And trends don’t merely oscillate back and forth either. Who knows what may come in at right angles?
Maybe the people of the future will be appalled that we did not design the odours of our cities, and indeed lived among disordered piles of odour-rubbish. Maybe they will condemn us for not allowing birds their rightful place at the symbolic peak of society. Maybe they will look down upon us for allowing marital infidelity to flourish, because our restrictive wedding vows never allowed our marriages to bloom to their full and proper size. Maybe toes will be obscene. And maybe they will curse us for allowing Rush to fade into obscurity.
Or modern Americans calling the USA land of the free and home of the brave, with the largest prison population in the world no matter how you slice it and the pioneers in security theater like TSA sexual assaults and No Fly Lists.
Got it. And people are people, past, present, and, if history is any guide, the future.
I would hope future people will learn from past mistakes and not repeat them in a “All this has happened before, and will happen again. And again. And again.”
But humanity has an apalling penchant for self deception and self delusion. We can rationalize just about anything in the moment, only to look back on it (sometime only just a few years later) and say, “WTF were we thinking?”
I didn’t say I agreed with Blake’s point, but that I got it. And there are some historical examples to back him up.
A lot of trends do progress linearly over centuries. I don’t think a progressive living in 1912 would do that badly extrapolating trends to today. They’d probably think the trend of woman’s sufferage and liberation would continue, and how woman were treated in their own time would be looked down upon, and they’d be right. Ditto for the condition of the poor, treatment of minorities, sexual mores, lack of a social safety net, tolerance of pollution, labour conditions and tolerance for institutionalized corruption and political machines.
Of course, they may also misguess some stuff. The prohibition movement crested in the twenties and has more or less died out. So someone that thought we’d look down on our ancestors for alcohol consumption would be wrong, even though it might seem like a good bet in 1912. And committed Communists and Anarchists, who were gaining steam at the time, would probably predict their movements would’ve come a lot closer to their goals.
But by and large I think the experience of the past century suggest that projecting out current trends is a pretty decent method of predicting where we’ll be in the next century.
Thread title says: Folks in 2112 will be appalled that we…?
Parse the line your own damned self:
“They may be appalled…” At some point in the future, people may, might be, appalled.
“…by the idea…” By a notion, a concept, not a provable fact.
“…that women get paid as much as men despite the fact that women are physically incapable of working as hard in 99% of jobs.”
We know factually that this is rubbish. It only holds true, on average, for any job that requires significant upper-body strength. And that there are indeed women with the upper-body strength that can do those jobs, but that’s not normative. And that 99% of all jobs today (at least not in developed nations) do NOT require that kind of upper-body strength.
Fact or no, it is still an idea that is in current use in various parts of the world today. We (rightfully, IMO) look down on those cultures as backwards and perhaps barbaric.
Blake’s point about the nature of “progress,” citing the swing on views about sexuality and promiscuity, is that your premise is flawed in that it only assumes that humanity overall will continue to “progress” from the POV of our current standards and mores.
I would hope so. Like Simplicio, I would think so. But in spite of WWII and the horrors of The Holocaust, we still have racist wars of genocide going on, when as of 1945-46, the world would have probably said that we’d put that kind of nonsense behind us.
Who knows what the world will look like 100 years from now. Will Global Warming cause some sort of ecological disaster that throws us into another Dark Age? Will Transnational Corporations finally take over the world and relegate 99% of humanity to chattel slavery, laboring away for the betterment and comfort of the 1%?
Blake’s offering of a dystopian possibility is no less valid just because it offends your enlightened sensibilities.
Try to explain to that hypothetical 1912’er the movement for gay marriage…I’ll wait. Even if they could be progressive enough to believe gays as a accepted minority group, they’d think gay marriage absurd.
EDIT:Scientology has so much bizarre crap, like silent childbirth. Scientologists didn’t grow up with this, its not part of their culture, but they adopt it happily. I think people are less resistant to odd cultural changes than most think.
Though ‘appal’ is a bit hyperbolic in this context, I think they’ll be appalled at our child-like awe of what the Internet and electronics are capable of. It’s one thing to look back on the Atari 2600 or the C=64 and think how quaint it was to be impressed with machines running on so little memory, the staggering difference in the everyday power, reach, integration and regulation of technology will make being made to live with today’s abilities appalling.
Predicting what people will find moral in the future is really hard. If we go back to 1912, there were a lot of beliefs that were considered enlightened and forward-looking that turned out to be rather dumb. A person in 1912 might have predicted that by 2012 people would no longer drink(prohibition movement was gaining steam). Eugenicists might have predicted that we would have bred out many inferior qualities in the human race. Maybe they figured that by 2012 we’d be a race of supermen. But both prohibition and eugenics proved to be pretty awful. It’s likely that some ideas we think are awesome and forward looking right now will turn out to be total crap. Most of the ideas listed in the OP are things we already know are backwards or inadequate or immoral. The real trick is to identify what relatively new, enlightened ideas are complete hokum.
Not sure what your point is. I’m saying that many of the trends of 1912 would allow you to predict things about our current society, not that every thing about current society would be derivable from someone in 1912. Obviously some stuff would take people by 1912 by surprise.
(that said, I’m not sure gay marriage would be so foreign to at least some turn of the century Americans)
I think in 100 years, people will be either appalled or amused that doctors injected poisons into our body and sprayed us with radioactivity in order to “cure” cancer.
ExTank, when you’re using that much bold, italics and underlining that’s the point at which you should question whether you have any point at all or if you’re just trying to shout the other guy down.
The first thing to say is that instead of pointless speculation we should just let Blake return and explain what exactly he meant.
But in the meantime, here is why I think your interpretation is incorrect.
Here, again, is what blake said:
Now, I’ve interpreted this statement as:
<people in the future> may be appalled that <people in the past> paid women the same when <in general> men are capable of working harder in most jobs.
And you appear to be saying that it was actually:
<people in the future> may be appalled that <people in the past> paid women the same when <in the future> men are capable of working harder in most jobs.
The problem is the latter interpretation makes no sense. The people of the future are being appalled at us for something that doesn’t apply to us.
Anyone from 2112 with any knowledge of history would have to concede it made sense for us to push for equal pay in a time when women could do equal work. It’s irrelevant (to how they feel about us) if at some future time that situation changes.
I always wonder about this when I watch The Supersizers. I wonder what people in 100 years will be appalled that we ate, or that we didn’t eat. I watched the Restoration episode last night off our Tivo, and I remember how Sue Perkins was particularly put off by the lack of vegetables and drinking water in the diet.
Given that predictions about medical technology have often been over optimistic, it wouldn’t surprise me if we’re still treating cancer that way in 2112.
I do however think that one day, maybe 2512, people will look at 21st century medicine as little better than Dark Ages medicine. Medical care kills an awful lot of people. The ratio of cured/killed keeps getting better in baby steps, but it’s still a dicey proposition and I think a 25th century person would be about as willing to see a 21st century doctor as you would to see a 17th century doctor.
If I emphasize too much, it’s because you’re missing the point, and I want to draw your attention specifically to the relevant passages I think are best at bridging the understanding gap.
Put another way, “In the future, potential factors may come together in such a way as to make the idea of ‘equal pay for equal work’ socially unacceptable, and it may be ‘proven’ by numerous politically correct ‘facts’ that are generally held by the majority of the populous to be true, even if the experiences of the past 100-200 years show them to be demostrbaly false.”
I use the term fact here in the same way it was a known and proven fact, according many reputable scientists, that breaking the sound barrier was impossible. Until it was done.
Okay, that’s not the best example, since it deals with natural, physical laws.
To put it yet another way, not too long ago (hell, in some cases and some places, still today) it was a pretty widely socially accepted “fact” that certain non-white “races” were inferior to whites.
Oh boy, an even bigger typeface. Now I’m really in trouble.
You say “put another way” but you’re completely reading that into Blake’s original point.
You have to at least concede that one, simpler, interpretation of “the fact that women are physically incapable of working as hard in 99% of jobs” is that Blake actually believes that, which is a not uncommon view (it is incorrect of course IMO and objectively).
If you’re trying to argue against the assertion that we can always reliably predict the future and future social trends, don’t bother. I don’t think that.
But we’re getting better at extrapolating the future than we once were.
And, put it this way: in some countries bookies will let you can bet on just about anything. If future social trends are virtually random, and disconnected with current trends, you can easily make a killing betting against events that everyone else thinks are likely e.g. an increase in pension age or euthanasia becoming legal in at least X countries, say.
But in reality people will take bets on such things because we do have some idea of the likelihood of these changes.
