One of my favorite examples is from that movie too, Chuck. (I saw it, btw, in the Hotel Harrington last winter on your recommendation, oddly enough–thanks again.) It’s the ease and the utter social acceptability of Deeds punching anyone he has the mildest disagreement with, like the fellows in the nightclub who rub him the wrong way. Someone doesn’t like you? Expect a punch. Wow.
In the 1930s. it was way more normal to hit someone on almost any pretext, which these days would be thought of as “unprovoked assault.”
The reason I chose the Golden Rule is that it DIDN’T arise from our culture, it arose from a culture of a bunch of ignorant camel herders, many of whose other rules and tradition were completely loathesome by my standards.
I don’t think the Golden Rule IS the product of a single culture. That’s why I made the prehistoric comparison. Fairness is a virtue that supercedes culture. Just because the Oggs of ancient Sparta had a set of rationales for ignoring the Golden Rule doesn’t make them any different from us … in almost all cultures, including our own, rationales for ignoring the Golden Rule have been created by the local Oggs. And in almost all cultures there’s been a basic sense of what’s fair and what isn’t that has fought against the rules of Ogg, though often feebly and with little immediate effect.
I am asserting in short, that there are certain fundamental human attributes that supercede cultures, and the sense of fairness as embodied in the Golden Rule is one of them.
One way in which we think differently now is that in the past there was no real concept of the individual. The clan or society was the basic social unit, not lone people. I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around it, but I have a modern day example.
My girlfriend is a college professor. She once told her students to write a paper. Two brothers from Indonesia turned in one paper with both of their names on it. She said that wasn’t good enough, that they each needed to do their own work and turn in their own papers. They simply could not understand this concept. Why should they work seperately? Were they not brothers? They just couldn’t get it.
Well of course nobody ever claimed it was a product of our culture.
You’ve managed to miss the whole point, which I guess just further illustrates the point. Our culture is based around the Golden Rule. We are all indoctrinated with it form the time we are born. We’re all inescapably indoctrinated with it. And because you have been you can’t even see that. You simply believe that it’s good because of some objective standard. You don’t even realise that you think it’s superior simply because of the way your culture has forced you to think.
A perfect example of people thinking differently due to cultural effects that have changed over time. To someone living in your exact location 4000 years ago the golden rule would have been anathema. You do realise that don’t you?
None of that is even remotely true. I don’t think you know your social history very well.
Remember the man who quoted the Golden rule endorsed slave ownership several times in his parables. So much for fairness as a universal virtue. Even in medieval Europe and Asia there was no sense of fairness. There was a sense that God placed each man in his station in life and that was where he belonged. Similarly blessings and curses were handed out by God, they weren’t inherent rights or punishments. People as recently as 100 years ago genuinely believed that fate/God was capricious and there was no justice or fairness possible in this life. The idea that there existed a basic sense of fairness is simply so far form the truth as to be laughable. There may have been abasic sense of human justice but fairness of the type you speak of was a totally alien concept.
Well that’s certainly an assertion. Can you back that assertion up with anything whatsoever? When the man who quoted the Golden Rule endorsed slave ownership and formalised the idea that those who suffer here will be most greatly rewarded in the next life it seems fairly apparent that it’s completely untrue.
And that illustrates my point perfectly. You believe that this is the case without any evidence at all. The way these people though was so alien to your 20th century model thought pattern that you can hardly conceive of it. Instead you assume that they must have always thought like your do.
Because people, both now and in the past, find it much easier to empathise with others from the same cultural background. It’s this lack of empathy which allows racial or religious groups to be treated as sub-humans.
These attitudes are still very much in place today, although we have slowly gotten better about thinking in terms of ‘humanity’ as a whole. For example, most people in the west, including myself, had a stronger emotional reaction to 9/11 than the Rwandan genocide. The scale of the latter atrocity was much larger, but our instincts are not so objective.
As much as people may hate the big three monothestic religions, The Golden Rule idea arose in more cultures besides those. Before anyone discounts it because the Big Three don’t condemn slavery, I would remind them that Hitler was a diehard anti-smoking crusader.
I would submit that the idea of justice for all humans is built into the Homo Sapiens firmware. However, who gets the honor of being a human is mostly set by the software of culture, allowing people to get around the firmware when it would be more convient to treat someone unfairly.
Culture does change, so I suppose people are thinking differently now.
Right now in America the only biologically human organisms which are not treated as such are fetuses which haven’t reached a certain arbitrarily set age. Maybe in the future people will see this as a odd mindset.
Two adult men sharing a bed for a short period, no, that might not be unusual. But Lincoln and Joshua Speed shared a bed for four years, long after the attorney Lincoln could have bought his own bed.
But, what’s the point? Another bed costs more money. It takes up more space. It’s cold, when there’s no one there to share it with. They clearly had no problem sleeping in the same bed. If there’s no cultural stigma associated with it, why change?
Even now, culture is confusingly inconsistent. Although people would raise an eyebrow if I shared a bed with my roommate, two of my female friends shared a bed for a while and no one seemed to think it was odd. Women are also much more likely to hold hands and write notes and speak of “love” in a fraternal (sororal?) sense.