“Humans throughout human history did it this way, so you should too”
At times I confront people using methods that are dangerous, time-consuming, etc. As a result, they defend themselves by saying that either they’ve always been taught this way since they were young or that humans throughout history, smarter, wiser, stronger, etc, than us have been doing it this way. Why challenge all of those people?
I feel it’s wrong, but I’m not sure what to say. Can I get your insight on this?
In a lot of cases, they’re wrong – there are few things that “humans throughout history” have always done in only a single way. You can challenge it on that end.
You can also point out that there are things that people have done for a long time due to tradition or habit that still can be wrong and result in bad outcomes.
Human beings treated ulcers as if they were a gaping hole in your stomach caused by racy movies and too much pizza for, who knows, hundreds of years. Until somebody figured out it was a simple bacterial infection.
But since you asked for advice in a straightforward manner, here is some:
Tell them that evolution is an ongoing process. Every year, somebody thinks up a new and brilliant way to do something or other. This is the joy and the miracle of the human mind. We can make prosthetic limbs that you can move with your mind; we have solid plans to put a human habitation on Mars very soon. Why shouldn’t we embrace the spirit of innovation? Because of it, we can fly! Doctors in San Francisco or New York can do surgery remotely on a patient just about anywhere in the world. Brave little girls in oppressive nations can learn to skateboard, or become the very face of that nations’ peoples’ desire to do better by their children. All the knowledge of the past is precious, precisely because it informs the practices of the future! It is one thing to reach a plateau, but it is something else altogether to stagnate!
How’s that?
First make sure that we’ve actually figured out a better way to accomplish the thing you’re confronting the “old” ways of doing. Sure it could be dangerous to confront/resist someone forcing their will on you, and it’s time consuming to get an education and learn a trade/profession to the degree you need to be successful in the time and place you live. Numerous methods and techniques we’ve figured out long ago don’t cease to be useful just because we figured it out 20 generations previous.
Assuming you’ve got that covered, look at the results of said previous traditional way of doing something from a cost-benefit perspective in the present. Legally speaking, life used to be very cheap and it didn’t matter if you had a dozen people killed during a construction job or a couple hundred died while you figured out the glitches of a large-scale infrastructure project affecting millions (this is still the case in many places).
Today however you have a higher standard of living (again consider where you actually live) which relies on higher standards of performing tasks we’ve been doing for thousands of years which come from the innovations we’ve made in all sorts of areas. Consider how good a life you can expect when you use methods from when we simply didn’t know any better.
“Humans have been doing X-Y-Z for thousands of years so you should too” isn’t an argument at all, it’s a generic statement which may or may not be true or correct. So you have to counter it - if need be - based on the specifics of what the claim is.
I’m seeing a little of this in the current debate over coal-mining jobs. Yes, it’s quite possible that a renewable-energy economy will cause the loss of many, many jobs in the coal-mining sector.
Blacksmiths, stagecoach drivers, and shoe-shine boys are in complete sympathy, but, hey, the world changes, and society must change with it.
(Personally, I can imagine very few jobs which I would less rather have than that of a coal-miner! Extremely hazardous and extremely arduous.)
(I’m watching one of my own jobs – phone-in tech support – becoming obsolete due to AI systems. It’s a bummer…but also a good thing. It’s a crappy job.)
More to the point, it’s doing what humans throughout history have done: acting in the light of experience as guided by intelligence. (Hey, that’s a quote from decades ago!) How many hundreds of years have people been using the scientific method to make new discoveries? How many thousands of years ago was someone coining a phrase about how the only constant is change? How many hundreds of thousands of years before that were our ancestors inventing new spears? How many millions of years before that were they figuring out how best to work with fire?
We’ve conducted experiments and learned new information and acted accordingly. We’ve been playing adapt-and-improvise-and-overcome since time immemorial.
The thing is, sometimes “we’ve always done it this way” is legitimate: it may be a tried and tested solution to something. Why reinvent the wheel?
Other times it’s simple habit and culture, and swept aside now that better solutions exist.
But the point is, the appeal to tradition itself is meaningless. It necessary to talk at the level of : do we think we already have the best solution to this, and why.
What have we always done? Well, in the 1790s, we amended it; and then we amended it again in the early 1800s, before of course amending it a few more times in the wake of the Civil War; and we amended it a couple more times before WWI, and more before WWII; and we amended it in the '50s and in the '60s and in the '70s.
And we’ve amended it since, because, well, making changes is how we’ve always done it. Hell, once we amended it because it seemed like a good idea at the time – and we noticed it wasn’t working out, so we amended that amendment away, because we learned from our mistake and reacted accordingly, because that’s what we do. But mostly we’ve made amendments that stuck, because, hey, it’s our job to make changes; that’s been our job for centuries.
Says so right there in the document itself, y’know?
Now, maybe someone feels like saying it’s because they learned their lesson when the Articles of Confederation didn’t pan out. And maybe someone else feels like saying that came out of a revolution after folks didn’t feel like staying with the status quo. But I figure the key is, the solution they hit upon was to declare oh, hey, this right here, it’s a work in progress, see; we reckon you’ll be amending it.
I ask if the practitioner thinks that the earlier humans derived the current solution at the first attempt. If they believe they did or don’t know I ask, “Well maybe we should try this other way to be sure it isn’t better?” If they think the ancient ones probably tried the other method I ask, “Shouldn’t we have a look at the other method and confirm that it is inferior?”
Hey, hey, hey, can I cheer? I prefer written contact for support, from both sides.
My standard answer is “do you hunt your own food, too?” I know some people who do, but curiously enough, none of them gives the “it’s always been this way” reasoning. There are times it’s justified, at least as a way to open a debate over whether the new way is actually better, but definitely not as the sole and final reason.
Disclaimer: I do use a variant of that reason over the spelling of my name, but it’s actually an euphemism. The actual reason some people want me to change it is political; the actual reason I don’t want to change it is also political; but invoking “my foreparents wrote it this way for about a thousand years and I don’t consider it behooves me to correct them” works. It tells the other person “I am not a Basque-independentist and I am not going to let Basque independentists change my name” in a way that lets him accept my spelling while saving face.
