Why Judge The Past By Standards Of Today?

Great Debates
61

That’s true, because I signed a document saying that the bank has a lien on my house; that document was instrumental in their loaning me the money to buy the house. Absent such a lien, I’m not sure you have a similar situation.

Furthermore, the bank can’t prevent me from letting my house go to shit. Jefferson could, for example, have secretly purchased tickets for his slaves to send them to a nation in which slavery wasn’t practiced, or at least where the US law enforcement couldn’t reach. Maybe such an act would have been illegal, but the law itself was unethical at the time, rendering its observance ethically irrelevant.

The ones who believed their slaves were happy said, “Look, guys, work as much as you want, or as little as you want. I won’t beat you for lack of work, but if you’re not doing enough work, I’ll stop feeding you, and you’ll have to find work elsewhere.” The ones who didn’t believe their slaves were happy used explicit or implicit threats of physical violence and/or emotional torture (e.g., selling family members) to coerce obedience from people they believed were otherwise unwilling to engage in the labor relationship.

And the thing is, I’m completely unaware of any slaveowner who followed the first course of action–almost by definition, because at the point where you give someone the right to make a choice, you’re no longer a slaver.

62

I didn’t say “everybody” said so. Don’t play these games, ok. It’s old.

No it isn’t. We know what they wrote, and plenty of people were condemning the barabarity of slavery even in Jefferson’s time. People didn’t just wake up one day and suddenly realize slavery was wrong. They knew damn well how evil it was and many of them said so.

63

You said they knew it was evil. So now are you saying that only those people who said it was evil knew it was evil? If so, that would seem to be a small subset of the population. IOW, Martin Hyde was right-- we don’t know what they were thinking.

And plenty of people were justifying slavery. You’re right, though, that we didn’t just wake up and suddenly realize slavery was wrong. We really didn’t have the scientific understanding of what it meant to be human. Even Lincoln didn’t really think Blacks were equal to whites.

64

Are you addressing a specific poster or are you talking to yourself?

65

Anyway, my first post in this thread really sums up my feelings on the whole thing. If you learn about people from the past, you need to recognize both good and bad. I’m actually very staunchly not a moral relativist.

I openly think most practitioners of Islam are monsters because they treat their wives and daughters abominably and they think it’s fine to stone people to death for various minor infractions. I don’t make excuses for them because of the radical Islamic societies they live in.

I don’t make excuses for all the people in sub-Saharan Africa who practice female genital mutilation and et cetera. Basically, I’m not a moral relativist.

However, I do think that I personally can condemn other people and judge other people, while still saying “but I think the reason they do these things is x.” I don’t think saying “they’re just evil monster” really helps my understanding of the world or helps anything at all, really.

If we just point to repressive Islamic and sub-Saharan cultures and say “they’re just evil monsters” we’re doing nothing to understand why they are the way they are, and that’s just basically willful ignorance.

If you feel the need to condemn barbaric societies, fine, do so. But why can’t you move past that initial condemnation (you’ve made your point) and actually work to understand the reason cultures are different, and how and why cultures change over time?

Something interesting about chattel slavery in the United States, is that even the people who opposed it were monstrous by our modern definitions. The earliest abolitionists were not really abolitionists because of sympathy for blacks. It was actually their belief that slavery debased the slave owner. In essence they saw it as a personal failing like gambling, abuse of alcohol and et cetera. They didn’t view blacks as human beings, but they viewed exploitation of them to be immoral for the slave owner, akin to abuse of a good horse or something of that nature.

Many abolitionists genuinely believed blacks just weren’t as smart as whites, and needed to be protected and not taken advantage of, just like children. That’s a pretty heinous world view, and insanely racist.

66

Okay explain a sane thought process that could conclude torture, and rape were good things. Because that’s what slavery is, using torture as tool for subjugation and rape which is is in its self torture.

Really? To paraphrase Shakespeare who predated some of these evil slaver monsters by hundred of years:

“Hath not a slave eyes? Hath not a slave hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means,
warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer
as a freeman is? If you prick them, do they not bleed?
If you tickle them, do they not laugh? If you poison them,
do they not die?”

Explain how anyone who isn’t a retard or self justifying liar could examine a slave and conclude them anything but a human of another color?
Slave owners were monsters, or deluded fools. Either way they propagated such evil that they and their supporters should have their remains moved to a sewage storage plant, except it’d be an insult to the shit.

67

I’ll be the first to say I’m a little tetched, but I do believe our society is evil. We live in a society where the snots who created the biggest global recession since the 1930s were not only left unpunished, but were rewarded by the government in the form of high-profile jobs…regulating the same industry that they ripped to shreds. That’s the kind of evil society we live in. Where the winners always win, even when they shouldn’t. (And dontcha know, there will be people reading this who think I’m a communistic dunderhead. But if they’ve been reading the paper, especially the Business section, for the last five years, they would have to concede that I’m right. But people don’t read anymore. They just watch TV. That’s not evil, though. That’s tragic.)

We live in a society where people knowingly poison the air and water in the name of jobs and material comfort, and then weep bitterly when they and their children turn up with cancers and other diseases. And we also live in a society where we talk a good game about “brotherhood of man” and doing what Jesus would do, but we laugh in the face of those who do not have insurance and scream “IT’S YOUR FAULT!!!” when those people plead for assistance. That is, until it’s us who’s doing the pleading.

We live in a society that talks a good game about freedom and liberty, all the while looking the other way when our government supports other societies who deprive their own populations of those very concepts.

We live in a society where people shop at Walmart to find the cheapest, most unnecessary stuff, and then sniff our noses at the Third World for not being as intelligent and hard-working as we are…even though those low low prices are directly due to our exploitation of those “primitive” people and their natural resources.

We are a society where people talk about family and values, as if those things automatically go hand-in-hand and are self-explanatory to boot, but those same people don’t want foster kids to go to certain welcoming homes or see people who love each other getting married.

We live in a society that’s still rife with racism, sexism, homophobia, nationalism, religious bigotry, and every other -ism out there. Our society is also superficial, materialistic, greedy, and downright mean sometimes.

Strangely, as individuals we tend towards goodness. But when you look at what we do when we’re all jumbled up together, a lot of badness seems to come out of us. Some good stuff eeks out too, but taken as a whole, our society is fucked up. Compared to the Founding Fathers’ day, we might be better in some ways. But we’re still messed up. I’m not ready to draw a line between us and them quite yet. Evolution occurs over millions of years. Thomas Jefferson might as well have died an hour ago in the grand scheme of things.

So…why shouldn’t we say our society is evil? Because we happen to be living in it? That seems mighty convenient, doesn’t it? IMHO, the question isn’t “Are we evil?” It’s “How do we STOP being evil?” We know the answer, so even this question is rhetorical. We know how we can be better. But just like the slaveowners of yore, we just don’t want to do those things. And just like those “good” people, we have tons of justifications for why we shouldn’t have to.

68

Well said!

69

In the real world those words monstro spoke don’t mean much. People will never look at themselves and say “wow, everything we’re doing is evil.”

And really, they’re right. The SDMB is a strange place, incredibly leftist and liberal, however on the issue of good and evil the SDMB is strangely more conservative than any other place I’m aware of–for whatever reason it is definitely a majority opinion here that the whole world and everything in it is either GOOD or EVIL.

I tend to think very few things are truly good or truly evil, things just are. Political systems, societies, corporations, people, are all complex entities. Sometimes they behave in evil ways, sometimes good ways. Sometimes in ambiguous ways. Just waxing about good and evil really doesn’t do anything, it’s actually so simplistic as to basically be the stupidest possible way of looking at things.

A smart person would recognize we live in a flawed society, yes. But all of humanity is flawed, I think on the balance we’re less flawed now than we were in 1789, and we’ll be less flawed in 2111 than we are today.

70

I agree with you on a lot of this, but…

…I think that you’re confused on some facts. We’ll start with the easy one: significantly more than half of all practitioners of Islam don’t have wives. And I think you’re engaging in hyperbole when you talk about your other facts.

Agreed.

71

That sums up my feelings pretty much exactly. There’s hardly anything I hate more than black-and-white thinking, and it’s pervasive among certain posters on this message board.

72

The root of the golden rule and any sensible morality system is avoiding inflicting unnecessary suffering. By that logic we are very evil, we inflict suffering each other, on future generations and on other species needlessly. Could we change over night?

Probably not, but maybe if people took a good hard look at their lives and how they could be better we’d makes changes this very generation, very big and important ones that give the future so much, and that we’d get so much out of in return. These changes aren’t an economic system, nor a government system, nor a religion.

They’re simply developing love and concern for our fellows. From that concern capitalism, socialism or communism would lose their teeth and become irreverent. Despots would lose their might in the face of armies that won’t fire on their own people, and democracies would clean up their corruptions.

Sadly greed, persecution, and intolerance have much more power, and as such they give us the world we know thanks to we the people who live in this world.

Whenever a priceless rainforest is clear cut to print tabloids, whenever bankers dance gleefully in piles of bailout money, their reward for trashing the economy while the poor struggle just to get basic medical care, whenever poverty kills untold thousands in the third world it is because you, me, and the rest of world choose to allow it to happen.

Earth could be a paradise if we chose it, yet we choose suffering and hardship.

73

That’s meaningless clap trap, and obviously this thread is now officially off the tracks.

Just because we’re rich and other countries are poor doesn’t mean we actually have the power to turn them into paradises. That’s fucking arrogance to think we have that sort of power.

If the entirety of the First World decided to turn the planet into a paradise the only way they could even hope to succeed would be by forming a unitary government and conquering the entire Third World and rebuilding it from the ground up.

We’ve seen examples of First World nations taking over Third World nations and rebuilding them. Most people would note that such processes cause immense suffering for the inhabitants of the Third World nation, and many argue about whether such a venture is a net good or bad.

Note that even to get to that point we’ve entered the realm of fantasy, the realm of the not possible in this lifetime. No, the truth is no matter how much sunshine and light we embrace, we do not have the power to make the whole world better. We have the power to make things a very little bit better. Next generation it will get a bit better, and it will slowly build. I hope you take a giant reality pill because what you just preached isn’t just wrongheaded, it’s dangerous.

74

No, not everything we do is evil. When people give to others in the form of charity, or follow kindly traditions like bringing food to the grieving, or invent solutions to problems that seem so insurmountable, those are moments when the goodness of humanity shines through. When we have a lot of these moments, we should be proud of ourselves. And we can judge these things as Good. No need to hold back on congratulations when they are deserved.

We have talked slavery to death, but I just have to say this. I have bitterness towards that time period not only because of my ancestral connection, but because it does represent a major stain on the founding of this country. I can’t look back at the Founding Fathers with special reverance like others can. I can look at them as people from history, but that’s about it.

However, when I think of places like [url="http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Oberlin,_Ohio"Oberlin, OH, I can’t help but feel that humanity is not always, nor is it destined to be, evil. If Oberlin existed so early in this country’s history, why weren’t there more of them? What was so special about the white people who lived there versus other places? Were they angels sent from above? Had a time traveler come just to Oberlin and successfully convinced them of the benefits of integration? None of these things happened, of course. The answer is that the whole country could have been like Oberlin if people had wanted to be like Oberlin. Just like the whole country could be like France or Canada, or even, Nigeria–where people are said to be the happiest people on Earth despite it all.

If it makes me a conservative to see how badly we are acting and how good we could be if we just worked at it, then I guess I’m a conservative. But I dunno. American conservatives always tell us how good our society is, how certain individuals–a new group each generation–are always undermining its goodness, and how it’s the duty of the righteous to stop them. This has been the conservative refrain since the beginning of this country. But I don’t have this belief. I believe our society is not good and that all of us–all of whom have a general tendency for goodness–have a responsibility for making it better. It is true that liberals tend to see things less in black and white than conservatives do. But that doesn’t mean they can’t distinguish right from wrong. Liberals have always been in the forefront of righteous revolution, at least in the history of the US. So I am a liberal, not a conservative. Of this I am sure.

It’s a cop-out to say that all of humanity is flawed and that’s just how it is, let’s how another beer, man. Yeah, we all are flawed, but no, that’s not how it HAS to be. We don’t have to wait to die to go to heaven. We have all the tools here and now for us to have heaven here, for everyone, in the real world. But it’s hard work, as the folks of Oberlin discovered. Some people endure the hard work because they are sincerely bothered by injustice, even when it doesn’t involve them. Other people take the easy route because they only care about justice for themselves. That was true then and it’s true now. All we have to do is create more Oberlins.

Where’s that time traveler when you need her?

75

You seemed to have missed the fucking point. It’s not the first world that chooses the state of the world, it’s the world. Imperial decree through murderous force is just as evil as allowing starvation.

Each and every one of us, from the president down to 3rd world beggars chooses this world because the collective result of these choices is our world. It’s a terrible yet wondrous world, it has such beauty and love yet such violence, and suffering.

Again it’s not a government that’s gonna save us, if anything will, but love and concern for our fellows. Imperialism and colonialism was not love and concern but exploitation. Love and concern were the abolitionists, the people on the underground railroad, civil rights leaders. Those were the people who gave us something valuable. It’s people like them that will cure us of our ongoing depravity.

76

Y’know how when you talked about Muslims, you assumed that the women didn’t count as practitioners? You’re doing the same thing here, sort of: you’re assuming that when Tao’s Revenge talks about what “we” choose, he’s only talking about rich people in first world countries. From his post, it seems pretty clear that his first-person plural includes all humanity.

Edit: ninjaed!

77

Again, no we do not have the tools to make the world a paradise in the here and now.

Mainly because the only way to do that realistically is to 1) make everyone a different person than they are, on a fundamental level (make them believe different things and behave in a different way) or 2) to use force to make people behave in the way you want.

By using the second method, you’ve created the opposite of paradise.

The only way to achieve it through the first method is through lots of time and the progression of generations.

What you’re saying is akin to saying “if only magical unicorns would come from the sky and make us all immortal energy beings of pure altruism everything would be fine.” Because what you are basically saying is “if everyone on earth unlearned the entirety of their lives and behaved in the manner I equate with paradise, the world would be great.” Yeah, that’s so realistic I can’t see why it isn’t a widespread movement.

78

Alright, I agree then.

If every single person on the planet changed their fundamental being the world would be paradise.

If I found out my house was built on the world’s largest oil reserve I’d be a billionaire.

If I found out I was from Krypton and invulnerable to anything save kryptonite, and hey, could also fly, breathe frost, see through solid matter, run at supersonic speeds, possessed unimaginable strength, hearing and et cetera, I could be Superman.

79

I’m not particularly impressed by your line of attack here, nor is it really worth much response. It’s obvious the intentions of my words and I don’t quibble on the minor nits.

80

I was actually giving Tao’s Revenge credit by making the (erroneous) assumption that he was talking about people in the first world making the world a better place. That at least has some grounding in reality, the First World could do a lot to improve conditions around the globe, stuff we aren’t doing now.

I didn’t realize he was flying on a moonbeam of happiness talking about every single fucking human on the planet unlearning a life time of lessons, altering their entire being. I apologize for thinking he was being somewhat realistic and not fucking outrageous.