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The next layer is realising, “hey, this is what’s happened to other civilisations, because they got too complex”. This is not because people are horrible, or it’s “us versus them”. It’s all of us.
Is that true
Cultures are not monoliths and trying to hold onto old beliefs results in generations of unnecessary harm inflicted on the people who are trying to change with the world. Traditionalists hold back humanity from meeting change and trying to hold onto a vague idea of “culture” creates an undefined standard to hold up to people. And “you’ll know it when you see it” is witch hunt reasoning.
Old believes tend to be better. If they would be bad, then the people trying to change them, would be proven right long ago and the believe would not be old. This is especially true, when they are wide spread over a long time. A very obvious one is the idea that murder is bad. Pretty much everybody through out history all over the world would agree with that idea. I certainly believe it is a good one too.
Old believes tend to be better.
slavery is ok.
black people are animals.
woman aren’t human.
Jews are scum.
gays are corrupted.
it’s ok to marry a 10 year old child.
are these all better?
First of all “tend to be” and also they are not that old believes for the most part. You have to keep in mind that for most of human history we have been hunter gatherers and they did not practise slavery for the most part. They would also understand that black people, as human beings are animals, but that women are humans. Jews are pretty new anyway. Gays would have been mostly seen as natural(it actually has a lot of history of being seen that way)
“Erm actually when I say old I ean hunter-gatherers” is kind of a cop out lol
Let’s narrow it to “when writing exists” for our history and go from there.
A very obvious one is the idea that murder is bad.
Execution seems to be allowed by the state so it seems not everyone thinks murder is bad when it has very specific applications. So, again, change should be embraced so we can end murder. Tradition means archaic justice like mutilation or execution - you really think irreversible severity is better than rehabilitation?
“Murder is bad” is not as sacrosanct an idea as it should be. In fact, historically, it was quite the opposite. Just look at the US’s traditionally sadistic murders in the name of justice, from old lynchings to the new cross-mounted “lethal injections”. Even the naming is so… Out of touch.
You’d think the cross at least would raise some eyebrows in the relevant religious community, but you’d be wrong.
There’s so many superstitions and beliefs that once had a purpose, but now do not, other than holding society back.
Koreans still think a fan will kill them, Europeans still think colonization was actually good for the colonized, and the USians still think their country is the absolutely first and best in the world, or at the veary least a 1st world nation in the development sense.
In most places, “traditionalists” claim any raped woman wasn’t actually raped, because all of them must have worn miniskrits, looked at the man seductively and secretly wanted it. In fact, she should be the one punished for raping him! And it’s always a him and her. The rest should naturally get the lethal injection treatment.
What old beliefs tend to be is held by people with a lack of critical thinking skills. Which means a bunch of it is superstitious bullshit that has little more than a tangential basis in reality. Moreover, their critical thinking skills tend to make those beliefs skew just the right way to be as disjunct from real life and as senseleness as possible even when the tangential relation with history is plainly visible.
and none of that is an argument to say: old believe = bad believe
Also:
Europeans still think colonization was actually good for the colonized
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103250/people-s-opinion-on-former-colonies-2019/
In most places, “traditionalists” claim any raped woman wasn’t actually raped
Rape is similar to murder widely accepted as a crime. There are obviously cases where that did not happen, but still basically everybody considers rape to be wrong.
the USians still think their country is the absolutely first and best in the world, or at the veary least a 1st world nation in the development sense.
The concept of rape being possible between people who are married is new to Abrahamic and Greco-Roman culture. Historically, rape is a crime against a patriarch a woman belongs to. It being possible to rape one’s wife or slaves was considered nonsense in the western world until quite recently.
And while raping women that belonged to enemies was recognized as such, it was generally considered a good thing, such as the Rape of Sabine Virgins, the Iliad (Achilles is mad because Menelaos is selfish about the rape loot table), Viking raids, etc.
There is no time in Mediterranean/European written history where the majority position is that physically abusing your wife until she has sex with you is bad until the 20th century.
Even the Rape of the Sabine Virgins and similar were seen as wrong as early as the Roman Republic. But it is certainly insane to claim that rape was not considered a crime at all. In most cases it was, unless you raped your wife.
Yeah it’s not so much that rape was not considered wrong, but that they had different conceptions of consent than we do now.
When you drive a vehicle, in most states, you consent automatically to having your blood taken by police officers. In most states, you can literally have your blood taken from you against your will. But because you agreed to have a driver’s license, according to most states, you’ve legally consented to this violation of your body.
Rape is obviously a whole different level of violation, but marital rape historically worked the exact same way we treat drunk driving blood draws today. When a woman was married, legally she was consenting to any future sexual activity her husband desired. She couldn’t withdraw her consent after. Her consent was implied through the act of marriage.
Check the same statistics from 50 or 70 years ago. Current beliefs are by definition not traditional.
That was about the time European countries gave up their colonies. 1960 was the African Year after all. Even before that you had the clearly not exactly liberal Bismarck arguing against German colonies for example.
Old beliefs also include “being gay is a sin/affront to god/whatever negative statement you want to attach” and more generally “being different is bad”.
That’s because in the old world, social cohesion was the most important factor in your group’s survival. Anything that got in the way of that, like neurodivergence, being otherwise different, or not having children with other members of your group when it was expected, could endanger your survival*.
Thankfully, we’re not in that world anymore, and the differences between our world and the one in which those rules/laws arose are what make morality developed during that time irrelevant. We can explain why murder is still wrong today without relying on religious texts for justification, but we can’t explain why eating lobster is more wrong than eating beef anymore, nor can we explain why just being different is wrong anymore.
The people who made those laws lived in a rapidly desertifying climate before refrigeration or indoor plumbing - if your group wanted to eat lobster, they would have a lower chance of survival overall. You can find reasons like this for most religions’ rules, and some of them, like banning murder, still contribute to our group survival, but that’s not a reason to assume any given religious prohibition is sensible today.
*to be clear, I’m not suggesting that any of those things were actually wrong or inherently contrary to a group’s survival, because many cultures had no issue with weirdos, neurodivergence, or queerness. The people making these rules probably believed they were good for their group, but they didn’t have access to the information that we do now, nor did they have the benefit of the intervening millennia of philosophical developments. The groups that prohibited queerness and observed dietary restrictions were also trying to separate themselves from the groups around them, to strengthen in group feeling, and they enforced it later when converting new groups as a way to mark a clear cultural shift from the old ways.
A very obvious one is the idea that murder is bad
exceptions may apply
Yes, and no, the thing is, most animals (including people) don’t like change. It causes stress.
