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Empathy towards others is like having large windows in houses. You can only have that when there is relative safety in your immediate area.
People used to be incredibly cruel to animals and children as well. It's only been in the last hundred years or so that we've had animal cruelty laws in effect, and that was before we even had child abuse laws in effect. You could say a society has to "mature" into itself before it can have empathy, and all the years before us were like a child's teen years, cruel and thoughtless. Not that we're a whole lot more advanced.
I think before any society can advance, you have to show a tolerance and an empathy towards others. I always wondered if the same people who watched Star Trek and admired Spock are the same ones today who demand that gays go back in the closet. And I've also wondered what would happen if we actually found a planet with a different life form on it and how we'd regard that life form, since we can't even get along with people like ourselves. I wonder if we've learned anything about exterminating new life forms just because they might be different physically or spiritually from us, or if we'd exterminate them because of expansion, wealth, or even just because we could.
I don't think our society today has gotten to the real "space age" because we haven't matured enough yet to accept what we find. As long as bakers are still refusing to bake wedding cakes for gay marriages, we're all still stuck here on earth.
I think that a overwhelming majority of humans are every bit as capable of killing other humans without a second of remorse or guilt, right now. Less than one hundred years ago in this country people committed the most depraved acts of violence imaginable. Read the accounts of southern lynchings, if they don't compare favorably with any acts of violence I don't know what does.
Humans as a species are just remove from their bestial past by a few millennium and while biological evolution (we are one of only a few species that kill for the plain fun of it) has been slow to keep pace with our social evolution, modern institutional restraints prevent most of use from acting out our base instincts, that is the only thing that separates us from the mass killers of day, and yesterday. But unleash those controls and more humans than you would imagine would revert to that primitive state of being than you might think.
I agree about that. I suspect that there are LOTS of people out there with murderous tendencies. If it wasn't for the laws that exist, you would see more people committing murder without giving it a second thought. Look at road rage for example.
I get the feeling that in the distant past, when two people got into a physical fight with each other, it was a fight to the death. The losing party likely ended up dead. I suspect that some people today, especially those with strong personalities and/or short tempers, would readily kill another person during a fight if they knew they could get away with it.
History is biased towards those than won, because it is written by the winners. The winners were generally those who killed the most other humans to take their land, impose their own culture, and enslave the losers to build their own new civilization. Also, most people couldn't write. Those educated few that could were usually servants to the king, or his scribes, and of course told tales of their king's bravery and why others should fear him, so as to perpetuate his image of strength and power to prevent mutiny and collapse. Kindness may have been viewed as a sing of weakness for those in power, but it's doubtful that there was any more or less of it in the general human population. Humans haven't suddenly evolved a higher degree of emotional intelligence over the past 100 years. Oh no, it takes much, much longer for baseline behaviors to change over the entirety of a species.
Morality expands as it becomes affordable. Consider the staggering cost of our criminal justice system, one which comes with a list of rights for the accused even to the point of paying for that suspect's defense attorney. A nation which does not have sufficient wealth cannot extend such rights, and thus appears morally inferior to the nations which do while the actual problem is financial inferiority.
Child labor was seen as moral until we became wealthy enough to find it immoral. Slavery died in the northern states while it thrived in the southern ones because of the economics, not the morality involved.
Great humanitarian gestures toward other nations in crisis come from those nations rich enough to make such gestures. If there is a disaster in Panama, it isn't going to be Botswana providing the emergency relief aid.
Future generations will be looking back on things we currently tolerate which by then will have been abolished because they could afford to do so, and they will be shaking their heads at our primitive morality.
Location: Mableton, GA USA (NW Atlanta suburb, 4 miles OTP)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Twilightnight
Before the modern age, it seems the good majority of people were capable of killing others even torturing them without feeling a sense of remorse or guilt.
Most people were eating, sleeping, breeding, and not really involved with any of that stuff.
Keep in mind that the history we are aware of involved the decisions of a privileged few in areas where the written records have survived to the current day. It may not reflect accurately on anything.
Humans have an inherent ability to be heartless and lack empathy & compassion when they convince themselves that they are doing I either for religion or a political ideology.
This. Many people erroneously believe that we are nice, rulers are nice, they themselves are nice, and they aren't capable of killing anyone. Wrong. If you don't believe me, just read how many individuals believe capital punishment and torture is justified. Also, consider how many people are murderers. Just because people aren't murderers on a mass scale doesn't mean they haven't killed anyone. Historical era has nothing to do with it; the capacity for violence is a part of human nature, and will always be a part of human nature.
What do you mean, why were they so heartless? They still are! OP, what kind of bubble do you live in? Look at all the torture and mayhem the US, just as one example, has wreaked in the Middle East! To say nothing of what it did in Chile, after it engineered a coup. What about the infamous School of the Americas--now renamed, but still going strong? What about the people who post on the Politics forum things like, "These people need to be exterminated" (in reference to certain US born-and-bred people)? What about our prison guards, who beat inmates when they think nobody's looking (there are cameras now), and who rape women inmates?
Cruelty is everywhere, OP. Organize your friends to do something about it instead of congratulating yourself on how far we've "evolved".
The advent of various international bodies like the UN or the League of Nations and the World Court might be somewhat responsible for calming things down a little. We also have the European Union, NATO and other regional alliance entities. Violence is still quite common (terrorism, mass murders, etc.) but not as much of the organized warfare (I know...as soon as I post this I expect North Korea or Sudan or Kashmir to erupt into fighting).
In a multi-polar world, countries of nearly equal power feel they can make a move to gain more power. This is the most dangerous type of world. It's what we experienced around WW1 and WW2.
In a Bi-polar world, usually argued to be the most safe, one major power is kept in check by the other. The cold war.
Uni-polar wars can be dangerous because the country in control can't easily be kept in check. U.S in the post Soviet world. Iraq, Afghanistan
You're definitely right about major conflict is being constrained because of international cooperation. Pax Americana. Major countries were integrated to a point where working together is more valuable than war. In other words, not repeating the mistakes of the treaty of Versailles with Germany after WW1. The advent of nuclear weapons also has a lot to do with it. There's no "gains" to be made when the most powerful countries have nuclear weapons. No nuclear armed nation has ever been invaded. Part of that is because of the post war integration where these "powerful countries" are allies, but the other part is because you can't generate a winning result anymore.
Humans are getting smarter and smarter. As far as I know they gain about 10 IQ-points with each generation. On average elderly people are significant dumber than younger ones. Juveniles are today much nicer than they were 30 years ago. They are much more empathetic. The increasing IQ is probably also the reason why homicide rates are falling strongly. Murderer have mostly an extremely low IQ.
"Man feeds stranger to lions" - potentially history or news.
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