I have a new column today on OnlySky. It poses a thought experiment: If you were flung hundreds of years into the past, how would your modern morality clash with the sentiments that were commonly held then?
The past wasn’t a nice place, and most of the moral ideas we take for granted today only won out after long struggle. In ages of monarchy, of empire, of colonialism, of patriarchy, of religious supremacism, our modern beliefs in democracy, equality, human rights and tolerance would be shocking, outrageous notions that would put you in league with the most radical thinkers of those days.
Now slide the lesson forward: What beliefs do we hold that the future will abhor? And what does that tell us about what we should be thinking and doing right now, knowing that our era will one day stand in the judgment of history?
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column requires membership to read, but you can sign up for free. (Paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter and the ability to post comments.)
So, what would you do as a modern person trapped in the past?
Hopefully, you’d be a shining light to those dark ages. You’d join the visionaries and reformers who stood against popular prejudice. You might become a crusader for free thought, sheltering religious dissenters from the wrath of the Inquisition, writing books that defended people’s right to make up their own minds. You might take up arms in the revolution and fight for democracy.
You might oppose imperialism and speak up for indigenous rights against colonizers who wanted to exterminate them. You might make your dwelling a station on the Underground Railroad, a secret shelter for people escaping from slavery into freedom. You might hide Jewish families from pogroms. You might march in the nascent movements for women’s suffrage or civil rights.
You’d do these things, not just because you’d have the benefit of knowing you were on the right side of history, but because you’d know it was the right thing to do. Your conscience would demand no less.
How far back in the past? As I just learned today, sportzballz player Pete Rose, who just died, had a habit in the 1970s of having girls ages 12 – 14 brought to him so he could rape them.
The 1970s. I remember the 1970s. I don’t recall this ever being news, along with the rock stars who got custody of very-young teens and then raped them. All of this was kept quiet, no big deal, it’s just women and girls, nothing important about crimes against them.
Yeah, you wouldn’t have to go very far back at all to find morals that are drastically incompatible with ours. (And it’s not necessarily that we’re *that* much better than the 1970s, but #MeToo and other feminist movements have at least set a baseline expectation that sexual predation is a bad thing and shouldn’t be politely tolerated.)
That’s consistent with a model of moral progress which accelerates over time. Good news for people further into the future. Of course, it’s small consolation for people who lived in the past.
Considering how much of the news I read these days is about powerful people trying to bring back bad ideas from the past which range from “unpopular” to “extremely unpopular” today, and force them on everyone else, it’s definitely not the case that everyone would be a “shining beacon”. They’d be every bit as much convinced of their rightness if they were trying to fight for future stagnation, and not, you know, just trying to keep their head down and survive like most people would do in that situation.
(I didn’t read the article because it’s subscriber only.)
Admittedly, this is a best-case scenario. Some people might just keep their heads down and try not to make waves.
But I like to think a person of good character wouldn’t be able to sit idly by. Hell, plenty of people in the *past* fought against those oppressions, and they didn’t have the advantage of knowing their cause would emerge victorious in the end. I aspire to have at least that much moral courage.
Once more: Where can one read this without signing up for anything?
Tell me, do you often go into a small business and ask the owner where you can get the same products without paying for them? If you don’t, what leads you to expect that obnoxious behavior would work better in this case?
I think things are slowly changing. Most people will say its not cool for grown men to rape 12-year-old girls, and it’s not cool for other people to procure 12-year-old girls for grown men to rape. Moreover, the Southern Baptist and Evangelical-whatever-sect men who have committed abuse are being censured.
To support what you said, I point you toward the 1970s-era tv smash hit “All in the Family”, featuring Archie Bunker–a blue-collar white man–who was on the wrong side of pretty much every issue. Over the course of the show, he grew for the better because of the women, people of color, and occasional special guest stars (I think Sammy Davis Junior was one) around him. For children there was the program “Free to Be You And Me”, hosted by a number of stars who taught through songs and skits and cartoons that it was okay for boys to play with dolls and for girls to want to be doctors.
False comparison. I’m not trying to get some physically-scarce thing without paying for it. I am merely trying to read an article without jumping through completely technically-unnecessary hoops (and likely ending up with spam in my inbox unless I jump through even more hoops). Nobody is getting paid a dime less than if I did nothing at all, nor is anything being taken away from anybody.
It is the same. You may believe information wants to be free, but *writing* is a profession, and those of us who pursue it for a living and not just as a hobby deserve to be compensated for our labor.
You might as well say to a published author, “I didn’t want to pay for your book, so I just downloaded a pirated copy. But don’t worry, you’re no worse off than if I hadn’t read it at all.”
That’s the mindset of a free rider. If everyone were to act that way, then the industry would collapse and no one would be left over to create either fiction or journalism, except for the already-rich who don’t need to care whether they make money from it or not.
I’d make the same complaint if anyone here hid most of their post at Facebook or at any other site that requires a signup just to read what people post there.
In fact I’d like to petition for a return to the way the web was supposed to be, accessible to everyone without barriers or obstructions of any kind, by requesting that anyone who agrees refrain from linking to any site that does not honor the spirit of the web; including any link that runs into a registration wall, a paywall, or is subjected to geoblocking or any other use of technical measures to discriminate against would-be readers on the basis of location, class, race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, or disability; this includes sites whose aggressive use of Javascript, popups, advertising, or other non-value-adding cruft impedes the ease of just clicking through and reading the information you’re interested in, and in particular if it impedes the use of accessibility tools such as screen readers by overwhelming them with extraneous clutter. This includes sites that interfere with so-called “deep linking” by misdirecting browsers following links to specific pages to their home page or some other page first, including gratuitous captchas and other interruptions (captchas are acceptable on a) account creation forms and b) new post submission forms when posting as a guest rather than with a login, at sites that permit such users to post at all, where they provide needed protection against spam). It also includes sites that discriminate against Tor, VPN, or proxy users, since this effectively discriminates on the basis of geography whilst also aiding and abetting repressive regimes that want to limit citizens’ access to information (e.g. China).
If a growing number of people sign on to a pledge not to link to such sites, then those sites will start to find that discriminatory or otherwise annoying or obstructive behavior costs them traffic (which they could otherwise monetize using sufficiently unobtrusive advertising). This would discipline ill-mannered sites into dropping these bad practices and, in the end, restore the web to its original vision as a wellspring of information accessible to everyone on a non-discriminatory basis, excluding no-one.
The OP said that signing up was free. Ergo, they don’t make a dime from OpenSky forcing people to sign up to read things there. Ergo I’d be just as much a “free rider” if I signed up and read it as if I read it without signing up.
Even if something is technically free with a signup, I significantly limit the number and type of places where I choose to sign up, because leaving too many traces of oneself all over the internet *is* a cost, and one which some people don’t appreciate well enough. Facebook is a particularly egregious example of this; their customers aren’t the people who use it as social media, but the advertisers, and anyone who is willing to pay for any information they can legally scrape from you and your interactions. They’re not the only ones; some of them can even scrape stuff about you from sites they don’t own. Even the with more ethical ones, there can be subtle and complicated issues that one might not always be aware of. But I don’t complain, I just choose not to pay that price.
Anyway, as far as *personally* being an “average citizen of the future” goes, I guess I could say that I’m pro-radical-body-autonomy? Though outside of abortion and trans issues, which are small subsets of this, that’s not really politically relevant right now. Not to say that those aren’t super important! I fully support those! It’s just that the longer-term, bigger-picture issues are a bit too far outside the scope of present-day political and cultural battles.
And then I’m also post-work, but the few times I tried advocating that I got dogpiled by fellow lefties, including once for apparently being ableist, despite not even bringing up disability issues. Not sure if my approach was garbage or if the very idea was just too radical for most. But it’s been some years since then, maybe I’d have more luck if the opportunity to talk about it came up today?
@Snowberry, can you describe what “post-work” means to you? I’m not sure I understand the concept. Thanks!
@Katydid #9: No problem. The basic idea behind post-work is that nobody has to have a job. The world can get by if very few people work. Though they don’t need to, people generally can anyway if that’s the best way for them to find fulfillment, or it’s a price they’re willing to pay in furtherance of some other goal. There’s no stigma against not having one, and no pressure or expectation to define oneself by one’s occupation even if one does work.
Some people might respond, “isn’t that just post-scarcity?” While the two are fully compatible and have the same general technological prerequisites, it’s possible to have one without very much of the other. Most depictions of post-scarcity societies, whether in fiction or futurism, presume that while the vast majority of people have a high standard of living unless they choose otherwise, they are still expected have jobs, and are still expected to find a significant part of their identity in the work they do… it’s just supposedly much easier to find work which one finds fulfilling, regardless of whether that work is “important” or “necessary” or even sometimes “productive”. Think Star Trek, where even the non-Starfleet characters are largely defined by their professions.
Maybe I’m an outlier, or maybe it’s too ingrained in the culture, but that line of thinking carries assumptions which seem rather toxic. Regardless, the reverse, a near-pure post-work society with only a minimum of post-scarcity is different in that it doesn’t insure a high standard of living for everyone, merely a very basic but livable one. Some people might have better, and not always for reasons involving “making a lot of money” (though it definitely helps). I’m not against post-scarcity per se, I do expect at least some of both in the very long run… but maybe it would be better to tackle the issues inherent to post-work first, rather than creating a “near-perfect” society where toxic assumptions are baked in and really hard to extricate without recreating it all over again? Assuming I’m not just speaking out of my rear, anyway.
Where the accusation of ableism came from was that someone else brought up that most disabled people need to feel like they’re full participants in society; having a productive job can help a lot with that. Making work increasingly optional would likely involuntarily shut disabled people out of employment and make them feel like outsiders again, since the default assumption seems to have been that most people would want to work regardless of any lack of stigma against those who would choose otherwise. (I’m not entirely convinced of that, but again, maybe I’m an outlier here.) It’s just that the people who supposedly need the choice the most would be the very ones who wouldn’t get it.
As someone who is also a radical body autonomist I would advocate fixing that by making disability optional… but that didn’t go over well either, because for a lot of disabled people their disability is a major part of their identity, and it trivializes their experiences, apparently. I’m going to admit that I’m not 100% certain I communicated the intent properly back then (or now, for that matter), and I’m not 100% certain that even if I didn’t that it’s still not boundary-stomping a marginalized community… and whether that would imply that, ethically, exploring the very idea of post-work would have to wait until improvements in medical technology forces disability advocates to confront that particular thorny mess.
There’s a lot I left out, but that’s it in a nutshell.
@ Snowberry, thanks. While reading paragraphs 1 & 2, I *was* thinking of Star Trek. About the only non-working characters I can think of, off the top of my head, were the cloud-dwelling folks on TOS who were living off the efforts of the enslaved ground-dwellers. Or the Space Hippies of TOS. Or the Irish Tinkers of TNG. Or the Bajorans confined to the open-air prisons in DS9. You’re right–everyone else had a job because otherwise there’d be no Starfleet.
I’m going to have to think about what you said. This is the first time I’ve encountered the term and the ideas behind it. Thank you for responding.
As for disabilities, the only person with one that I’m deeply familiar with is a family member in her 50s with profound autism, who operates somewhere between 9 and 18 months old on a functional level. Periodically (maybe every decade or so?) the Republican party will send her mail asking her why she doesn’t go out and get a job and feel the empowerment that comes from work. Sure, she can’t be potty trained and it’s not clear if she recognizes her own name, but her mother can just dress her up in a power suit and send her off to work on Wall Street, amirite? Her mother has to periodically jump through hoops to recertify her disability and once had to hire a lawyer to contest getting kicked off SSI roles.
Snowberry@8:
So do I, normally; that’s why I come to places like here rather than go to places like OnlySky and Substack. But then I come here and find a stub of an article with a link to OnlySky for the rest …
I have no problem with paying to read something. In fact, I’d *love* to have an efficient micropayment system for doing so. I remember X/Twitter alternative post.news offering such access, but it flopped.
Back to the premise, IMO that would be very difficult, because one would be all alone, and it would be difficult to do very much without the assistance of other people. Even the most autocratic of leaders cannot rule alone. One needs underlings to do most of the work of governance. The same is true of leaders of social and political movements. They do not work alone. So one would either have to join an already-existing movement or else recruit followers.
There is also the problem of what would be technologically feasible. For instance, women had to be baby machines to ensure that they could have enough children so that some of them would survive to adulthood. Also, republican governance was impractical for anything larger than a city-state until the last few centuries. Republics larger than a city-state were rare, and most of them ended up becoming monarchies, like the Roman Republic and the Dutch Republic, with the emperor and the stadtholder as de facto monarchs. The only exception that I know of is Switzerland, a republic larger than a city-state that stayed a republic over all its history.
Why Monarchy? The Rise and Demise of a Regime Type – John Gerring, Tore Wig, Wouter Veenendaal, Daniel Weitzel, Jan Teorell, Kyosuke Kikuta, 2021
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0010414020938090
Part of the rise of republicanism was the increased population fractions of cities, because it is easier to mobilize mass movements in cities than in the countryside. That was enabled with improved technology that improved farmers’ productivity.
@Bekenstein Bound, #3: I guess you could spin up a disposable VM, use it to register on OnlySky and then publish the fake credentials on BugMeNot (where, in a display of supreme irony, Safari informed me it had blocked four trackers …..)
There are some cases of a technology that is apparently hard to invent but easy to copy, and an obvious one of that is writing.
If one introduces some technology, there is also the question of how to sustain it. How would future generations learn of it and keep it going? For instance, it may be hard to sustain writing in a population too small to support a population of scribes, people who specialize in that task. That would likely be every pre-agricultural population and many early agricultural ones.
For those already with writing, one might want to introduce place notation for numbers, to make them easier to write.
Related to that is how one would get people to copy one’s books by hand, since that is what one had to do before the invention of printing. A common pre-printing practice was pseudepigraphy, a sort of inverse plagiarism, where one ascribes one’s books to someone very respected and notable. There are numerous pseudo-Plato, pseudo-Aristotle, pseudo-Solomon, pseudo-Paul, … works.
A further problem is if a society already has some people who specialize in memorizing large amount of information. These people may resist the introduction of writing as making possible fake learning, as Plato stated toward the end of his dialogue Phaedrus.
Another problem for time travelers: language. Go back more than a few centuries, and everybody’s language will be unintelligible, even ancestors of English. Let’s look at the first line of the Lord’s Prayer.
Modern English: Our Father, who is in heaven
King James (1611): Our Father, which art in heaven
Wycliffe (1380): Oure fadir, that art in heuenes
Old English (~1000): Faeder ure, thu the eart on heofonum
Proto-Germanic (~500 BCE): Fader unseraz, sa izi in himinamaz
Proto-Indo-European (~3000 BCE): Pëter nëseros, yo esi in dyewi (pl. diwsu, ë: schwa)
Those last two are from reconstructions.
Another example:
French: Notre Père, qui es aux cieux
Spanish: Padre nuestro, que estás en los cielos
Italian: Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli
Latin: Pater noster, qui es in caelis
As one can see, going back in time gets worse and worse. “Father”, “our”, “is”, and “in” go back to Proto-Indo-European, though with f becoming p, but “sky” or “heaven” vary quite a bit. Proto-Germanic *himinaz, Latin caelum, Greek ouranos, Proto-Slavic *nebo, … The relative pronouns were originally interrogative ones (*kwi- > “who”, Latin quis, qui) or demonstrative ones (*so/to- > “that”).
The grammar is also different. Old English noun cases demonstrated on faeder “father”:
(nominative: subject, accusative: object) F faeder, Fs faederas
(genitive) of F: faederes, of Fs: faedera
(dative) to F: faedere, to Fs: faederum
Going further than Proto-Indo-European requires getting into some speculative macro-linguistics. But the most likely closest relative of Indo-European is Uralic, which includes Finnish and Hungarian.
“We” IE (subject) *wei, (oblique: non-subject) *nos, *nës- — U *me
“Father” IE *pëter — U *itsa
“To Be” IE (imperfective: incomplete, ongoing) *es-, (perfective: complete, momentary) *bheuH- — U *wole-
“In” IE *en, (locative case) sg. *-i, pl *-su — U (locative case) *-na
I’ve simplified the Proto-Indo-European reconstructions to make them easier to pronounce. Their more usual statement is *ph1ter-, *nseros, *h1es-, *h1en, … BTW, nëseros ought to be in the “vocative case” also: Pëter nësere, … or Pëter nsere, …
BTW, the best-reconstructed PIE deity name is *dyeus pëter — “Father Sky”.
If technology continues to advance in the future, then that is likely to lift some of the technological constraints that we currently suffer. Which ones might those be? What would be the social consequences of doing so?
AI and robotics will likely do more and more of the more routine sorts of work, and also some of the less routine sorts. How much work will be necessary to sustain our standard of living? How much is necessary at the present time? For instance, how much is useless bureaucratic makework? What David Graeber described as “bullshit jobs” that don’t give much of either social usefulness or satisfaction. A lot of corporate and government administrative jobs, it seems, while those who actually produce often get the short end of the stick. He once described a case of school-reform activists finding it much easier to provoke hostility to teachers than to administrators.