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Comment by wireprotocol | Hacker News Reader

It's not about past crimes and past wrongs; it's more about rising moral standards and rising expectations of peace and comfort.

The past was just a lot more brutal than the present. Judgement should be in that context.

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Agreed. And yet: some nation-scale crimes are not that far in the past (or are being committed right now). On a tangent, it is also interesting to reflect what our children will think of our times when they’ve grown up. Will they e.g., see our lack of action on climate change as moral failure? Or even more interesting: will they see failure where we don’t even see an issue nowadays?

I don't think you can make the historical case that the past was uniformly more brutal or unjust than the present. I think it would be more accurate to say that in our current place and time, our current evolution of moral standards and expectations looks unfavorably (and rightfully so!) on human slavery, but there's no guarantee that we or others aren't regressing on other issues. That's probably a cause for humility as future generations will almost certainly look back on us and wonder how we could have tolerated those things that they will consider injustices.

This article contains actually interesting not much known history. It is more about learning about past and ditching away self serwing comforting tales. People want to talk about noble heroes going into adventures and celebrate them, but really really don't want to know about ugly stuff that was inherent to all that.

But when you accept ugly stuff for what it was and past leaders for who they were, you will find also a lot of lower level people standing in their way, arguing with them, becoming poorer or even risking their lives because they don't want to participate. Who are also interesting and complex.

We can judge Nazi and Stalin in their historical context, just like people from any other period. Just like slavery, they did not appeared via divine intervention of past - they appeared because of human decisions, activity, ideologies and struggle for power.

Look again. In different ways, moral standards have fallen.

You are going to have a very hard time selling that theory. The world is a vastly more fair and less savage place now then at any other point in human history.

I'm sure folks in Syria would disagree.

That's the result of technology, not moral standards. People are the same as they've always been, and I'd describe the moral evolution as a random walk, more than anything.

That's an extremely broad statement. Do you really know that much history?

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