The myths we tell about history always tend to be so self-serving and belittling of the people who came before us. I'm not sure I want to know what people will think about us 500 years from now
It's incredibly hard to argue against even with the tools of history on your side. We are psychological pre disposed at any point in time to consider that the present moment relative to that time is the utmost most important and urgent and also to view the past and future as less important. It's non stop urgency of the moment.
Imagine a historian in the future writing about the decade we are living in now and just writing a line "nothing much to note". We would feel insulted and hurt just considering this.
More realistically: The most important time yet.
And this is kind of reasonable, since progress mostly seems to accelerate.
People intuitively discount the future, since it's hard to imagine what will come. But I haven't seen many people actively discount the future.
Folks who talk about any sort of arc to history have to be thinking of a fundamentally statistical reality. The lived experience of any specific human or tribe is going to be far too nuanced for that picture.
Perhaps?
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/07/15/i...
"Yes, there was food growing there in the desert, too. Right out of the ground, as far as your eye could see."
"And they just threw it all away?!"
I think that was more our mythology is more holy than thine, not pure rationality.
Ants defending the ideological hive. You see it in science, religion and politics.
Charles Fort addresses this phenomenon in his "The Book Of The Damned".
Judaism, and its followers Christianity and Islam, innovated a different approach, the idea that someone who doesn't follow your god can't be trusted to adhere to an agreement. This made them antagonistic to other cultures, which worked out great for Christianity and Islam (the memes themselves, not the people carrying them).
Religious practices farther east, in India[1], China, and the central Asian steppes, were generally not exclusive in the same way. You were free to mix and match practices and avowed beliefs from several formal systems, and they didn't factionalize in the same way.
On the other hand, Chinese Confucianism, considered as a system of how society is organized (as opposed to a system of thought) was quite hostile to other modes of organization.
My take is that governments don't coexist easily, but philosophies do.
[1] Islam excepted.
Consider your comment, a throwaway one liner of no significance. Most people just read it and move on. But what if, your comment and our comments were all preserved through a series of backups and database migrations over time until eventually they were 500 years old! Imagine some future archaeologist coming across our threads and seeing what people of this day were thinking and saying to each other. Sometimes I stumble across old posts from 2001 or so and read with fascination about what the world used to be like back then. It’d be pretty meta if that future archaeologist was actually the one reading this comment right now.
Imagine if we found some text in a 500 year old book somewhere plainly asking the same question “why would people 500 years in the future give a shit about us?”
Clearly there will be people in the future that give a shit so long as the human race remains a curious species.
Or climate change in general, even though it will hit some areas harder, while others might even get better of.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/this-is-the-dream-time...
For reference, "antibiotic" means "contrary to life".
We also treat cancer with surgery, the only problem being that, like the poison, it doesn't really work.
And cutting the bad parts out, can indeed work, but maybe future generations find a way to help the body stop going wrong, so you don't need those radical methods anymore.
This is much like saying that criminals are not living organisms, just parts of a society that have gone wrong.
Cancers are living organisms, similar to, but quite distinct from, the animal they developed from.
A parasite is its own organism, has its own purpose. Even though it is against the purpose of the host. Cancer has no purpose. It is a "bug" in the organism that can be fatal.
Were primitive hunters "idiots" for using crude (only by modern standards of course) sharpened sticks/stones instead of rifles?