That was my first thought - in a few generations, the prevailing view will likely be “Back then, there was already perfectly good science that proved that fossil fuels so on were wrecking the whole planet, yet they kept doing it. What a bunch of jerks!”
Obligate Star Trek quotes (from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home):
McCoy: [McCoy, masked and in surgical garb, passes an elderly woman groaning on a gurney in the hallway] What’s the matter with you?
Elderly patient: [weakly] Kidney
[pause]
Elderly patient: dialysis.
McCoy: [geniunely surprised] Dialysis?
[musing to himself]
McCoy: What is this, the Dark Ages?
[He turns back to the patient and hands her a large white pill]
McCoy: Here,
[pause]
McCoy: you swallow that, and if you have any more problems, just call me!
[He pats her cheek and leaves]
And, a bit later:
McCoy: Chemotherapy! Dialysis! Sounds more like the goddam Spanish Inquisition!
So how do we stop human rights abuses in unspecified other countries without invading them? I mean, it’s all very well to talk about how we have an obligation to stop human rights abuses in China in the abstract, but what does that mean in particular?
Stop trading with China unless they follow the bill of rights? How is that going to work?
Or to put it another way, people today think slavery is wrong. Now suppose you’re an abolitionist in 1850. You think, just like modern people, that slavery is wrong, and you’d like to stop it. How do you go about stopping slavery? Advocate a civil war over it?
I think the idea that everyone has to go out and find a job in the private sector (or the public sector jobs that are ‘approved of’) will one day go away. The world’s needs are likely to be served by a small percentage of people working in the private sector and most people will have jobs serving the public needs. It’s inevitable, and the sooner the better.
Those are somewhat odd speculations, since attempts have been made to wipe out both, and those attempts are what’s now viewed as horrible. The attempt to have the government fully or partially determine who can have children was eugenics, not something looked back on with fondness these days. People such as Robespierre, Lenin, and Mao have attempted to stamp out religion as we know it. (Unsuccessfully, of course.) That’s not regarded as a great idea these days either.
Abolish the concept of the “passport”. All humans are equal, regardless of birthplace. Universal Schengen Zone across the whole of planet earth.
IOW, what Napier said.
Deja Vu from the “what will they think of us in 500 years” thread?
So far all pretty predictable, and largely based on preexisting sociocultural trends and on things that a not-insignificant fraction wishes were already considered censurable; save for the Bones McCoy/medical science bit, which would come under the heading of horrified because of how crude and primitive, not because it was immoral (imagine someone from today’s First World, observing a US Civil War battle hospital…).
I would then if given the chance go along the lines of Post #3: that in a world that DOES have the productive capacity to sustain its population, a huge part of them are allowed to be taken down by lack of adequate food or drinking water and/or by easily preventable or curable health conditions, and it’s just par for the course. They may be horrified that it took so long to be straightened out and that it was for so long considered an externality that it was not efficient to address.
(…now I’m wondering about the reverse question – what that today WE consider horrible or morally reprehensible beyond immediate predictable social trends, will one day be accepted as no big deal .)
Then I will be able to make a profit selling my free ranged critters that have been raised very humanely. I can’t make any sort of living doing it now, I can’t raise enough that would make it profitable to be bought as a batch by a slaughterhouse [they generally will not buy in quantities of less that hundreds of chickens at a time, or a dozen cows or several dozen sheep. And to operate a slaughtering house on the farm requires so many insane hoops that need to be jumped through it is impossible to do now realistically.]
Though I swear I think I actually have an idea how I could produce cloned vat seafood right now - and if it is started from samples taken from living exemplars that are not killed in the process, it would be acceptable for people who object to cruelty and animal slavery to purchase. I simply lack the funding to give it a go.
Yeah and I know how to build a car that runs on water I just need a few million to get off the ground
Capitalism
War on Drugs
Advertising (as much as we have now)
Running peacetime deficits
Treatment of Arabs
War on Unions (e.g. teachers, civil servants, etc)
- Honesty
Stigma and criminalization of the mentally ill.
I wonder how widespread acceptance of vat meat effects the cannibalism taboo? “Long pork” seems to show up in every sci-fi story with artificial meat.
I wish I had the answer to those questions. I don’t.
The thread was “what will people look back and say ‘OMG’ over” not “how do we fix those problems”. The abolitionist in 1850 probably doesn’t have any realistic options for stopping slavery. I don’t have realistic options for allowing free speech for Chinese citizens. That doesn’t mean people 100 years from now will think it was hunky dory. (It doesn’t mean they will know what we should have done either).
I can’t help but think of the The Culture series of novels. The Culture is for the most part a kinder and gentler society than ours, but a lot its people come across to the reader as smug, pampered, assholes.
They get no benefit from (let alone depend on) eating animals, supporting capitalism, polluting, owning slaves, or pretty much anything else mentioned in this thread. They’ve never experienced any form of want, yet smugly condemn the barbarians who, when confronted with these issues, don’t voluntarily impoverish themselves.
In Excession, one of their Minds (advanced AIs) speculates along the lines of: “What if we’re not morally superior at all? What if it just looks that way because doing the right thing never requires us to make sacrifices? Maybe we’d prove to be much worse than most barbarians if put to the test.”
That’s the first thing that popped into my mind. We may already be seeing this happen with the sudden concern about concussions.
Speaking of that, I do think Americans in the future will agree that a lot of the people incarcerated now thanks to the war on drugs were political prisoners.
-Legalized abortion (along with certain cases of tolerated infanticide as per the Groningen protocal)
-War on Drugs
-Poverty being considered a moral failing
-White flight, in particular from public schools
-Casual divorce
-Opposition to nuclear power
-Modern pop culture (“twerking”, reality shows, rap music, modern art, and similar examples of degeneracy)
-Obsession with novelty
-Toleration of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder (for example in Darfur)
The whole question of personal responsibility. Once it is scientifically confirmed that free will and responsibility is a pseudo-scientific myth and that responsibility is a social construct, the entire system of addressing ‘deviant human behaviour’ will change making modern penal and other social control policies seem as medieval as I currently find them.
Judicial killing, mass incarceration as vengeance and so on.
So in this new Age of Enlightenment will there be a perfected Ludovico technique, or do we all collectively shrug our shoulders and say “oh well, murderers gonna murder”?
Awesome?