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I'm curious which parts of the past strike you as being from "another planet", because I tend to get the opposite impression.

Past people didn't have our tech level, but otherwise strike me as being very obviously fellow humans.

(confer Marcus Aurelius' complaint that even when you're the emperor of Rome, you still have to deal with idiots and jerks all day long)

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I agree. I think one thing I’ve realized is that a few thousand years isn’t really that long of a timespan. And people writing around the time of Rome and even earlier weren’t stupid like I’ve tended to think of them. I think that’s why things like philosophy have persisted through time. It’s not like humans were unable to reason about their existence in the time of Rome. If I read and think about those folks and their experience of the human condition, I am able to relate to someone who lived many generations before me, which I think is pretty incredible to be honest.

One example that comes to mind is maps. I tend to think of North as being up, so North should be at the top of a map. I never realized that that is cultural until I learned that many ancient societies considered East (the direction of the rising sun) to be up, so you find ancient maps with East as the top.

Another example is their view of history. We tend to see history as needing to describe what is "true", that is what actually happened if we had been there with multiple cameras recording the events as they happened. Many ancient peoples would have thought that is a bizarre and alien view of history. For them history was more about the stories that they could tell and if the stories differed significantly from what actually happened, well, so what? Why would anyone possibly want history to describe what actually happened? Who cares? The story is what is true.

> so you find ancient maps with East as the top.

I have seen that before with the T and O maps [1], where Asia is presented as North. They are nice, simple maps for their age

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map

To be “oriented”.

Some old Greek texts have the Past being what’s ahead of you - you can see it all in front of you. The Future being behind you - it can sneak up on you and you can’t see it.

Not just Greek. Many ancient societies viewed time in this way. It makes sense. You can see the past, so it must be in front of you. You can’t see the future, so it must be behind you.

I had more morality-type issues in mind. Something like The Genealogy of Morality by Nietzsche, in that what we think of as universal human moral attitudes have actually been very different in the past.

A modern example might be imperialism and expansionism. Pretty much universally condemned in 2020, yet was the SOP of basically every civilization since the beginning of time.

Human moral attitudes are also very different, in different parts of the world, in the present.

As far as imperialism goes, it may be condemned in theory, but in practice it looks to be alive and well, at least as far as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military... indicates (expansionism is a different matter, because how is a global power supposed to expand?)

> Human moral attitudes are also very different, in different parts of the world, in the present.

True, but still much less so than they were before the Modern era.

Regarding imperialism, I don’t think your examples are quite apt. While modern nation states have power bases around the world, this is nothing like most historical empires. The American economic “empire” is nothing compared to the Romans, Mongols, etc.

The difference I see is that the Romans, Mongols, etc. were geographically limited and bordered by geostrategic peer powers, with the occasional client states buffering in between. Presumably you see different differences?

(I've read a fair amount of Kissinger, and his main contribution to US political thought had been anticipated by the Melian Dialogue, set about 2'400 years ago)

Sure, from a moral standpoint the Romans or Mongols would probably have zero qualms with using biological weapons, nukes, enslaving the conquered populace, etc. These are obviously all totally taboo today.

If you read about the Mongol siege of Kyiv, or the Romans destroying and salting Carthage, they are way beyond anything considered acceptable today.

I think of the Assyrians who carved into the stones of their public buildings scenes of them killing and torturing their enemies. I don't think that would go over so well today.

Life was cheap, especially to the rulers, and their existence was a zero-sum game (the success of other rulers always compromised their own power to a degree or in totality).

What does "acceptable" mean? What we condemn in public or what we tolerate? It seems that civilians were killed using gas in Syria. Other atrocities are happening in several places around the world and they're dispatched with some stern declarations. When oil supply has been endangered, wars were fought.

Fortunately the US is now a net oil producer and looks to be one for the indefinite future. Hopefully this will help reduce need for the US to militarily maintain access to that resource by force.

Both are simultaneously true.

You get such a strong impression of Pliny from his letters: a sensible chap, a bit Pooterish, really a classic organisation man, but good-hearted. And his appreciation of his new wife is so touching! Then you discover he was 39 and his new wife was about 14.

> ...I tend to get the opposite impression.

I think it can go either way, depending on who you read, because contemporary variation has always been greater than difference over time. Much of what I read in Galen or Aristotle sounds like it could have come from a colleague, while a lot of posts on HN strike me as coming from an alternate reality.

How about in 1600s when people in Massachusetts (and in Europe also) were being burned because they were witches ?

Maybe they got all of them, so we don’t know how we would do today.

That is actually one of C.S. Lewis' examples of how humans have not evolved morally. He claims that the difference is people not believing their child was sick and might die because the weird old lady at the end of the street is a witch. If they were convinced of that then many would almost certainly support burning people.

He was sadly proved right in 2014 when someone posted on social media that a 33 year old women was kidnapping babies to use in satanic rituals. Her neighbors beat her to death (news in Portuguese):

http://g1.globo.com/sp/santos-regiao/noticia/2014/05/mulher-...

He talks about this in “Mere Christianity” and it strikes me as correct:

“But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.”

We could speculate on how modern society would react if it was established that some people really could harm telekinetically, were doing so, and incarceration couldn't stop them.

Not to downplay the atrocity of the whole thing, but -- no one in Massachusetts was burned for being a witch.

> The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than two hundred people were accused. Thirty were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging (fourteen women and five men). One other man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death for refusing to plead, and at least five people died in jail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials

thanks - not sure where i got the burning from

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