I’ve often wondered whether, as a species, homo sapiens is any better now than thousands of years ago. By better, I mean in terms of morality, compassion, decency, goodness and the like?
Obviously, I only have a very sketchy idea as to what mankind was like, in terms of how they behaved towards each other, and how much we cared how we cared how we treated each other, one thousand, two thousand, ten thousand years ago, but I suspect that the current mix of good and bad has always been the norm.
I would like to think that our progress in the sciences and technology has been mirrored in the humanities, but I doubt it. On a positive note, equality between the sexes and between rich and poor, the privileged and the less privileged is probably better now in some countries than it used to be, but, to counter that, many members of society treat their fellow man appallingly, as I suspect they always have.
So, have we progressed much, or is the psyche of man locked in a persistent state? Are we becoming, or can we become better people?
The moral progress made by the liberal democracies in the last 300 years and particularly the last 50 has been enormous. Think of the treatment of women, religious and racial minorities, genocide, slavery, torture and countless other issues. Modern democracies may err sometimes on say, torture, but on a far smaller scale than before and will usually correct their mistakes.
Really anyone who doesn't believe that we are far better off today doesn't really understand how brutal life was for the average person in pre-modern societies. The vast majority of people had to accept a permanently inferior status for one reason or another with violations punishable by violence.
As far as morality is concerned, until recently it was pretty much “Do as you’re told, or else.” A significant number of cultures have evolved beyond that.
In terms of morality, compassion, decency, goodness and the like?
All you need to do is read the writings from thousands of years ago. You could start with the accessible stuff like the Bible and then progress to Roman and Persin writings.
Until very recent times the standard belief was that anybody who wasn’t part of your society had no rights. And i mean they had no right not to be killed, raped and tortured. Much less having any right to property or dignity. And killing, raping, torturing and enslaving such people was considered to be a duty and the highest possible good that person could do.
It’s not that you couldn’t find people who objected to such barabarsim a thousand years ago, or that you can’t find people who don’t object to it today. The difference is that what is normal. The typical person alive today has a moral mindset that was only found in the most progressive thinkers like Jesus or the Buddha a htousand years ago, while people who have the mindset of the typical Roman or Hebrew are as rare as prophets. Most people today would be horrified at someone boasting about how he slaughtered civilians and raped the survivors. Yet accounts from thousands of years ago universally show people doing precisely that and being lauded for it.
In the UK and USA, and other countries. But in Zimbabwe, Burma, North Korea at the moment? Cambodia recently? Nazi Germany (particularly if you were Jewish) sixty years ago?
More a case of steps forward and steps back, surely?
There’s also the issue of how those who controlled society treated those they controlled, and how the indiviual members of a society treated each other.
Another question. If we have progressed (and I think that in some ways we have): why? What made us change? Why did we feel they need for suppression, brutality and intolerance then, but feel it is not acceptable now?
I know there’s a widespread belief in the US that most Africans and Asians will go on a Rwanda/Cambodia style rampage at the drop of a hat, but it’s not true. Most Africans and Asians are as horrified with the thought of such things as most Americans.
You seem to be confusing nation/regions wit brutal dictators with areas with brutal citizens.
A very good example of how things improved. The typical German was so intolerant of what was happening that it had to be kept carefully hidden from the population. Do you honestly think the average German would have applauded a German officer constructing a column with images of himself murdeirng and raping Slavs? Such monuments were standard in previous eras, and the acts were trumpeted as a sign of the perpetrators prowess, never hidden.
We could say the same about technology or art or anything else. No progress is ever a straight line. Nonetheless nobody would deny that humans are more advanced in those fields now than they were in past millennia.
Very complicated, and justice can’t be done to the answer in a message broad post. But it’s basically down to increased choices. Poeple get a good feeling from treating others well, and they get a sing of conscience when they hurt others. Trouble is that they also get a sting when they starve, and they get a good feeling when they increase their social status. So while food is abundant and there are alternative ways to get social approval people are inclined to be good, but for mot of history that wasn’t the case.
Savagery is a way to get food an dincraese social stauts. And it’s an option open to all, so when people have no other options they can still act savagely. Compassion and charity make us feel good, but they don’t feed us. The most extreme example is what happens when a society is left without food for 48 hours, but you can see it manifested in other ways such as the strong correlation between violence and income. Take a man and give him choice between joining the army and starving and he won’t starve. Take an army and tell them that if they fight their families won’t starve and their families won’t starve.
Once you get that personal level of violence then the societies themselves become violent. Your tribe attacks my tribe, so I need to become as violent and compassionless as you to survive. Any tribe that doesn’t become violent and compassionless is destroyed so very soon all tribes are violent an compassionless.
Then we start selecting our cultures to value violence and lack of empathy. Then these societies select religions and leaders that preach that violence. Add into that mix that the majority people are uneducated and have no experience of alternative cultures and it all self reinforces.
Violence that was born out of necessity becomes violence born out of cultural pressure. People who aren’t inherently violent are traumatised by the violence around them and then pushed to be violent themselves because it increases social status. So the default mentality becomes violent. Only the most exceptional individuals ever manage to break out of the cultural conditioning.
Just for good measure mix in the fact that life is hard and short. No medicine, hard work, lack of justice. As a result people placed very low values on their own lives and health, much less anyone else’s
Then two things happened, simultaneously and feeding off each other. Armies became professional and wealth increased. There had been professional armies many times before in history, and there had been times of wealth, but the confluence of the two was important. It meant that the upper levels of society could gain prestige without being warriors and it meant that war ceased (largely) to be a scorched earth, capture a city and slaughter the inhabitants affair. That in turn meant that we had, for the first time, a situation where large numbers of people had no direct experience of violence, no real threat from violence, nothing to be gained from violence and a lot to lose from violence.
IOW they had a choice. And many of them chose to be non-violent. That in turn had the effect of leading to the popularisation of arguments for non-violence/compassion (after all if I’m not a warrior I have to make not being a warrior laudable, or at leats not a social handicap). Also people started growing up without being exposed to violence.
Then this effect started feeding on itself. More professional armies, less collateral damage form wars, more stability leads to greater wealth and the cycle starts again. So people and societies grew richer, violence became even less necessary, healthcare got better and people had even more to lose from violence. So pacifism and compassion became even more laudable and so forth.
The same applies to violence and a lack of compassion within societies. Payment is much more effective at motivating people than the whip, so with increased wealth slavery vanished, and with payment the peasants had something to lose from violence in the sense that they could be fined or thrown in prison and lose their jobs.
Until today in most parts of the world most people are well educated enough to have heard arguments for and against violence, and most people have so much to lose and so little to gain that they reject the arguments for. The little sting of conscience people get from hurting others is far greater than the sting they get from not eating, so most people are essentially pacifist. Sure people will hit one another, but most people are horrified at the thought of permanently injuring someone else, or hurting someone for pleasure.
Blake: Thank you. A very well reasoned, thought provoking response.
You say that in the past, when times were stable and people were wealthy that they were likely to treat each other decently. In current times, in the same situation, people act in the same way. So, doesn’t that mean that we haven’t moved forward; we just respond to the circumstances - now as in the past.
Well first off I didn’t say that. It’s hard to think of time on the past when things were stable and people were wealthy, or at least for the period of generations it seems to require to shoft these things.
If we generalise about Rome for example, then when things were stable most people were incredibly poor and living on welfare if they weren’t actually slaves.
However I see no reason to believe what you say is incorrect. People haven’t evolved biologically, cultures have evolved. If you took a baby from the bronze age and raised him in modern day France he’s have the sensibiities and moralities of a modern day Frenchman.
Nonethless our species has advanced. Humans have been advancing far faster than we can biologically change for the last 100, 000 years at least. That’s the great advantage of our language and our large adpatable brains. We’ve got a method that can transmit beneficial behavioural changes inependent of biological evolution.
This is the crux of what I’m discussing. I think that there *are *people who will go on a violent rampage at the drop of a hat, or who will hurt someone for pleasure, and there are others who, equally, will be horrified at the thought of that.
I think that is as true of people today as in the past. Plus ca change.
I think that brutal dictatorships legitimises brutal behaviour. Sure, there might be some normally non-violent people who for some reason become violent, but it also gives the violently inclined the circustances where they can be violent without repurcussions.
It’s worth noting that all the talk of progress has been of progress from the state of human beings in recorded history, e.g. from about 4000 BCE untilthe rise of liberal democracy. And that’s certainly a lot of progress.
But the species is a lot older than that - a hundred thousand years older. And there is considerable evidence to suggest human being treated each other much better prior to the development of agriculture and animal husbandry than they did afterwards; indeed, many theorize that it was the development of those things that brought us tyranny, genocide, and suppression of individuality.
So while we’ve made lots of progress recently, consider the possibility that we’re just getting back a lot of what we may once have had.
I’ll be surprised if there is any real evidence other than speculation.
But keep in mind that we didn’t have as much interaction with people not like “us” back then, so the opportunity for the type mass scale barbarism against “others” that we’ve seen in historical times wasn’t as common.
Also, if you’re a nomadic hunter/gatherer, you don’t have a lot of excess material and manpower to wage systematic warfare against another group. You need to settle down and start accumulating things for that. So again, did we actually change (ie, our fundamental nature) or did we just react in a different way to different circumstances. People often invoke the inter-tribal warfare of the native New Guinea populations as evidence that primitive hunter/gathers wage warfare, but these are not hunter/gathers, but settled farmers and keepers of livestock who supplement their food with hunting and gathering, not actual hunter/gatherers.
Re: your last paragraph. It’s not only barbarity en masse that I was thinking about. He could have been cruel and intolerant to his fellow tribesmen, or -man - as some of us are now. Whether we have changed down the ages is what I am wondering about.
There is some interesting research going on to see if civilization has had an effect on human behavior-- pushing us in one direction of another, genetically. Some of it is outlined nicely in the book “After the Dawn”. But I would not call any of that research “accepted scientific consensus” yet. At this point, the consensus is that we are essentially the same animal we were at least 60,000* years ago. Keep in mind that, compared to most of the other primates, most humans are relatively non-violent towards members of their immediate group.
*There is some debate about whether we were “fully modern” before that time period, and you will often here scientists refer to older populations as “anatomically modern”, implying that we don’t know whether they were as developed mentally-- especially wrt language.
It’s a Canadian comedy series that has no illusions about how much the past sucked. It has a wiki page explaining the basic premise (i.e. what if television had existed for the last 5,000 years) and numerous clips on youtube.
A segment from an episode on Ivan the Terrible, where Ivan goes on Oprah is pretty good, with a lead-in by series host Rick Green.
The Slave Hunter is also pretty funny in part because one passage sounds eerily familiar to any SDMB member:
“We were in the middle of a debate, and she used inductive reasoning and an ad hominem argument, and then she bit me.”