I think that the idea that the OP is trying to get at is, “What if people become more intolerant in the future, and look back at our tolerance with disdain and disgust?”
My answer to that is, I don’t think it will happen, and therefore, do not feel the need to “future proof” myself from that eventuality, and in the unlikely case that it does, I really don’t care what future bigots think of me.
What about my real-life examples from post #115? 1940-50s China and 1930s Germany. No one knew what side would end up looking better down the road, despite some sides obviously disadvantaging groups of humans.
~Max
Deciding which side to support in an aggressive war over territory is vastly different than deciding to write an opinion piece on persecuting women, it’s a completely different context than this discussion started off with. Sure, if there’s a multi-party territorial war then deciding which of the parties (if any) to publicly support could cause problems when the war ends. But that’s not really ‘people’s views will shift in 40 years and you might be looked at harshly’, that’s ‘someone is going to win this war in the near future and will be looking for traitors to punish when it’s over’.
And outright Nazis? You’re seriously even asking ‘gosh, how could anyone figure out that supporting the Nazis might lead to them being judged harshly by their descendants?’ The Nazis were a racist genocidal regime that endorsed large-scale conquest, slave labor, ethnic cleansing, and treating Jews as disease-ridden parasites- and this was all written down in Mein Kampf, it’s not just things that were found out after the war was over. For anyone trying to hedge their bets, I think it’s a very safe bet that endorsing large scale slave labor, explicitly racist ideology, treating Jews as a parasites, conquest, and ethnic cleansing will get you looked at poorly in future judgement.
Unless that side wins.
Recall the financial old saw that “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
Applied to politics that turns into “The government can remain beastly brutal and totalitarian longer than you or your living descendants would naturally live.”
Which is not to defend the proposition that “Good Germans” should have embraced Naziism. Nor the proposition that Golightly’s screed was a smart (or morally correct) thing to publish in 1980-whatever.
It would be easy to conclude on the basis of, say, 1945-2015 that Progress is fore-ordained. As we are seeing in nations across the planet, including the USA, Progress often triggers a mighty backlash. Over the long sweep of history I hope it’ll be repeated two-plus steps forward one step back. But the idea that’s what’s taking shape now is the beginning of a 500+ year Dark Ages is not out of the question.
Once a lot of people begin to buy into that mindset Progress will be seen as dangerous heresy. The reward for heretics has always been found only in Heaven, not on Earth.
So it’s your belief that we’re at the start of a Dark Age, and that part of that Dark Age will be that people who didn’t actively write articles supporting treating minorities badly during the current era will be judged harshly by future generations? Or that they’ll be unable to qualify for jobs in a few decades because they didn’t publish a screed about how awful trans people or blacks or women or some other group were today? You’re writing a lot of flowery stuff, like the “Progress is fore-ordained” line that other people didn’t say, but don’t seem to be saying much of substance about the actual topic of the thread.
I REALLY don’t think that ‘did you fail to write an article about persecuting X group during 2010-2030’ is going to become a litmus test for future careers, since most people just don’t write articles on topics like that at all.
If you’re not defending the proposition, what are you actually trying to say? You strung together some sayings but didn’t seem to say anything concrete about the “gosh, how could someone at the time determine that the Nazis would likely be viewed badly by future generations even though they were already viewed badly by a large part of the current generation”.
I’m a Progressive. I’ve got almost 20 years of writings on SDMB to attest to that. A week doesn’t go by when I don’t write the line “Be the change you want to see.”
Of late in many threads I hear a lot of triumphalism from certain Progressives. That of course the future will be better, more just, more enlightened, etc. It’s as inevitable as sunrise.
I merely offer a cautionary tale that history does not reward triumphalism. Or if it does, it may be a lot more years in the future than one might hope.
Nothing more and nothing less.
Traditional Chinese thought, mainstream before the Communist Revolution, was somewhat neo-Confucian and placed great value on following gender roles. Mao Zedong was very much against that, at least in theory, and argued that women and men were equal and should enter the workforce. You may recall that it was none other than he who said, “women hold up half the sky”. And so it was the Communists who represented progress on the front of women’s rights.
But as we were just saying, in the 30’s and 40’s, the Chinese people didn’t know that Communists would win. The idea that women should work outside of their homes or brothels was a fringe idea associated with Communism. It ran counter to the traditional neo-Confucian morality, which did not necessarily dictate that women are inferior, but still emphasized social harmony through traditional gender roles.
So the matter is then put to a progressive Chinese citizen of that era, perhaps you shouldn’t publish that essay pushing for women to enter the workplace. After all, there is a good chance the Communists, your only sympathizers, won’t win the war and then where does that leave you?
Regarding the Germans, remember that the Weimar Republic never fought a war. It was not clear in the early '30s that a Nazi dictatorship would replace the Republic. It wasn’t until the 1929 referendum that the Nazis had any sort of credibility at all, not until January 1933 that Hitler was made chancellor, not until after the Reichstag fire in February that the Nazis started suspending civil liberties. Most ironic is that you have interpreted me as saying, ‘gosh, supporting the Nazis might hurt me in the long run’ instead of ‘gosh, calling out this new political party might get me killed a few years from now’. For anyone trying to hedge their bets, it was anything but safe to criticize the Nazi party in the 1930s. The Nazis came perilously close to winning the war when it did happen, anyways.
~Max
Anything you say or don’t say, do or don’t do, can be used against you at any time.
It’s always been that way. That’s what people do.
The only difference is that in about 10 years, everything you ever did or said (or didn’t do or say) in the last 20 years will be traceable to you personally and available to everybody.
“Can you believe people used to post under fake names? What a buncha cowards. What moron ever thought THAT was a good idea, they thought that people wouldn’t eventually be able to find out who they were? Stupid assholes.”
I do think modern morality is objectively better than, say, the US during the time slavery was legal. The question is whether or not a continued improvement is the natural course of things. If you had asked me four years ago, I’d have said of course it is. Now, I’m not so sure. To paraphrase from the peak oil thread, we may have hit peak morality as a species some time in the mid-2010s. Probably somewhere around 11/7/2016 for those of us here in the US.
Since we really don’t know what the future will be like decades from now, it’s pretty hard to live by it.
I wasn’t around in those days, but I assume that people of those times who held to the morality of “don’t hurt other people unless it’s necessary in the defense of others” probably were able to see it clearly. Had whoever opposed Hitler in the early 1930s and Chiang Kai-shek won their respective conflicts, the world today would be a much better place. I assume that many people alive in those times and places also knew that.
You brought the stuff about Nazi support in response to me. At what point, exactly, did I state any advice that could be interpreted as ‘criticize the Nazi party if you’re living in 1930s Germany’? My advice was that you don’t publish things critical of minority groups and you’ll probably be safe from future judgement, not that you publish criticism of any particular group. The topic of this thread was being hurt in the long run by being judged by people decades off, not getting killed by a particular regime in the next few years, so I was being generous when I interpreted your comments as being relevant to the topic of the thread instead of a non-sequitor.
People trying to “hedge their bets” by supporting a genocidal regime in their own time are almost certainly not going to be judged well in the future. Either they’re going to get caught in some shift in the genocidal regime’s politics and end up on the wrong side of a ‘night of the long knives’ style reckoning (by the end of the Nazi regime, almost all of the original supporters were considered traitors to the cause), or the regime eventually falls apart and later generations are… less than friendly to people who supported it. I’m not really sure what point you’re trying to make, or how you think this is relevant to the concerns raised in the OP.
And again, switching context from ‘what will people think of me in four decades’ to ‘might I get killed by the Nazi regime that I’m living in today’ is a bit of a jump. It’s pretty clear that the thread was talking about judgement decades out, not ‘future’ in the sense of ‘two months from now’.