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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

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

rolltiide 7y ago
"they only took social media detoxes once a month, by the 2020s older people that were already addicted to the novelty of social media only did detoxes once every six months and this was considered a privilege for the most mental health conscious people with a modern social support system"
chasb 7y ago
As a kid I loved "Motel of the Mysteries," reimagining the discovery of our culture today as if it was Howard Carter opening King Tut's tomb. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/07/15/in-motel-of-the-mysteries-america-falls-and-it-doesnt-actually-matter https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/07/15/i...
swayvil 7y ago
I think that a system of popular thought (epistemology?) is invariably antagonistic to all other systems. Adherents of one typically seek to discredit the others. There is always a body of popular stories explaining why all to other systems are bad. 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".
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  Classical Mediterranean practices specified that, when two people made a contract with each other, each would swear to the gods he honored to abide by the terms of the contract. 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.
JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
I’m reminded of a quote I can’t find again and I’m paraphrasing and butchering- every generation sees the previous one as primitive troglodytes and the future one as effete dandies.
- lostphilosopher 7y ago
  "Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it." - George Orwell Perhaps?
- FreeFull 7y ago
  Even Socrates was complaining about the next generation: "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."
  - jasonhansel 7y ago
    Not a real quote from Socrates: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/
  - andrepd 7y ago
    Apocryphal, see wikiquote.
- oceanplexian 7y ago
  What I find fascinating Is how people view the future as some sort of progressive utopia. But if you look at history actually that’s not true. The Roman Empire was more supportive of woman’s rights than 18th century America. It’s entirely plausible we could experience a regression of social norms, and that could last hundreds of thousands of years. History isn’t linear.
Waterluvian 7y ago
21st century people were idiots. They treated cancer with poison.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  We treat every disease with poison. The disease is alive, and we want to kill it. That's all poison is. 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.
  - nesadi 7y ago
    Maybe 25th century people, instead of resorting to poisoning it, will find a way to assimilate disease and add its biological distinctiveness to our own.
  - hutzlibu 7y ago
    But cancer is not a living organism and rather parts of the living organism gone wrong. 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.
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      > But cancer is not a living organism and rather parts of the living organism gone wrong. 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.
      - hutzlibu 7y ago
        I meant, cancer is not a living organism, in a way, that a living organism can reproduce. Cancer can only grow, until the body is destroyed, but not beyond. . So seems a bit similar to a parasite, but not the same. 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.
weberc2 7y ago
What's interesting is we don't look back on all people evenly, nor do we esteem people less who lived farther back in time. For example, we tend to esteem the Greeks and Romans more than the Medieval Europeans. The author has a chip on his shoulder because we don't regard all eras equally.
tetraca 7y ago
"How could they have 7 billion people? Did they all live in the desert?" "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?!"
- EForEndeavour 7y ago
  We had a garden and we paved it.
tom_ 7y ago
What on earth makes you think anybody 500 years in the future will give a shit about any of us?
- salty_biscuits 7y ago
  Hopefully not trying to work out what caused the collapse...
- Noumenon72 7y ago
  Because this is the dream time. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/this-is-the-dream-time.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/this-is-the-dream-time...
- xwdv 7y ago
  A person 500 years in the future is more likely to give a shit about you than a person 5 minutes from now. 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.
  - amelius 7y ago
    Future archaeologists will treat our comments as big data.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  I make the half joke, half serious caution, that people 500 years from now are going to hate our guts.
tus88 7y ago
Is it really true? Do we belittle those of the Enlightenment period and it's artists and thinkers scientists and composers? I think we make fairer judgements of different periods of history based on fairly objective grounds. A lot of embellishment and imaginative reconstruction of the past no doubt, but not always negative.
- FranzFerdiNaN 7y ago
  We consider ourselves the heirs of the enlightenment and renaissance, so we continue their tradition of looking down on the Middle Ages, and we think of it as a rational time of progress. This despite the fact that both time periods brought plenty of irrational behavior, with things like alchemy to occultism to witch hunts, and also brought fun things like slavery and racism (earlier people made differences between people of course, but not yet based on race and skin color). But we prefer to forget all that and pretend the Middle Ages was the backwards, superstitious time, despite it being the time during which the Church outright said and taught that witches and demons and magic are just nonsense.
  - tus88 7y ago
    > the Church outright said and taught that witches and demons and magic are just nonsense. I think that was more our mythology is more holy than thine, not pure rationality.

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

rolltiide 7y ago

"they only took social media detoxes once a month, by the 2020s older people that were already addicted to the novelty of social media only did detoxes once every six months and this was considered a privilege for the most mental health conscious people with a modern social support system"

chasb 7y ago

As a kid I loved "Motel of the Mysteries," reimagining the discovery of our culture today as if it was Howard Carter opening King Tut's tomb. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/07/15/in-motel-of-the-mysteries-america-falls-and-it-doesnt-actually-matter https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/07/15/i...

swayvil 7y ago

I think that a system of popular thought (epistemology?) is invariably antagonistic to all other systems. Adherents of one typically seek to discredit the others. There is always a body of popular stories explaining why all to other systems are bad. 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".

thaumasiotes 7y ago
Classical Mediterranean practices specified that, when two people made a contract with each other, each would swear to the gods he honored to abide by the terms of the contract. 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.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

I’m reminded of a quote I can’t find again and I’m paraphrasing and butchering- every generation sees the previous one as primitive troglodytes and the future one as effete dandies.

lostphilosopher 7y ago
"Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it." - George Orwell Perhaps?
FreeFull 7y ago
Even Socrates was complaining about the next generation: "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."
- jasonhansel 7y ago
  Not a real quote from Socrates: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/
- andrepd 7y ago
  Apocryphal, see wikiquote.
oceanplexian 7y ago
What I find fascinating Is how people view the future as some sort of progressive utopia. But if you look at history actually that’s not true. The Roman Empire was more supportive of woman’s rights than 18th century America. It’s entirely plausible we could experience a regression of social norms, and that could last hundreds of thousands of years. History isn’t linear.

Waterluvian 7y ago

21st century people were idiots. They treated cancer with poison.

thaumasiotes 7y ago
We treat every disease with poison. The disease is alive, and we want to kill it. That's all poison is. 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.
- nesadi 7y ago
  Maybe 25th century people, instead of resorting to poisoning it, will find a way to assimilate disease and add its biological distinctiveness to our own.
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  But cancer is not a living organism and rather parts of the living organism gone wrong. 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.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    > But cancer is not a living organism and rather parts of the living organism gone wrong. 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.
    - hutzlibu 7y ago
      I meant, cancer is not a living organism, in a way, that a living organism can reproduce. Cancer can only grow, until the body is destroyed, but not beyond. . So seems a bit similar to a parasite, but not the same. 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.

weberc2 7y ago

What's interesting is we don't look back on all people evenly, nor do we esteem people less who lived farther back in time. For example, we tend to esteem the Greeks and Romans more than the Medieval Europeans. The author has a chip on his shoulder because we don't regard all eras equally.

tetraca 7y ago

"How could they have 7 billion people? Did they all live in the desert?" "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?!"

EForEndeavour 7y ago
We had a garden and we paved it.

tom_ 7y ago

What on earth makes you think anybody 500 years in the future will give a shit about any of us?

salty_biscuits 7y ago
Hopefully not trying to work out what caused the collapse...
Noumenon72 7y ago
Because this is the dream time. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/this-is-the-dream-time.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/this-is-the-dream-time...
xwdv 7y ago
A person 500 years in the future is more likely to give a shit about you than a person 5 minutes from now. 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.
- amelius 7y ago
  Future archaeologists will treat our comments as big data.
Gibbon1 7y ago
I make the half joke, half serious caution, that people 500 years from now are going to hate our guts.

tus88 7y ago

Is it really true? Do we belittle those of the Enlightenment period and it's artists and thinkers scientists and composers? I think we make fairer judgements of different periods of history based on fairly objective grounds. A lot of embellishment and imaginative reconstruction of the past no doubt, but not always negative.

FranzFerdiNaN 7y ago
We consider ourselves the heirs of the enlightenment and renaissance, so we continue their tradition of looking down on the Middle Ages, and we think of it as a rational time of progress. This despite the fact that both time periods brought plenty of irrational behavior, with things like alchemy to occultism to witch hunts, and also brought fun things like slavery and racism (earlier people made differences between people of course, but not yet based on race and skin color). But we prefer to forget all that and pretend the Middle Ages was the backwards, superstitious time, despite it being the time during which the Church outright said and taught that witches and demons and magic are just nonsense.
- tus88 7y ago
  > the Church outright said and taught that witches and demons and magic are just nonsense. I think that was more our mythology is more holy than thine, not pure rationality.