No matter what the future holds, I think we can be fairly certain that our distant descendants will look upon us with the same mixture of pity and disdain that most folks feel for medieval serfs. That's just human nature - each generation sees itself as more enlightened than those who went before.
What interests me is what they will pity and disdain us for? Will it be our gross economic inequalities amidst an abundance of food and shelter? Or our tribalism, our pop culture, our anachronistic religions?
Personally, what keeps me up at night is the possibility that I might wake up one day to a world where I'm no longer ahead of my time, but behind it. Up until about 4 years ago I considered myself a far left liberal in most respects, but with trends going as they are, my viewpoints and opinions are beginning to look more conservative... even reactionary by today's standards. I bet there were a lot of people my age back in the 60's who dismissed sex, drugs and rock 'n roll as a passing fad, just as today we say the same thing about Trumpism, snowflakes and daily mass shootings. But are these fads, or foreshadowings? I don't want to die yet, but sometimes I wish I could travel back in time and live the remainder of my life in the good old late 20th century.
At least two good points there, I think. Some of the progressive assumptions are just self-serving postures: we can't really know what it was like to live a long time ago, so we project our faults onto the past and pretend we've advanced more than we have.
However, I agree we also eventually lose touch with the present, because we feel most at home in the period when we were having our most intense experiences, when we were children, teens, and young adults. I actually wrote a poem about that (link below).
I console myself with the belief that this society is unsustainable. Trump is embarrassing the country and finishing off our economy. The snowflakes are hanging themselves on their own soapbox. Neo-feminists are returning women to the state of quasi-childhood that early feminists fought to liberate themselves from. The whole damn zeitgeist is too full of contradictions to last more than another decade. Either we return to classic enlightenment, humanist values or we revert to a much more conservative, primitive social order. If voters don't start electing competent representatives, then the competent will simply have to seize power by force. If snowflakes don't relent their attacks on free speech, then that right will be revoked for everyone. If women can't make their 'yes' mean yes, and their 'no' no, then they are obviously not capable of consenting to (or for that matter, refusing) sex and need to be sequestered from male society the way they were in traditional Islamic states.
Will we make a quantum leap to an enlightened, Star Trek type of society or return to medieval values? Maybe the descendants who judge us will not be cybernetic post-humans. Maybe they will be more like our ancestors were, pondering - not our bigotry and superstition - but our hubris. Did we really think we could defy a hundred thousand years of inertia and leave our animal nature behind in our journey into the stars?
One 'expert' after another has predicted a 'cure for cancer' since 1971. Despite huge expenditures and great increases in knowledge about cancer, and serious successes in a few categories, we are nowhere near a total cure nor a total prevention for those thousands of diseases lumped under the name 'cancer.
No matter what the future holds, I think we can be fairly certain that our distant descendants will look upon us with the same mixture of pity and disdain that most folks feel for medieval serfs. That's just human nature - each generation sees itself as more enlightened than those who went before.
ReplyDeleteWhat interests me is what they will pity and disdain us for? Will it be our gross economic inequalities amidst an abundance of food and shelter? Or our tribalism, our pop culture, our anachronistic religions?
Personally, what keeps me up at night is the possibility that I might wake up one day to a world where I'm no longer ahead of my time, but behind it. Up until about 4 years ago I considered myself a far left liberal in most respects, but with trends going as they are, my viewpoints and opinions are beginning to look more conservative... even reactionary by today's standards. I bet there were a lot of people my age back in the 60's who dismissed sex, drugs and rock 'n roll as a passing fad, just as today we say the same thing about Trumpism, snowflakes and daily mass shootings. But are these fads, or foreshadowings? I don't want to die yet, but sometimes I wish I could travel back in time and live the remainder of my life in the good old late 20th century.
At least two good points there, I think. Some of the progressive assumptions are just self-serving postures: we can't really know what it was like to live a long time ago, so we project our faults onto the past and pretend we've advanced more than we have.
DeleteHowever, I agree we also eventually lose touch with the present, because we feel most at home in the period when we were having our most intense experiences, when we were children, teens, and young adults. I actually wrote a poem about that (link below).
https://allpoetry.com/poem/14782993-The-fire-that-was--Longer-Version--by-Grim-Bard
I console myself with the belief that this society is unsustainable. Trump is embarrassing the country and finishing off our economy. The snowflakes are hanging themselves on their own soapbox. Neo-feminists are returning women to the state of quasi-childhood that early feminists fought to liberate themselves from. The whole damn zeitgeist is too full of contradictions to last more than another decade. Either we return to classic enlightenment, humanist values or we revert to a much more conservative, primitive social order. If voters don't start electing competent representatives, then the competent will simply have to seize power by force. If snowflakes don't relent their attacks on free speech, then that right will be revoked for everyone. If women can't make their 'yes' mean yes, and their 'no' no, then they are obviously not capable of consenting to (or for that matter, refusing) sex and need to be sequestered from male society the way they were in traditional Islamic states.
ReplyDeleteWill we make a quantum leap to an enlightened, Star Trek type of society or return to medieval values? Maybe the descendants who judge us will not be cybernetic post-humans. Maybe they will be more like our ancestors were, pondering - not our bigotry and superstition - but our hubris. Did we really think we could defy a hundred thousand years of inertia and leave our animal nature behind in our journey into the stars?
One 'expert' after another has predicted a 'cure for cancer' since 1971. Despite huge expenditures and great increases in knowledge about cancer, and serious successes in a few categories, we are nowhere near a total cure nor a total prevention for those thousands of diseases lumped under the name 'cancer.
ReplyDeleteYou also need to think about whether capitalists find a possible cancer cure profitable.
DeleteBut there has actually been great improvement in treating various forms of cancer thought.
Would communists be more likely to find a cure? After all they would be less concerned with profit.
Delete