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> all so that we can stare at them in a museum for 30 seconds So that we can study them, learn from them, and let them tell us their stories, so that they trul
by jonny_eh 5y ago
> all so that we can stare at them in a museum for 30 seconds
So that we can study them, learn from them, and let them tell us their stories, so that they truly live on after death.
- ceilingcorner 5y agoFrom their perspective, none of that would be relevant. They had certain beliefs and rather than respect them, we treat them like objects to gawk at.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- anbende 5y agoExcept that the mummy in the museum isn’t a person. It’s a collection of inanimate organic matter. There are no beliefs there to respect. They ended with the person’s life thousands of years ago. I could see an argument made for modern remains as there are living people/descendants who have a strong connection with the burial beliefs and practices. But make no mistake, even in that case it is about the living and not the dead.
- ceilingcorner 5y agoSorry, but this is a modern anachronistic statement. To the people that lived, their remains were extremely important. They even built dozens of pyramids to house them, which again, have been reduced to a tourist attraction. The modern world has no respect for anything.
- anbende 5y agoThose people are also gone and no longer have any beliefs or ideas that can be violated. Nothing we do today affects those people or their beliefs in any way. Those people no longer exist and cannot be harmed or protected. Ideas about respect and proper behavior around their landmarks only affects people who are alive. It is only important to the extent that it is important to us. It is clearly important to you but not others. So why should it matter to others if it doesn’t?
- ceilingcorner 5y agoBecause it’s a simple matter of recognizing other human beings and respecting their cultural achievements and desires. Just because they don’t exist anymore doesn’t mean they weren’t humans worthy of our empathy. I hate to use this example, but your argument would also basically say a genocided people is completely unimportant and unworthy of respect, as they no longer exist either.
- anbende 5y agoThanks for your response. I'm trying to understand your position here, and I'm really not getting it. Aside from the obvious problem of their being living people who experienced the holocaust (so they still exist), this example seems to imply that I'm saying that there's no need for empathy and respect for the people who came before us. I don't think that anything I've said implies that. Instead what I'm saying is that the dead need no protection and can receive no pain or insult. Anything we do for "them" is really for "us", because they do not exist. >Because it’s a simple matter of recognizing other human beings and respecting their cultural achievements and desires. Just because they don’t exist anymore doesn’t mean they weren’t humans worthy of our empathy. You seem to be implying that not honoring the wishes of the dead is an empathic failure. How so? I can empathize with someone's wishes, understand where they are coming from, and even respect who they were. None of that implies that I owe their desires a place in the world now. And in fact as modern people we MUST make choices about what pieces of the past to revere, revise, or pave over. Otherwise the world becomes a mausoleum to the past.
- rimiform 5y agoThe person you're disagreeing with agrees with this idea about morality: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person-affecting_view https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person-affecting_view). You, on the other hand, (I think) believe something can be bad even if it is not actually bad for anyone. Case in point: the people who've actually died in said genocide cannot have any feelings about what we do about them, so to consider those feelings would be nonsense (according to the person-affecting view). Of course, if someone living (such as yourself) cares about this, then it would still make sense to care about it, since the feelings of an actually living person are concerned.
- ResearchCode 5y agoSocieties with high human capital respect the dead and won't seize upon the first opportunity to rob their graves (rationalizing as "learning" or whatever doesn't cut it). There's plenty of other material that was willfully published to learn from.
- riversflow 5y agoI disagree. I have extremely high respect for human capital, and genuinely feel disgusted that especially western society isn't working hard to improve the human condition at it's most basic level, i.e. Automation first. To me the long dead are meaningless, and the recently dead are mostly so. I have the utmost respect for the living, and those who are recently dead have people who care about their legacy. But the farther you go back you go, the less direct connection the dead have with the present, and the simple fact is that the dead are gone.
- ceilingcorner 5y agoPretty much the entirety of the modern world is built on the accumulation of ideas and knowledge acquired over thousands of years. Unless you are a hunter gatherer, you have a direct relationship to the long dead.
- riversflow 5y agoOh I agree 100%, I'm fully of the belief that we stand on the shoulders of giants, and that Social contract theory has merit; we owe society for the world we are born into. But owing society isn't the same as owing respect to individuals. We can't be burdened by the wishes of those long dead, they no longer exist and as a society we have to move on.
- bredren 5y agoThey respect _their_ dead. There is relatively minuscule respect paid to dead native people that lived in their land before they arrived.
- exikyut 5y agoWhat does "them" refer to here though? Our preferred projection of them in our own image? Or a meeting-in-the-middle between you and an individual's preferred presentation of themselves? One of the reasons the Git version control system caught on is that it lets you rewrite history...