Inspired by the Darwin was a racist and a eugenicist thread ongoing I got thinking about what modern day practice and philosophy will our descendents find abhorrent. Maybe our general disregard for our natural environment will be considered the failing of early 21st century humanity. What do you think?
Well, homophobia of course.
I’d like to think organized religion eventually, but that probably ain’t gonna happen anytime soon.
Suturing up wounds was considered barbaric by Dr. McCoy, so who knows? Maybe laser cauterization or gluing will be the future of surgery.
Spanking children will probably disappear in the near future.
Could slaughterhouses and chicken farms be viewed as barbaric at some point?
Children being raised by unqualified people just because they are the biological parents.
Animals being slaughtered for meat instead of using tissue cultures.
Reality Television as entertainment.
People deliberately making unhealthy foods for other people to eat.
Trolling and hacking being considered childish pranks.
Wasting petroleum in private cars.
Smoking and the death penalty.
1.Taking a medicine which is mass-produced. It will seem as disgusting in the future as using leeches to “bleed” a patient seems to us. Why would anyone take a medicine that isn’t custom designed to match his DNA?
- It will be consider child abuse to let a kid leave the house without their cell phone/GPS device.
Then, after a few decades, the law will require implanting a chip in each newborn. This will start as a medical requirement, so each person’s full DNA profile will be available for every trip to the doctor. After society becomes used to the idea of chip, some parents will willingly add GPS locater info to it, for their own security and peace of mind. And then it will become law.
Trophy hunting and fishing
Either single family homes, or apartment complexes, depending on if energy is expensive or cheap.
Forcing everyone to actually drive/commute to work every day, when most of them can work from home.
Nursing homes.
Having children who are not genetically engineered. Eventually, I expect it will be considered the equivalent of deliberately crippling them.
Being forced to work if you want to live at all well.
Centering your view of someone’s worth on whether they work and at what ( since I expect most people won’t work when the economy becomes automated enough ).
Standardized testing of students with the aim of raising everyone above average.
Elective abortion.
Is it just me, or are threads like these less about what modern thoughts or practices will be considered barbaric, and more about what modern thoughts or practices posters currently consider are barbaric?
For all we know, they’ll think of voting as barbaric, or women being considered equal to me.
Is this one, or two answers? 
Both. Heck, for all I know, having babies w/o gov’t licensing will be considered barbaric in the future.
Definitely both. I just wonder what the mote in our eyes is. We go “OMG, they were so racist in the 19th century” and don’t realise what we’re doing wrong. Most of us live in multicultural, liberal democracies which have enacted laws to protect those who were discriminated against in the past and would continue to be sans these laws.
Exactly…that’s why these threads always say more about the posters than about what may or may not happen in the future. Maybe in the future there will be a heavy religious resurgence and they will look back on our time as hopelessly secular. Perhaps women will go back to being second class citizens and folks will think ‘how the hell did they justify giving them the right to vote??’ Maybe people will look back at all the eco-nuts and neo-Luddites and wonder how we put up with such groups putting the brakes on progress and stifling innovation in the name of trying to help nature, the people, or whatever? Or maybe the converse will be true and we’ll have a huge anti-technology movement, and people who advocated technology will be demonized. Hell, look how good folks in the past were about predicting how things would be today? 
Personally, getting out my own crystal ball, I think the various green movements will be looked back on as Communism is today, as misguided and counter productive (though not quite as deadly), that people will look back with scorn and incomprehension on things like taking children from their homes at young ages to be put in athletic factories (I’m looking at YOU, China!) to perhaps win a few bright bits of metal every 4 years. I also think that people in the future will look back and wonder why the hell we screwed around so long before really pushing the fronteers of space exploration and exploitation ('Why the hell didn’t they go out and mine the resources they needed from the solar system? Idiots! They sat and squabbled over the dregs when they had unimaginable resources available if they got off their fat asses and just went out and got them!). And speaking of fat asses…I’m hopeful that future generations will look back at our time with a bit of disgust for the food we ate and how we let ourselves become so overweight as a society.
Of course, all this says more about me than it does about what may or may not actually happen in the future…
-XT
Highly unlikely, since without an environmental movement they’ll all be coughing up black gunk, in refugee camps because their home town on the coast is now underwater, starving while the crops die and dying themselves while young. The environment isn’t something you can just ignore for ideological reasons without being forcibly reminded that yes, it DOES matter.
Well, YMMV…personally I think that it will be a technology and market solution that eventually gets us out of any difficulties with the environment we are in (of course, I see it as technology and market solutions that have made us progress as far as we have to date as well), not the yammerings of some unwashed eco-nuts and thinly disguised neo-Luddite types. The SERIOUS ecologists in the future (IMHO) will embrace things like nuclear power and powerful ecological technologies…and people will wonder why we let the fears and prejudices of the nutball wing dictate and foot drag for so long.
Guess we’ll see if we live long enough, ehe? (I plan to live for a few centuries myself, evil technologist that I am!)
-XT
I wouldn’t be very surprised if eating meat (at least meat not grown in vats) was considered barbaric by our descendants. Assuming that we keep getting richer, inventing new things, being more productive etc… as opposed to wiping ourselves from the surface of the planet.
Well…personally I’m hoping that in the future they want to eat MORE meat and less veggies. But that’s just me…
(My guess though is that we’ll probably go to more plant grown foods instead of meat on the hoof so to speak. Seems like that’s the direction technology is headed atm…and if we do, then people may look back on cows, pigs, chickens, etc in the same way that WE now look at the horse…as opposed to how our ancestors looked at them)
-XT
Natural childbirth.
Who would want to go through all that pain and danger and fuss when mommy and daddy can just drop by Babies-R-Us and pick up their freshly decanted genetically engineered little angel.
And pretty much every current medical practice.
Drugging children for behavioral disorders
Plastic surgery for cosmetic (as opposed to reconstructive) purposes. It amazes me that a society which endorses breast implants and Botox looks askance at corsets and neck stretching