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....in ancient/medieval times, why was it so easy for nearly everyone living during said times to relentlessly kill, rape, destroy, enslave others, etc. etc. without hardly anyone feeling the least bit bad about it?
Nearly everyone? I think this is a false premise. Sure, this sort of stuff went on, but not to the extent that you apparently imagine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Harry Diogenes
Empathy / sympathy are innate to humans, they allow us to live in small groups. However, we also have the problem of in-group / out-group.... the things that separate us into different groups.
Right. Humans (or even before we were human) have always been social creatures, living in groups. And to do that, you've got to have some sense of cooperation.
"Ethical rules... were not originally invented by some enlightened human lawgiver. They go deep into our evolutionary past. They were with our ancestral line from a time before we were human." - Sagan
Empathy / sympathy are innate to humans, they allow us to live in small groups. However, we also have the problem of in-group / out-group morality, where we apply our morals only to our group or groups. Football teams, race, religion, nationality, skin color are just a few of the things that separate us into different groups.
When we hate the other group, then we treat them less like humans. This was not a problem just for ancient/medieval times, it is still a problem.
You are nitpicking. America post Revolution quickly abolished indentureship, ended laws that gave fathers legal powers over sons (as had been an ancient custom too), and the Northern states moved quickly towards abolition. The South, as we know, moved in a different direction. I do not pretend everyone jumped on the bandwagon of equal civil liberties for all starting in 1783. The subsequent century was a history of a country adapting to its new future. In many cases, it was two steps forward and one step backwards. History rarely moves neatly, you rarely find a sudden break and a total transformation of society overnight into something entirely different. But what happened in 1783 was still a revolutionary event that radically set the United States onto a very different path, a path that we still struggle with today in some sense. Certainly, by 1800 America was already reckoned as the freest country in the world and for good reasons. It offered tremendous amounts of personal freedoms and autonomy on a scale never seen or accepted anywhere else in the world prior to it. Was it perfect? No. Did it always live up to the ideals? No. But pointing out a select handful of contradictions doesn't disprove the enormous changes across American society and which attracted tens of millions of immigrants and underscored the American dynamics and culture and politics for the future to come.
Hmmm, you probably are correct in that I am doing some nitpicking, and your points are well founded. History is taught with the implied concept that the time in which we exist is the completion of history. In that context, yes, I agree I'm nitpicking. My personal viewpoint, mostly taken from seeing all sorts of recent discoveries and shifting of the very laws of nature, is that we are in the middle of changes and a real reaching of any goals may be quite a bit down the road. That changes my viewpoint of the American experiment from being solid courageous steps, to seeing them as smaller and sometimes faltering ones, heading towards the high prose of the founding documents but still falling short.
I know people like that exist today, but in ancient/medieval times, why was it so easy for nearly everyone living during said times to relentlessly kill, rape, destroy, enslave others, etc. etc. without hardly anyone feeling the least bit bad about it? Do you think people back then just weren't capable of being able to empathise or sympathise at all?
History is, by and large, the history of human tragedy. Not the everyday gestures that actually make us human and humane. Naturally, the great events that rate as historically important are accompanied by those on the losing end of history.
Do you really expect to open a history book and read an entry like, "On August 15, 1322, John the Miller gave a pair of socks to a wretch. The wretch put them on with delight, as he had never worn socks before and found them quite warm and comfortable. Then John the Miller told the wretch to wait right their because his goodwife might have some left over pottage and stale trenchers, and he would bring them to him."
People were kind every day, when they could afford to be. Perhaps more than today since most people knew everyone in their communities and couldn't assume that others would take care of those in need.
I don't believe human nature was much different in the Middle Ages than any other time in history. Hard times do make hard men and women, but not every day in the Middle Ages was a tragic upheaval of society resulting in battle, famine, and plague.
I know people like that exist today, but in ancient/medieval times, why was it so easy for nearly everyone living during said times to relentlessly kill, rape, destroy, enslave others, etc. etc. without hardly anyone feeling the least bit bad about it? Do you think people back then just weren't capable of being able to empathise or sympathise at all?
Why was it so easy for Americans to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis? There was overwhelming popular support for the death of people who never did us any harm.
Most people spent their lives working and socializing and taking care of their families, just like now.
But that don't sell history books! You need conflict and drama and death tolls to get anyone to pay attention to ancient Peloponnesia.
Exactly.
When they read about our times, it’ll be about the World Wars, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq/Gulf Wars, 9/11, Columbine, killing people with drones, rioting in inner cities, refugee crises. Timothy McVeigh, David Koresh, JFK assassination, John Lennon assassination, Reagan getting shot, widespread genocides in many parts of the world, etc.
And this is all just covering 100 years, imagine looking at our time period over the course of 300-400 years, say from 1620-2020.
They aren’t going to write about little Susie donating her teddy bear to Goodwill. Unfortunately, many times it’s violence that affects human society the most and history covers events that have had the biggest effects on society.
I've often wondered how the earliest human groups reached mating age given how long it takes to raise a child to self-sufficiency, even in a hunter-gatherer society. Can you imagine sitting in smoky, stuffy cave with numerous babies and toddlers, smelling, upchucking and wailing?
Instinct or not, it's a wonder at some point people didn't just lose it. "I don't care how much you love it. It stinks and it's noisy and it isn't any good for anything. Out it goes!"
Empathy / sympathy are innate to humans, they allow us to live in small groups. However, we also have the problem of in-group / out-group morality, where we apply our morals only to our group or groups. Football teams, race, religion, nationality, skin color are just a few of the things that separate us into different groups.
When we hate the other group, then we treat them less like humans. This was not a problem just for ancient/medieval times, it is still a problem.
It's unlikely to be a problem - it's likely a feature not a bug. In-group prioritization makes survival more likely. The real problem is that nature presents us with the issue of scarcity. When there's just one deer available for hunting but 3 groups of hunters need it to survive, the more cohesive, more aggressive group will likely win.
Given that group aggression has survived throughout all human and even mammal evolution it's extremely likely that selective pressures favor the aggressive over the passive - just like other pressures favor collaboration and rule compliance. The modern 19th/20th century man who is capable of living a civilized life in accordance with society's rules and convention, the man who can go to Church and be a doting father, but put on a uniform and go to foreign lands and kill foreigners and take their property is in some ways the culmination of those different evolutionary pressures.
What we really see today in the developed world is the removal of scarcity as a perceived factor as far as necessities of life are concerned. We are in a situation where the international order has allowed us to believe that trade, industry and technology can change the default assumption about the intentions of other groups. We no longer believe that other groups are aiming to take ours away from us, but we're instead fully subscribed to the idea that we're all interested in a mutually beneficial exchange of goods and ideas.
Time will tell whether this is a permanent shift or whether it is merely a specific historical constellation.
Why was it so easy for Americans to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis? There was overwhelming popular support for the death of people who never did us any harm.
There was overwhelming support for killing innocent people?
While the Iraq War itself may have had widespread support (I seem to remember support usually hovering in the low 50% range), and I surely heard my share of people happy about sticking it to combatants, I am pretty sure the average American did not delight in reports of collateral casualties and deaths of innocent Iraqis, much less an "overwhelming" number of Americans.
In fact, I heard a lot of dismay about it even in Right wing media, and such reports bolstering a lot of anti-war sentiment from the American left (the real, progressive Left, that is, as the neo-liberal Dems are no less hawkish or shy to use non-discriminitory attacks than the Republicans).
Only approximately 1% of people meet the clinical definition of psychopathy. Anyone with more moral grounding and ethical standards than a psychopath abhors the death of innocent people, even those on the "wrong side" of a conflict.
I hear this level of hyperbole all the time from the Right, characterizing their philosphical/ideological opponents as having inhuman characteristics, and it makes them look foolish, and does nothing to contribute to the debate, much less improve our society.
There is not a great spread between accusing the majority of Americans supporting thousands of innocent deaths and accusations of blood libel. It is a way to dehumanize one's opponents and is propaganda through and through.
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