Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Progress
Sometime ago I heard someone talking about how the things even the most progressive among us believe today will be considered horribly vile and bigoted a hundred years from now.
Now, I guess that could be true, but it does make me curious. Do you agree with that? If so, does the idea that your views will be considered hopelessly outdated in a century make you feel less confident that they are right? If not, how do you explain the continued move away from how society used to view stuff like race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, and such?
Basically, I am interesting in hearing what people think of "progress" and whether there is some objective right and wrong when it comes to issues like this that we should stop at or whether what is appropriate is just totally dependent on what society at the time believes.
By the way, if what I just said seems totally unclear or weird to you, please let me know so I can try to clarify it a bit.
Comments
Considering many people existing today consider the present as horribly vile and bigoted right now...
Hurm, it's an interesting question. What I think it's not that we see the past as incredibly bigoted, but depending on the time, we see it as just an step of the staircase that is progress. For example, let's look at the character of Uhura from Star Trek. She's famously a PoC who holds a rank in the Enterprise in a time where seeing women not being wives and mothers was nothing short of heresy of the most heinous kind, let alone black women. But today, when we look back on it, everybody points out that she was nothing more than a glorified secretary, which is a role women find themselves shoehorned into quite a lot, even these days (both in fiction and real life)
Does this mean Star Trek wasn't progressive? Hell no. It constituted an important first step for both women and PoC. It meant diversity in fiction. etc. However, the fact is, that if Star Trek was released as is today, it'd be looked down upon, if only in that particular aspect.
I can't make calls on the future. All I can talk about it what I see now.
For all I know I might be chasing off half-neptunian children off my lawn with a shotgun, telling them to turn off their damn hyperdimensional music.
But a hundred years from now I'll be dead so if they're bothered by it extensively it's their problem rather than mine.
The metaphysical problems of a ghost yelling at alien teenagers should bother a few more people than just said alien teenagers.
What're they gonna do in their hyper-tolerant atheist paradise? Call an exorcist?
no, just the corpse of bill murray.
Juan,
What I think it's not that we see the past as incredibly bigoted, but depending on the time, we see it as just an step of the staircase that is progress.
That sounds like a pretty good take on this to me. I guess that way we can still say that progress is worth working towards even if it only amounts to a drop in the bucket a hundred years from now.
I guess I still kind of wonder what the implications of this are for determining what we believe to be right or wrong though. Does the idea that something even some of the most tolerant among us believe to be pretty disturbing now could be considered perfectly fine later give you pause at all?
Maybe Malkavian has the right perspective about not needing to care because you will probably not be alive a hundred years from now. I know I cannot predict what the future will hold or what kind of beliefs will be in vogue in a hundred years. At the same time, I would like to think that we can make the claim that at least some of the beliefs we hold now are important and substantiated and not just completely a result of our cultural context or whatever.
I think something to keep in mind is that social progression (for our value of it) hasn't followed a linear path. Let's look at the transition from tribal cultures to feudal kingdoms, for instance. From Europe to China, gender relations became more strained under feudalism, whereas the tribes that later become kingdom have left evidence to suggest they had a much more even-minded approach towards gender.
The Celts are a good example. Some evidence suggests that female rulership wasn't just unusually high for a warrior culture, but that female contribution to frontline soldiery was similarly less uncommon. Obviously those cultures aren't going to be perfect in such respects, but you can see how advanced they could be socially in comparison to more technologically advanced kingdoms and empires. For as much as they've contributed to general progression, the Greeks for instance were notorious misogynists. Great contributions to philosophy and science, no questions -- but not the nicest folks around, it seems.
This does come through later, though. For instance, Classical Europe was dominated by the Greeks and Romans, neither of whom were very good at gender relations. When Germanic and Celtic kingdoms came to power in the wake of Rome's fall, it didn't become a gender egalitarian paradise or anything, but to be a woman under the rule of Charlemagne was probably a few increments better than being a woman under the rule of Julius Caesar, you know? So even though medieval kingdoms went backwards in terms of gender relations, the influence of their tribal cultures never phased out the way it did for Classical empires.
Even in feudal Europe, though, you got a social movement like chivalry. While it's obviously outdated, the concept of chivalry introduced the concept that women should be honoured above men. I don't agree with this, but in context of its times, I can get behind such a movement -- too far on one side of the scale, but better than the opposite.
Such influence continues on today, with women's rights movements beginning in the West after the decidedly more masculine Early Modern and Victorian periods.
So just looking at gender equality within Europe alone, the progression isn't linear from Classical Greece to today. It rises with the fall of Rome, dips with the establishment of kingdoms, rises again with the coming of chivalry as a social revolution, and then actually dips throughout the Renaissance, Early Modern and Victorian periods until spiking in the early 20th century and continuing along a linear upward path until today.
For another example of this kind of non-linear progression, I've heard that in the Middle East, the grandparents of the current generation are significantly more progressive than their offspring, who contributed to the rise of dictatorial regimes. It's only with the youth movement and rebellion in the past few years that things have begun to equalise more in a social sense.
Basically, I think looking at it in terms of a line from "unprogressive" to "progressive" alone will always skew the data. Social progression is more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly cultural-lulzical stuff.
Another example of nonlinearity is slavery in the Western world. Pretty common throughout Europe until the 12th-13th century or so; receded; spiked again during imperial expansion; got abolished inside most of Europe while thriving in their colonies; got abolished in the colonies; Foxconn.
Alex,
Thanks for pointing out how social progression is not always so linear. Aside from what you mentioned about grandparents of the Middle East being more progressive than their children and grandchildren (probably at least partially due to the rise of Wahhabism I am guessing), what you described was pretty much totally new to me.
Progressive and progress might be the wrong words to use then. At least, if you do talk about progress, maybe you have to acknowledge that regress is possible too.
That being the case, it does not make much sense to talk about how certain social changes are inevitable (e.g., in x number of years recreational drugs will be legalized), since there is always a chance that counter-movements will fight them or that later on even those changes will be reversed. Plus, even if something is bound to happen, I would argue that just because it will happen does not necessarily mean that it is preferable that it does happen.