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.