Thread: What will future generations condemn us for?

I've posted this in a couple other forums as I thought it was a great topic, and so I thought I'd put it here too, as the reactions to it elsewhere kind of surprised me.

Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics.

Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking?

Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today.

Is there a way to guess which ones? After all, not every disputed institution or practice is destined to be discredited. And it can be hard to distinguish in real time between movements, such as abolition, that will come to represent moral common sense and those, such as prohibition, that will come to seem quaint or misguided. Recall the book-burners of Boston's old Watch and Ward Society or the organizations for the suppression of vice, with their crusades against claret, contraceptives and sexually candid novels.

Still, a look at the past suggests three signs that a particular practice is destined for future condemnation.

First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn't emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.

Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, "We've always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?")

And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they're complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn't think about what made those goods possible. That's why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks.

So what is anyone's opinion on what changes in our view of humanity will be the norm in the future?

I'm pretty much on board with what the author of the article thinks, but I would add that hopefully an awareness of the suffering behind cheap goods made in other countries would change the buying habits of consumers, and after reading the separated meat thread, I would hope we would upgrade our thinking about what stuff we put in our bodies and put limits on food production, so that health was more of a priority than profit.

What will future generations condemn us for?

P.S. To the mods: If this isn't the proper forum for this feel free to move it.

The way it is going here is what I think the future citizens of the USA will condemn us for not allowing:

That we did not allow multiple person marriages.

That we did not have the vote for 15 year olds.

That we had those funny things attached to our steering column in the car for signaling turns.

That we actually allowed some people to accumulate more money than others and not take it away from them to give to those with less.

That we did not control income to keep Doctors and Engineers from earning more money than Street Sweepers and Store Tellers.

I think those in the future will look at what we watched on television and then will see all the commercials and think.....our Ancestors from the 20th and 21st centuries were a bunch of dumbfucks.

Then they will take a look at all those Icons,Legends,Stars,and Celebrities and finally figure out that they were not leaders, and that they are not above the LAW! That they will get rid of Soap Opera's as there is enough depression and chaos going on in the world and then finally all the Law Enforcement Shows depicting that criminals never get away and that crime always is taking place.

That Capitalism found a way to make people pay for Air.....and those yellow sponge cake thingy's called Twinkies saved the world from starvation and last forever!

You can pick a number of those topics with relative certainty, but I'm guessing 200 years from now, radical Islamic whacks will still be killing anyone who is not Islamic.

Originally Posted by Midwest Media Critics

I think those in the future will look at what we watched on television and then will see all the commercials and think.....our Ancestors from the 20th and 21st centuries were a bunch of dumbfucks.

Then they will take a look at all those Icons,Legends,Stars,and Celebrities and finally figure out that they were not leaders, and that they are not above the LAW! That they will get rid of Soap Opera's as there is enough depression and chaos going on in the world and then finally all the Law Enforcement Shows depicting that criminals never get away and that crime always is taking place.

That Capitalism found a way to make people pay for Air.....and those yellow sponge cake thingy's called Twinkies saved the world from starvation and last forever!

I like soap operas. I bet in the future you can interact with them and control the plots. Probably all television will be that way.

waste and waist

They will blame us and then others in the future will blame them for something.

Originally Posted by Zaragunudgeyon

They will blame us and then others in the future will blame them for something.

I think the idea of the article was to try and predict not so much what they would "blame" us for, but what will have changed so much in the norm of society that how we behave today will seem barbaric. Slavery was once a common practice, accepted by everyone, nowadays that seems impossible to fathom.

What practices, if any, do you think are acceptable in today's society that in the future will be looked at as abhorrent?

The author chose treatment of animals (factory farming of meat in particular) how we treat our elderly, the prison system and environmental issues.

I tend to agree, except on a global scale the exploitation of third world countries for cheap labor will hopefully come to an end and future generations will be appalled that we ever did that to begin with.

And hopefully war for fun and profit will be a thing of the past also.

I'd bet that our future will be appalled by what we ate.

*peers at Scottie in the "I'm lovin' it" thread. :P

Originally Posted by gabebrooks

I'd bet that our future will be appalled by what we ate.

*peers at Scottie in the "I'm lovin' it" thread. :P

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they will be jealous that they didn't get to eat the wonderful food that we are privileged to enjoy. They will be mad they they didn't get to eat bambi's mom with bambi on the side, along with Clarabelle Cow, Porky the Pig and Longhorn Leg Horn...I say, I say, I say, I'm hungary now I'm gonna eat me some lunch.