our heads in the sand and suffer and die instead. Ignorant suicidal barbarians, they'll call us.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/09/the-scientific-de...

carbocation2• 16 years ago

We don't blame the past for not discovering penicillin until the 19th-20th Century (there is debate on the exact date). The future won't blame us for not discovering {as-yet-undiscovered amazing thing} yet, either.

ivank• 16 years ago

Many of these amazing things are around in embryonic form, but few people choose to invest any money or time in them. The future can certainly blame us for that.

NickPollard• 16 years ago

I (and many others) blame close-mindedness for holding back Scientific Progress and the fruits of the Enlightenment. Would Penicillin have been discovered earlier if people hadn't been so keen to label as 'heresy' what was just new, potentially valid hypotheses about the universe?

CWuestefeld6• 16 years ago

...implying that we'll discover a moral necessity to provide health care to others. This is of a category with the OP's comments about the elderly.

Pretty much all the other comments I've seen reference negative liberty, meaning that it regards our freedom from something, e.g., freedom from censorship.

However, you're talking about positive liberty, which is a fundamentally different thing: it posits that society owes us something.

The arguments for negative liberty are generally easier to make because they only force people to leave you alone.

The argument for positive liberty are much more difficult, because they force an obligation upon everyone. This suffers from slippery-slope problems, and clearly breaks down at the margins. Since healthcare (to take your example) requires the expenditure of resources, we must first determine to what level we are obligated (which is completely arbitrary, as far as I can see). And when resources are limited, it requires that we forsake that moral obligation (in other words, it may place us into a situation for which all possible actions are immoral).

badkungfu2• 16 years ago

It all comes down to phrasing doesn't it? Maybe the future will phrase the problem differently than we do.

* Freedom from being beaten by one's husband vs the right to feel secure in one's own home.

* Freedom from slavery vs the right to live and work according to your own dictates.

* Freedom from censorship vs the right to say whatever you want.

* Freedom from bankruptcy or death when illness strikes vs the right to realistically affordable health care.

This will sound snarkier than I intend, but there was a time when some Southern farmers thought that freedom for black people was a problem "at the margins" as it required increased expenditure to maintain their farms. It caused a breakdown in the entire economic model of the South- how does that impact the moral calculus as we look back?

twymer• 16 years ago

Personally, my bet would be that the extreme amount of effort we put in to promoting diversity in educational institutes and the work place will be something people eventually can't imagine being necessary.

Hopefully.

Edit: I guess I wasn't explicit enough as people took this the wrong way.. What I meant is that diversity will "just happen." I of course realize that it is a very important thing and that our efforts certainly are a good thing.

lwhi4• 16 years ago

Seriously .. WTF? (You don't believe that diversity will be seen as something that's worthwhile, and you're hoping for this conclusion?)

Or, perhaps I've misread what you're trying to say?

gxti2• 16 years ago

Apologies for downvoting you, I did so based on your original post of just "Seriously .. WTF?". I don't see his post as being WTF-worthy even though I disagree with it, nor do I condone any such posts since they add nothing of value to the discussion.

I interpreted his/her post as not against diversity, but against "diversification" programs like affirmative action as opposed to letting social entropy run its course. I agree with the sentiment somewhat but I don't think it meets the criteria for looking back and asking "what was society thinking?".

almost• 16 years ago

I believe what he was saying that he hopes it won't be needed in the future. That is he hopes that we will have diversity by default. That doesn't sound like such a bad thing :)

gxti2• 16 years ago

You're right that the pressure to actively promote diversity will fade as diversity increases, however I don't really see this as something we'll look back on and say "what were we thinking?"

CWuestefeld6• 16 years ago

The kind of diversity being fostered today (at least in education) is really nothing more than racism.

The diversity system today consists of giving preference to those with dark skin, while handicapping asians. But how much diversity are we really getting, when the only criteria is race?

If we were really interested in getting a diverse mixture, we'd be seeking all kinds of dimensions:

  * city people / country people; 
  * protestant / catholic / jewish / muslim / buddhist / hindu / agnostic / atheist; 
  * rich / poor; 
  * lovers of the visual arts / bookworms
  * introverts / extroverts
  * organized / chaotic
  * vegans / carnivores

And so on. As far as I can determine, the race-based diversity really aids nothing, but does serve to preserve enmity between the protected and handicapped races. If we want diversity, we need to look deeper than the skin.

jpablo2• 16 years ago

I was trying to think of things the future can look down on us for, but I can only come up with:

* Polluting the environment.

* Allowing people to day of easily curable diseases.

Seems like thinking outside of our own times is really hard.

lwhi4• 16 years ago

Do you really think humanity isn't doing anything else wrong?

jpablo2• 16 years ago

I honestly think we are doing a lot of wrong things. I argue they are hard to see for us since this is what is 'normal' for us right now.

thrdOriginal• 16 years ago

* Gay marriage (lack of)

* Drug prohibition

...always immediately jump out at me; I'm sure there are many, many others.

moxiemk1• 16 years ago

Interestingly, the article didn't mention the first, and barely touched the second.

Their hypothesis on when something is surely to be condemned in the future requires universal lack of moral defensibility. Right now, the detractors on both of these issues are still claiming they are speaking from morality, so the article didn't list them.

That said, I agree with you. The article, however, implies that these issues are not yet inevitably going to be looked down on in the future. (whew, run on sentence much?)

mingdingo2• 16 years ago

Factory farming

noverloop• 16 years ago

polluters

andreyf• 16 years ago

Slavery is still acceptable, as long as it's out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Or do you expect Dell to have ensured fair wages and working conditions for every person involved in the resource extraction and manufacture of the machine on the desk in front of me?

nova2• 16 years ago

Alimony too.

DavidSJ7• 16 years ago

Dell offers an opportunity to these employees which, while lousy by Western standards, is better, in their judgment, than the alternatives available to them. That's why they have voluntarily accepted the position. Dell has made their lives better, not worse.

Slaves didn't agree to be slaves.

krschultz• 16 years ago

There are a bunch more to think about:

War? Terrorism? Torture? Are we to believe that for the rest of eternity we will have these 3 things?

Discriminating against gays? abortion (either that we allowed it at all, or that people fought against it, I don't even know which will prevail), income inequality, immigration laws.

jbrun• 16 years ago

Meat consumption - Vegetarianism.

"Slave" Labour - there are still 26 million slaves in the world.

Some prison systems, notably the U.S.

yummyfajitas2• 16 years ago

"Slave" Labour - there are still 26 million slaves in the world.

Not just those 26 million, but there are far more if you count people who engage in temporary forced labor [1]. Many countries temporarily enslave their citizens, including Cuba, Denmark, Finland, Iran, North Korea and Israel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription#Countries_with_and...

Some prominent US politicians have proposed the US should bring back the practice (we used to do this):

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dc/2010/07/rangel-still-run...

http://www.prisonplanet.com/obama-website-scrubs-mandatory-c...

[1] This differs from slavery, in the sense that these people cannot be bought/sold and the duration is limited.

Avshalom• 16 years ago

It differs from slavery, in the sense that these people are still legally people.

That's not some trivial fucking difference.

philwelch9• 16 years ago

Being compelled to do something isn't slavery if you're being compelled to perform your social duty. That's the point of government--you have a negative duty to not do certain things (kill other members of your society or steal things from them), but historically most cultures have also recognized a positive duty to do certain things (pay taxes, defend your society against its enemies). It's an unpopular argument now, and I don't necessarily buy it, but it's still around--implicitly, at least, in every country's naturalization system, where new citizens explicitly accept the responsibilities of citizenship.

(In practice, of course, conscription has regularly been used to raise armies for offensive wars against imaginary threats. That's a betrayal of the government's duty to its people. In practice, this makes conscription a very dangerous tool to leave available. However, a degenerate case does not prove the general case--in terms of moral principles, just because it is immoral to use conscription to attack an innocent neighbor does not mean it is immoral to use conscription to defend against an aggressive enemy.)

pchristensen• 16 years ago

http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_bales_how_to_combat_modern_sl...

I dare you to watch that talk and not cry.

njharman• 16 years ago

Greed. Which arguably is the reason the other ills (except hatin on old people) listed in the article exist. But, honestly, believing humans will evolve beyond greed in the future is far-fetched.

CWuestefeld6• 16 years ago

I'd like to turn that on its head. I'd like to see an end to the demagoguery of greed.

In my perfect world, people understand that when someone makes money, it's because he's providing something of value to society. And the more money he makes, the more value he's delivering. The way to encourage people to work hardest for society is through the incentive of potential riches.

The only sin begotten by greed is the use of force and its little brother, fraud. So long people openly enter into agreements that they both believe to be beneficial to themselves, it's no one else's business.

mmorris2• 16 years ago

... when someone makes money, it's because he's providing something of value to society. And the more money he makes, the more value he's delivering.

I agree that people should receive reward in proportion to the value they create, but I don't believe that people who make more money are always delivering more value. The main problem with that idea is the difficulty in determining how much value a single individual actually generates.

There are plenty of terrible CEOs who destroy the value of the companies they manage, yet still receive huge salaries and bonus packages, and there are plenty of great teachers/engineers/others lower on the totem pole who earn a relative pittance. Is this because of the value they've created, or due to the CEO's direct proximity to value creation, an ability to convince others of their importance, and a relatively small supply side? I'd say looking at the ridiculous increases in the CEO-worker earning gap over the last few decades it has been warped by factors other than deservedness.

It may be true that there is a correlation between value created and income, but I think there are too many other factors at play to say that it is a general rule.

tomerico• 16 years ago

Hopefully:

* War

* Garbage

* Pollution

* Taking your shoes off in airports :)

davidw• 16 years ago

> * Taking your shoes off in airports :)

As someone who is not at all fond of flying, hopefully they'll judge the whole idea of tin cans hurtling through the sky, powered by highly flammable chemicals as being a bit primitive.

die_sekte2• 16 years ago

Looking at current research I would think that in the future plastic cans will hurtle across the sky, powered by more flammable but biodegradable chemicals. ;)

I think airplanes are here to stay for some time. There are few alternatives, one of them high speed rail, which has its own problems.

DavidSJ7• 16 years ago

Airplanes are far safer, per mile, than buses or trains (about 10x less likely to die), never mind cars (60x).

Edit: corrected numbers.

KoZeN• 16 years ago

Taking your shoes off in airports :)

This comic comes to mind every single time I go through airport security with my laptop. http://xkcd.com/651/

jacquesm4• 16 years ago

Possibly the future will judge us by the irreparable damage done to the environment and our ecosystem and for all the species that we allowed to die out that they'll never get a chance to see, let alone conserve.

Possibly they will remember us as the ones that killed off the oceans but in that case there might not be anybody there to remember us at all.

Hopefully they'll remember us as the generation that got off their asses and decided to do something, that stopped the damage and the wars before it was too late and that was the first to expand beyond the Earth to avoid having all our eggs in that one basket.

I'm bullish on the future, now let's make it happen somehow.

limist• 16 years ago

This is philosophy made relevant; there's no evaluation like self-evaluation.

anatoly• 16 years ago

Recorded music. The most bewildering thing about us to our descendants 80 years from now would be that millions of people routinely walked around with headphones, tuned to radio stations, or walked around public spaces, listening to exactly the same music over and over again.

27182818284• 16 years ago

Travelling with music is not new, it is just much easier. Today you don't have to be a king to make it happen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Music_(Handel)

trafficlight• 16 years ago

I don't see how this will change. 80 years ago, people were listening to the exact same songs over and over again. They only difference is that their players weren't portable.

InfinityX0• 16 years ago

This deserves another Paul Graham essay reference: "What You Can't Say". Graham details how each period of history has something different that we look back at and think of as horrible. He also uncovers some patterns between them.

Some excerpts:

"In our own time, different societies have wildly varying ideas of what’s ok and what isn’t. So you can try diffing other cultures’ ideas against ours as well. / In one culture x is ok, and in another it’s considered shocking. My hypothesis is that the side that’s shocked is most likely to be the mistaken one."

"To launch a taboo, a group has to be posed halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn’t need taboos to protect it. It’s not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo."

"Whatever the reason, there seems a clear correlation between intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas. This isn’t just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. Conventions also have less hold over them to start with. You can see that in the way they dress."

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Cushman• 16 years ago

What makes us think that future generations won't be disgusted by our wife-beating and slavery?

enko• 16 years ago

Terribly!

Here's some for starters:

- our total misunderstanding of, and gross inflation of, risk, leading amongst countless other things to the total demise of intergenerational friendship and or knowledge transfer for fear of mostly figmented "predators"

- our laughable superstitions about supernatural gods and demons which still manage to dominate our politics

- our inability to use rationality, statistics and outcomes-based thinking to make decisions, instead resorting to emotion and worst case thinking, to disastrous effect

- our idiotic ostrich-like "war on some drugs"

- our barbaric indifference to the suffering of others

- our continuing inability to distinguish between race and culture

Actually, typing that I realise how many of them are really due to the inability to estimate risk.

teaspoon• 16 years ago

If these problems are rooted in our innate inability to estimate risk, then are they really likely to disappear in the future?

lhnz2• 16 years ago

You think it's innate?

lincolnq• 16 years ago

We'll have computers which will increasingly replace humans in risk estimation. People will just do what the computer tells them to do.

brudgers• 16 years ago

The use of violence as an economic and political tool - due to changes in communications, the tide is already turning.

maxklein• 16 years ago

I believe in the future it will seem ridiculous that people from many countries are prevented from traveling to some other richer countries, while the people from the rich countries can freely move about as they please.

jacquesm4• 16 years ago

That's a pet peeve of mine and it really gets me every time I'm confronted with it.

The sooner the world will have no borders the better.

pdx3• 16 years ago

> The sooner the world will have no borders the better.

I think you should really think that over. A world with no borders is a world with one government.

Currently, if your government becomes something you can't tolerate, you can usually move to another country, or at least dream of moving. With a single, world government, your only option is revolution, which I believe is rapidly becoming almost impossible and certainly would be against the might and resources of a world government.

Are you really willing to resign your children, grandchildren, and humanity in general to some unknown world government of the future? Are you really so trusting?

Even if you don't believe that under such a system, human rights would erode at an alarming rate, you should at least shun it for the very reason that there is no diversity that will save you in case of unforeseen events. You want the world to be a field of wheat, all of a single strain. You would never advocate such a plan with actual wheat, since you know that diversity is a form of insurance.

loewenskind14• 16 years ago

While I too would like to see the borders opened up a bit, there does have to be some control. If you just let everyone do whatever they want you end up with London: an endless massive sprawl that produces and consumes the majority of resources in England. It would have been much better to control the flow of immigration a bit better and have more big cities than one insanely large one and wouldn't make most of the country look like free loaders on financial topology charts.

cynicalkane3• 16 years ago

Are you proposing that the US should open the floodgates to whoever wants to come over here? I'm not anti-immigration by any means, but letting everyone in all at once seems like a clearly bad idea.

Retric2• 16 years ago

Post globalization the ratio of poor to rich countries will be such that people will only understand your argument on the intellectual level.

fleitz• 16 years ago

It's a great idea, it will quickly eliminate most entitlement programs as people start to worry about "immigrants" receiving benefits.

bluesnowmonkey• 16 years ago

But it's not clear. What would go wrong?

You can move about very freely in the US. If you live in Florida, you can quit your job and move to Alaska today. No notice, no paperwork at all. You just go live there. And this system works fine in practice.

But if you decide to stop along the way and live in Canada, well suddenly it's an international incident. You have to apply in advance -- pay fees and fill out forms. They will physically examine your body. Committees you never meet will look into the most private details of your life and evaluate whether you are worthy to move to Canada. It will take a long time and you might be denied.

Why is it dangerous to let people cross imaginary lines? People don't suddenly become vile and dangerous at 49° N.

run4yourlives8• 16 years ago

There seems to be a common belief, even among the educated, that the security of nations is somehow completely unrelated to the security of the individual.

In reality, one is the macro; the other, micro. They are solutions to the exact same problem at a different scale.

The same way that you lock your door, we collectively close a border. The same way that we call the cops on the drug house, we bomb << entity >> .

So, to re-phrase your future view a little: If you foresee us being able to dispel the notion of door locks in favour of trusting our fellow humans completely, you can imagine your border free world.

I am a little more pessimistic, to be honest.

epochwolf• 16 years ago

I can't agree with this enough.

Granted the comparison of countries with drug houses is a little simplistic. :)

anigbrowl5• 16 years ago

The problem with this analogy is that while it's reasonable to think of oneself as the sole authority over one's own home, that concept does not scale in any meaningful way to the size of a country, unless the governing power is vested in a monarchy.

A great many political theses are advanced from all over the political spectrum in the format of 'You wouldn't tolerate X - so why does the government? We the people demand an end to X!' However, 'we the people', when taken as a whole, have a demonstrable tendency to disagree amongst ourselves, and almost never act in concert. There are all sorts of thing which we should find surprising or unacceptable within our own homes but whose existence we accept or at least tolerate within our county, state, or country because either a majority of our neighbors hold views which differ from ours or because constitutional or legislative power takes precedence over our own preferences.

A better analogy might be to consider the country as something similar to an apartment building or even a small town.You can exert a degree of security insofar as it serves the common good, but an absolutist approach of the kind you describe rapidly becomes self-defeating and unsustainable over the longer term. I might add that absolutism in this context refers to the idea of abolishing borders as much as to the idea of sealing them. After all, we have controls in between the borders of US states with limited powers to enforce prohibitions or requirements unique to that state, from carrying certain produce to wearing a motorcycle helmet, and these are not considered especially onerous.

Rather than abolition of borders, I see a trend away from a presumption of exclusion as the default and towards a policy of neutral vigilance - in other words, personal migration will come to be seen in the same light as other trade flows, subject to inspection and monitoring but requiring specific grounds for interference.

So, suppose you have a business importing silk from China, and the hacky part is that it's woven in conformity with 6502 assembler code or something. It comes into the US in a cargo container, and we all accept that DHS/CBP want to assure themselves that it doesn't include radioactive materials, smallpox, or marauding silkworm colonies. That done, we expect them to be indifferent to the question of whether 8-bit silken handkerchief designs will affect the US economy in positive or negative fashion - that's for the market to discover, not the customs inspectors, as long as there's no ongoing trade dispute between China and the US justifying their exclusion in accordance with treaty.

We already have such a policy in place for visiting tourists and businesspersons from other developed countries, and which is mostly reciprocal - you can grab your passport and fly to Japan on a whim for up to 90 days, and vice versa. Within both the US and the EU, the benefits of allowing migration between the individual member states seems to considerably outweigh the various costs; economics suggests that rational policymaking on international migration will go the same way sooner or later.

Of course, this isn't foolproof and the downside of such a policy is that criminals can exploit such openness to further their wicked ends. But insofar the number of such people/incidents is low - not least because more people appreciate the freedoms of the open model, and have a stake in its preservation - that risk is tolerable.

indrax• 16 years ago

Then why doesn't New York ever need to bomb Pensylvania? If the border of these two areas can be open, then so could other borders.

Likewise, there are places where you don't have to lock your doors.

jbarham4• 16 years ago

"Good fences make good neighbors." What's true at the local level is also true at a national level.

sgentle• 16 years ago

I think the future will judge this as a time of great confusion. Scarcity, the fundament of our economy, is becoming obsolete. Danger, the most powerful of human instincts, is largely irrelevant. Our technology gives us so much power that most decisions we make are no longer "can we?" but "should we?". We are more isolated than ever, and our nascent internet social models are rarely enough to sustain more than superficial relationships.

This is not true everywhere, but in most of the western world it is. Social change lags behind technological. The information age has done wonderful things, but I think we will be remembered as the first people to deal with the end of "natural" in any meaningful sense, and of a time spent struggling to find a replacement that is built, not handed to us by circumstance.

twillerelator3• 16 years ago

For their own good: locking children up in schools; telling them what to learn; coercing them in the name of health and education; punishing children at home.

These things won't happen eventually. Yet future generations will take education, health and morality more seriously than we do.

lftl2• 16 years ago

> punishing children at home

We shouldn't punish children? Even for things they clearly understand are wrong?

twillerelator3• 16 years ago

It sounds crazy, doesn't it? Of course, the idea of not punishing one's wife after she had done something which she understood to be wrong, once upon a time, also sounded crazy.

This applies to all moral progress. Any prediction about morality that doesn't shock at least some people is unlikely to be both true and important.

zeteo2• 16 years ago

It may also be possible that the future will hold us responsible for something that we are very proud of today. I recently re-read "The Lord of the Rings" and was surprised at the racist / eugenic undertones, which unfortunately date the book to some degree. One person's chief virtue is that he's of unadulterated blood, some nation is declining because of mixing of the races etc. Unbelievable as it may seem today, people once held racism and segregation as noble ideals. What will our time be known as - the age of political correctness, maybe?

cynicalkane3• 16 years ago

Tolkien explicitly denied that anything in the Lord of the Rings was intended to be directly allegorical. As I recall, the books don't talk about mixing races in the sense of subdivisions of humanity; they talk about things like mixing men and orcs, so it's not really the same as miscegenation.

edit: Apparently I didn't recall well enough. Oh well.

radu_floricica2• 16 years ago

Not exactly. He's pretty clear that dilution of blood happens, and that some races of Men are better then others.

This being said, I don't think it's a bad thing. It may not be a particularly good one, but it's fantasy. You're not supposed to kill orcs, if you really want to be PC. They're highly intelligent and emotional creatures - who happen to have their own seemingly foreign culture.

zeteo2• 16 years ago

Yes they do. Aragorn is of the purest race of Westernesse, and his special abilities are in good part based on this. The subjects of prince Imrahil are sadly mixed in race, although the prince himself is of rather pure breed, etc. It's not about this being an allegory for England or whatever, it's about the general world view and the things that are considered noble and admirable.

rue• 16 years ago

Well, we still have monarchies and much of the wealth even in modern countries is concentrated in the hands of the heirs of the aristocracy, robber barons and various lineages tracing back to pirates, warlords or other coercive thieves.

Book? Cannot get too upset about that.

cynicalkane3• 16 years ago

Consider the school system. I won't go into how bad it is because I bet a lot of readers here already understand that. What's terrifying is not how bad it is but how institutionalized it is. What little political will, what little realization there is that this system is fundamentally broken, becomes drowned in a sea of hopeless politics.

I think future generations will view our schools as archaic and somewhat barbaric, kind of like how things like corporal punishment and child labor are viewed today. Actually, teaching a child a trade is probably less harmful to his character than sending him to the average public school.

run4yourlives8• 16 years ago

I would think that future generations would probably see "having a school system" as the part that is ridiculously quaint.

Of course, that's assuming the evolution has taken them to a better place in this regard. It's quite possible that future generations will be too stupid to think about us much at all.

jbarham4• 16 years ago

> Actually, teaching a child a trade is probably less harmful to his character than sending him to the average public school.

This is not a new idea. It's called apprenticeship and was once widespread in e.g. Europe. Why it's less common now is largely a combination of changes in the economy (fewer stable, skilled trades) and society (teenagers being less willing to accept the obligations of being an apprentice).

xsmasher• 16 years ago

Spending time in among adults and performing real work would have a great positive effect on kids.

It seems obvious why teenage culture is petty, cruel, and obsessed with fashion and status; the inmates, trapped in an artificial world and forced to do fake-work, turn on each other.

DavidSJ7• 16 years ago

Also child labor laws, which are not a change in the economy per se.

jcromartie2• 16 years ago

When I listen to WAMU (the NPR station in DC) I hear some school coverage nearly every day. They have special school reporters, and school segments. I realize that these (mostly affluent and White) people just LOVE school. They think it's the most important thing in the world. There is no acceptable opinion (in the political sense) other than increasing spending and treatment through schooling. Some schools here are penalized by their local governments for failing to outspend their own budgets year-over-year.

It really seems kind of hopelessly entrenched.

Vivtek2• 16 years ago

Yeah, drugging kids to keep teacher-to-student ratios affordably low; I think there's a thing the future will judge harshly.

dpatru2• 16 years ago

Hopefully in the future, people will be more free. They will look back and wonder why it was once acceptable for governments to:

* confiscate huge percentages of a person's work, thus effectively making working people serfs of the government

* conscript people for war

* conduct wars

* require licensing to practice certain occupations

* restrict freedom to trade and tax commerce

* tolerate public unions

* monopolize the education of children

* force working people to provide pensions and healthcare for non-working people

* imprison people for using drugs in their homes

Retric2• 16 years ago

Much of that could apply just as easily to Rome circua 750 BC as it does to the USA.

rubinelli2• 16 years ago

I wonder if bread and circus won't come back in vogue. As long as consumer goods keep getting cheaper, and the unemployed are content with a standard of living that doesn't put too much of a strain on us, why should we care? Is it really worse to let them watch Two and a Half Men reruns than send them to some "dig a hole then fill it with dirt again" Keynesian job? Or worse, wait for them to commit a crime and then pay to keep them jailed?

pessimizer2• 16 years ago

I hope that I'm long dead before the time comes when society is wondering why it was once acceptable to tolerate free association between employees and to not let people starve who aren't working. I at least hope I have enough kids to support me once society has horribly failed in that way.

zargon2• 16 years ago

Violence does not solve social problems. Forcing people to feed unemployed people is violent. A future without forced "charity" does not mean people are left to starve.

lukifer2• 16 years ago

All of these things are evidence that democracy is not inherently adequate to create a free, just, and sane society. These systemic flaws are within our power to change, and yet we do not; many are in fact fought for tooth and nail by the populace.

Ultimately, cultural values are the root of any particular society, and the institutions of that society will grow to reflect those values. Hence: "Be the change you want to see in the world."

Waywocket7• 16 years ago

It seems rather more likely that in many of those cases, they will wonder why it was ever acceptable for governments not to do those things.

For millenia, human societies have drifted slowly but surely towards the left, with a constant increase in the quality of life for the entire population.

Your personal brand of Libertarianism - which advocates, at its heart, a return to feudalism - is uniquely peculiar to a current aspect of the US social situation. It has relatively little traction elsewhere, despite the relentless spread of corporatism in the last few decades, and will be seen as incomprehensibly barbaric within probably as few as 100 years.

dpatru2• 16 years ago

> human societies have drifted slowly but surely towards the left, with a constant increase in the quality of life for the entire population.

This is like saying that caged mice have a better quality of life than wild mice because they have more free time, a reliable source of food, and no predators: it completely discounts the value of freedom.

loewenskind14• 16 years ago

Personally, I think the future will be shocked to see that the American Libertarian was every considered a legitimate political stance. I do wish we could create some kind of virtual sand-box where Libertarians could go try out their ideas and see exactly why they wont work.

bearwithclaws• 16 years ago

Technology addiction.

AngryParsley• 16 years ago

This reminds me of http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

It's easy to pick stuff that a portion of society agrees with you on, like ending drug prohibition, gay marriage, abortion, or immigration. Even more controversial stuff like ending meat-eating or religion will get nods from a few people. I'm not going to mention anything really crazy, since I'll get downvoted as a nut if I do.

I don't blame most people for having the same beliefs as everyone around them, and I think the future will feel similarly. But while future societies may not judge us harshly, I think they'll contain things we would judge them for. This is because we don't have the future's technology, so certain decisions are already made for us. Most of us don't even think of them as decisions. For example, we can't easily increase a person's intelligence. If we could, we would have debates on how best to use this technology and whatnot. Then, maybe one day it would be considered a form of abuse to not increase your child's intelligence through drugs or brain implants.

aristus• 16 years ago

That essay is amazing, but I think it only covers part of the spectrum.

Knowing who your parents are is less important today than a couple hundred years ago. It doesn't cripple you socially as it once did. Knowing what material your water pipes are made of has become much more important, now that we're aware of the crippling effects of lead. The present world is greatly influenced by the manipulation of amounts of mass and energy too small to see. We've come to accept this situation without surprise, and we tend to think about emergent information content and not mechanics or chemistry.

To a typical Victorian all of that wouldn't be heresy so much as fantastic nonsense.

lionhearted2• 16 years ago

> I'm not going to mention anything really crazy, since I'll get downvoted as a nut if I do.

You mean like democracy?

Edit: Yup, there's the "downvoted as a nut" - I think voting on what your fellow man can do with his life might be seen as barbaric in the future. Maybe not, but the idea that 51% of people voting in the USA can enforce their will on all 300 million citizens is pretty scary to me...

shpxnvz2• 16 years ago

Maybe not, but the idea that 51% of people voting in the USA can enforce their will on all 300 million citizens is pretty scary to me…

Luckily that's not quite how it works - we're not a direct democracy. But, even when a majority of representatives attempts to exert their will on us citizens, the scope of their will is limited to the powers explicitly granted them by the constitution and they, within those powers, are further restricted from infringing on our natural and enumerated rights.

Certainly, a reasonable argument can be made that the legislature does push the limits with regards to their powers, particularly with respect to the commerce clause, and we do more arguing in defense of our individual rights than I think should be necessary, but all-in-all we're not doing too bad. In any case, we've so far only needed to use our first three boxes [1] in the defense of liberty. I wouldn't consider it a failure until we find need for the fourth.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty

anigbrowl5• 16 years ago

Good thing it's not an actual possibility then, since changing the US constitution would require a two-thirds majority (so to speak - technically it could be a much lower fraction of the population, but for practical purposes it's true enough).

Mind you, short of re-instituting slavery very few laws arise to the level of specifying the whole course of anyone's life. Democracy is a flawed system, to be sure - as any member of an unpopular minority can confirm. But we have yet to identify any reliably better alternative, and may never do so. After all, if there were sufficient agreement on how to identify good and wise candidates to be benign dictators, there'd be no need of their services.

loewenskind14• 16 years ago

As pointed out by others, the US isn't a democracy and never has been. Having said that, I don't think the problem would be being a democracy but rather consisting of 300 million citizens. I personally think that's far too big of a scale to have a reasonable government.

speleding• 16 years ago

Since no one mentioned it yet: The lack of right to die if you are incurably ill is shameful

A few countries and states already have euthanasia laws in place (Switzerland, the Netherlands) but in most other places you are still forced to die a painful and long drawn out death that is hard on the relatives too.

chewbranca• 16 years ago

I'm fairly sure we'll be judged to some extent that we allowed Bush to be president, twice no less, and also that we spent the first decade of the 21st century in war.

swah• 16 years ago

How would the past judge us?

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

Fantastically smart, alarmingly unwise.

mingdingo2• 16 years ago

They'd wonder why we're repeating so many of their mistakes.

a-priori2• 16 years ago

They would look at the vast regions of the world that are peaceful, and think we are foolish for being so trustful of our neighbours.

"Why is Washington not afraid of New York raising an army and marching on the capital?", they would say. Until the last couple centuries, that's something you'd have to be afraid of. Yet, that's something that people today would think is preposterous.

I'm an optimist. I happen to think this is a trend that will continue.

Revisor• 16 years ago

We are the last generation (or one of the last) that doesn't understand our own brains.

We have electricity, light bulbs and flickering TV and computers screens but we don't understand our sleep cycle and the circadian rhythm. We are a sleep-deprived civilization.[1]

Our scientists already know how learning works (semantic encoding and repetition are the key), but we still cram kids in Austro-Hungarian like classrooms.[2]

We are the last generation to waste drinking water. Water is already today a precious resource. In the future this will be even more pronounced.

Great article, got me thinking.

If you're interested, I recommend

[1] The Promise of Sleep: http://www.amazon.com/Promise-Sleep-Medicine-Connection-Happ...

[2] Brain Rules: http://www.amazon.com/Brain-Rules-Principles-Surviving-Thriv...

loewenskind14• 16 years ago

The surface of the earth is 70% water. I refuse to believe that future generations wont figure out a cost effect way of turning this into drinking water on the required scales.

ArcticCelt• 16 years ago

This article seams to propose that morality and civility improve linearly forever when in fact it's more like the stock market with frequent crashes and long periods of decline. I am maybe a pessimist but I think that modern society is near the peak of what we can achieve.

I personally think that it's not enough but I am the minority and my fellow citizens will simply vote against people who share my ideals. There is too many people hardwired to be assholes. Maybe if we start tweaking our brains (what could possibly go wrong) we could reach new milestones but otherwise I am not holding my breath.

run4yourlives8• 16 years ago

Agreed. It seems very likely that we are living as Romans did in 340: On the verge of collapse.

Not that this is a bad thing. In many ways, a return to a simpler time and a more virtual connectedness might actually be a huge step forward in the grand scheme of things.

loewenskind14• 16 years ago

Move to another country. The US has set up a perfect storm of a shockingly awful school system, dumbed down media from every angle, emotion in politics causing people to frame every discussion as "my side = save the US" vs. "their side = destroy it", etc. creating a large group of people who just can't be reasoned with.

a-priori2• 16 years ago

While I agree these are all concerns, I am skeptical that this is a modern phenomenon. Were people a generation or two ago really less emotional, or less prone to black-and-white thinking?

ranprieur• 16 years ago

Rent and interest. Both are giant rivers of money from the poor to the rich that we accept without question.

filosofo• 16 years ago

The fact that people did bad things at one time doesn't imply that what they did was accepted generally or approved by moral standards of the time. For example, many contemporaries opposed the tactics of the Inquisition (mentioned in the article as the advent of waterboarding).

Using the same logic we could characterize 20th-Century people as accepting mass-murder, because it was practiced by numerous nations on a never-before-seen scale.

city41• 16 years ago

On a smaller scale, I believe the future will judge us on our software. ie, bank websites with security holes in them the size of trucks. Software is still so young and has a long ways to go. The future might be amazed at how often we literally put our lives, finances, privacy, etc in the hands of really poorly written software.

Vivtek2• 16 years ago

Yeah, I'll buy this, too. Our software will be like the rounded rocks used in the Stone Age; people will see it in museums and wonder how people could have been so naive.

bruceboughton• 16 years ago

If the software even still runs...

simonsquiff2• 16 years ago

It's interesting how cultures differ on some of these.

I was speaking to a friend who works in China. He says he often discusses with the locals their appalling treatment of animals, which can be genuinely shocking to Westerners. He says this is usually met by a swift rebuke "How on earth can you criticize us for our treatment of animals when your culture treats your elderly relatives - your own family! - so horrifically, shipping them off to be ignored in a home for the rest of their lives?". It's a fair point - people in glass houses...

potatolicious• 16 years ago

Ehh... it's a point, but IMHO not a good one. I'm Chinese and have heard a lot of this viewpoint from my "own kind" (I don't actually identify culturally as Chinese, but whatever).

"We're faultless because you've got faults" is a shitty argument no matter which way it's offered. Or more accurately "we're not going to engage in intellectual discussion about this issue until you yourself are perfect in every way". It's dumb and pointless, and is really just defensive nationalistic kneejerking.

Another common argument I hear from the Chinese is the "you had our turn, so we get to have ours". It's very common when it comes to environmental issues - the basic logic is that America was able to burn fossil fuel in a completely unrestrained way for decades, so why shouldn't China get the same opportunity?

simonsquiff2• 16 years ago

I don't think the argument is that they are not faultless. It's that they see the Western faults (treating their elderly relatives so poorly) as so much worse than their faults in a related area (treating animals poorly). It's a valid observation - that our complaining of the poor treatment of sentient animals is rather undermined by our poor treatment of a much more closer to home sentient animal.

jemfinch• 16 years ago

> when your culture treats your elderly relatives - your own family! - so horrifically, shipping them off to be ignored in a home for the rest of their lives?"

Have they considered that perhaps it's the American individualism manifested by the elderly, and not by the young, which causes this? My grandmother just moved out of my dad's house because she wasn't ready to give up her freedom. My wife's grandparents still live by themselves in their mid-to-late 80s and fire every caretaker my wife's family hires for them. My own mother and my wife's parents have assured us that they will never be moving in with us (or into a home, for that matter).

davidcann2• 16 years ago

As medical technology progresses, it seems obvious that abortion will eventually be seen as barbaric. A hundred years ago, a baby born prematurely would die, but now babies live when born at 7 months, 6 months? earlier? Laws in the US have begun to reflect this. The only logical limit is conception.

At some point, it will no longer be an issue of religion or freedom of the mother, just like wife-beating must have been the "right if a man."

lukifer2• 16 years ago

Conversely, contraception technology may progress to the point that accidental pregnancy itself becomes a quaint impossibility, sidestepping the moral issues altogether.

DavidSJ7• 16 years ago

Not entirely. People change their mind.

So the question will be (and mainly already is): when is too late to change your mind?

Luc2• 16 years ago

> The only logical limit is conception.

The future will see zygotes as people? Hopefully that particular future won't be uniformly distributed around the planet...

davidcann2• 16 years ago

I don't know, but do you have a suggestion for another limit?

jcromartie2• 16 years ago

I treat the abortion issue as a sorites paradox. You can't draw a line where human life begins, and if we are really serious about respecting it, then we shouldn't try to.

DavidSJ7• 16 years ago

The only logical limit is conception.

If you accept conception as a logical limit, then you'll have to explain the relevant moral distinction between a human embryo and a fish embryo, besides that one can eventually become a person, given the right external conditions (an ovum can too).

I propose sentience as a logical limit, acquired I suspect late in pregnancy.

Abid• 16 years ago

Jared Diamond works with a similar theme in his book "Collapse" though he goes further and explores issues that might literally bring about an end to our societies.

The take-away from both pieces: we should regularly question our beliefs and values in a larger context - what may seem like a perfectly normal, decent and harmless thing to us may be doing our society irreparable harm in the long run.

lhnz2• 16 years ago

I like to think that we will do away with the tragedy of the commons and actually find the solutions that are best for all of us and not just some of us. (And when I say 'us', I mean that to the widest extent).

Dove3• 16 years ago

I have always thought abortion an act of barbarism against which both the past and the future would revolt. Babies are killed for convenience and profit; it'd be over the top for comic book villains, and yet it is real.

It won't survive another generation, and will be seen as one of the darkest black spots in our history.

dgabriel• 16 years ago

I find this unlikely, sorry. I won't go deep into the pro-abortion arguments right now because I am unlikely to change your mind.

What is more likely is birth control will become better and more reliable (including hormonal bc for men), drastically decreasing the need for abortion.

Waywocket7• 16 years ago

>I have always thought abortion an act of barbarism against which both the past and the future would revolt

Given that the use of abortifacients is well documented for the entire duration of recorded history, this seems unlikely.

Dove3• 16 years ago

Really! That goes strongly against what I think I know about mores and history. Do you happen to have details or documentation for that claim?

philwelch9• 16 years ago

Automobiles. I think the future will be horrified that people transported themselves around in two-ton machines that polluted the air and fatally crashed into things (and each other) a lot, especially when both before and after the invention of automobiles we had safer and cleaner options, and especially when a lot of people spend hours a day sitting in their cars in stop-and-go traffic.

I have an SUV myself, and the freedom and joy and romance of driving appeals to me as much as anyone, but at some point, if energy is expensive enough, all of that will be forgotten, and it'll turn into a horror story.

xenophanes• 16 years ago

The future will condemn our coercive parenting and our irrational, exclusive relationships (marriages).

If you think that sounds crazy, that means they are at least candidates for things people take for granted that are bad (unlike, say, the environmentalism in the post which is an issue we're all aware of).

If interested, you can find arguments here: http://fallibleideas.com/

chegra• 16 years ago

Patents and Copyrights :D for starters.

gasull• 16 years ago

What are we doing today that our descendants might condemn tomorrow?

Over 1M deaths due to US-led invasion of Iraq:

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/1-over-o...

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Casualties_of...

DavidSJ7• 16 years ago

That number is ten times higher than many (I think most) other estimates. Is there a reason you prefer their methodology?

nova2• 16 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_death

estel• 16 years ago

I think he's missing world poverty. Whilst noone really supports it, it's entirely morally reprehensible that we don't do more as a society to eradicate poverty around the world.

nomurrcy• 16 years ago

I'm very surprised that nobody has mentioned the domination of modern banking over our present society.

Most of the major nations of the world currently pay a fee to private banks for the privilege of circulating their own currency. Our current debt-backed money system is unstable and serves to exacerbate and deepen the gap between the rich and poor and lodges an enormous amount of power in the hands of a few men.

I believe that should humanity ever squirm out from under the thumb of 'big banking' we will view the stranglehold it has had on us for the past few hundred years as a great systemic evil to which we collectively averted our gaze for a long long time.

loewenskind14• 16 years ago

I don't think the future is going to "judge" us anymore than we really judge past civilizations. We realize the mistakes they made were usually due to ignorance just as ours are.

The things they'll shake their heads about will probably be things like:

Having country policies decided by popularity contests instead of research and (where possible) science.

Spending most of our waking hours making people we don't even personally know rich instead of finding a way to spend more time enjoying what little life we had.

DavidSJ7• 16 years ago

Compulsory schooling is the top of my list, as any society which values freedom must value the freedom of one's own mind above all.

Wife-beating and slavery were once acceptable: How will the future judge us?

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