In a discussion about slavery and equal rights and such, someone mentioned that in the future we’ll look back on how we treat animals (slaughterhouses, etc.) and realize it was just as bad if not worse than human slavery or segregation.
Slavery and slaughterhouses aside, I noticed something I hadn’t before: we’re prejudiced against people in the past… or at least we’re prejudiced against their opinions.
All other things equal, we assume someone in the future has a better opinion than someone of the past. If Neo in 2110 has a certain opinion about an issue, we assume that opinion is better than Napoleon’s opinion from 1810. And it’s not just because we like Neo better than Napoleon.
So why is ol’ future boy’s opinion automatically better than someone’s in the past or even ours now?
Overall, I think I know why. We assume humans collectively are getting smarter, more intelligent, and simply better overall because you and I also assume we’re individually smarter, more intelligent, and better overall than we were, say, five years ago.
But is that last part a valid assumption?
And even if it is, can we generalize our individual experience to humanity as a whole?
Most importantly (or at least most interesting to me), why?
Or why not?
I think it’s part of the dialogue of modernity (though possibly that idea was made from our vision of ourselves improving, as you’ve been suggesting) – we use more technology and the world gets better! Though obviously this dialogue has some major problems and is gaining major detractors.
Alternatively, there are and always have been people convinced the world is going to hell in a handbasket. One of my professors has a quote by Aristotle (or someone old and Greek and dead like Aristotle) about how children no longer listen to their parents and everything’s gotten so bad. It always cracks me up.
Hmm… sounds like something from Plato. I don’t know the specific quote, though. Whoever it was, I think I tend to agree more with that sentiment about people than its opposite, though I’d still like to think I’m fairly optimistic overall.
-Marshall Jones Jr.