3 ms·
>Campbell was a racist Back in the 50s? Most people of all kinds were, either implicitly or explicitly, even those who could have known and embraced better wit
by southernplaces7 2y ago
>Campbell was a racist
Back in the 50s? Most people of all kinds were, either implicitly or explicitly, even those who could have known and embraced better with a bit of context improvement.
Judging the people of the past by all the biases and ingrained assumptions of their time is myopic at best and a dumb path to disregarding a lot of wonderful knowledge too.
No human is free of at least some absurd ideas, it doesn't necessarily make the rest of what they create or say worth denigrating.
I'd hate to imagine all of us in the early 21st century only being mocked because of certain absurd things we surely take for granted as truths today.
- mcswell 2y agoNo disagreement, and I was probably racist back then. I'm just agreeing with an earlier comment that some of the 1950s authors were not "well adjusted", because I now think of racism as a sin.
- rectang 2y agoI think we'll only approach an equilibrium on racism if and when we reach consensus that it's innate human nature to be prejudiced, and that what distinguishes us is whether we make an effort to counter our base impulses. Let me join you in acknowledging that I have been racist before. (And I might be again, if I slip up.)
- bigstrat2003 2y agoI definitely agree - it's better to focus on the good in people, rather than the flaws. People 75 years from now will think just as poorly of our values as people today do of the values in 1950. And the people of 1950 would no doubt have thought just as poorly of our values today! The change of values throughout the years is not one of monotonically increasing moral rightness. Every age gets some things right, and some things wrong. So we should focus on the positive and not the negative, because that's what we would want done for us.