Fortigurn wrote:harmony wrote:Why would you assume that the ancients I refered to were the ancient Jews?
I didn't. My answer applies to the ancient Eastern sages, the Native Americans, and the ancient Muslims. The key is the belief that the ancients were in connection with God in a way we are not.What can ancient man tell modern man, that modern man needs to rely on the ancients for their wisdom?
A huge amount, from where I'm standing. Like 'How to raise a family without one parent running off with someone else, the kids being left to fend for themselves and becoming crack addicts, and the remaining parent indulging themselves while the kids run amok'. A few things like that. Like how to raise kids which don't shoot other kids in the face, or grow up to be serial stabbists. I think that's an important lesson modern man still hasn't mastered.
How about how to raise kids which treat teachers with respect? Who don't drift away from school and spend their lives under bridges sniffing glue? How to teach girls to respect their bodies instead of dragging them into anorexia and bulimia? How to create a society in which people aren't afraid of helping someone, in case they get hit, mugged, or sued?
How about how to grow food without destroying the soil you're using? Allegedly ignorant 'savages' managed that for 40,000 years. We somehow lost the knack after the industrial revolution. How about not soiling the water you're going to be drinking? Dogs know that, but apparently we don't. How about preserving wildlife and natural environments even if we think they don't have any intrinsic value, instead of almost wiping them out and then frantically scrabbling to preserve them when we realise we've just ruined the local ecosystem, and now crops are failing through an imbalance of natural pests, the water table has dropped 20 feet, the top soil has blown away because we knocked all the trees down, and local people are choking with respiratory diseases as a result of huge soot deposits caused by massive slash and burn operations?
Here's another good one, how to teach people that other people are more important than money. That enslaving thousands of native people in your offshore factories making US$300 shoes for US$.50 a day is unethical? That safety regulations should be obeyed even if it costs your company a lot of money? That corporate fraud is actually wrong, not 'creative accounting'? That people below a certain socio-economic status are not disposable, and that those suffering from debilitating mental illness should not be simply dumped in the streets just because the government doesn't want to spend money on healthcare?
Where do I start? Where do I stop? Modern Western society is such a mess of morally depraved, ethically deranged, selfish, snivelling misfits, that I wonder if there's any other society from any era which doesn't have something to teach us?
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Yes despite it all, I would argue that society today (at least Western Society) is far more "moral" that at any time in history, if one judges morality by respect for human rights, human freedoms, and human dignity.
Society is far from perfect; there exist many moral outrages big and small, but at the very least, we possess a moral framework in which to understand and judge these acts, and we are open to increasing moral understanding and development.
The ancients do have much to teach us about human experience, but little about human morality. Our understanding of the moral universe has increased geometrically since the ancient days making much of what ancient holy books have to tell us about morality quite irrelevant.
Fort, I seem to note in you a bit of nostalgia for the good old days when life was simpler, people lived in small, close knit communities, and society was governed by good old fashioned morals (I’ve perhaps misread you). You are highly critical of modern times, yet appear to have a critical blind spot for the halcyon days of yore.
Life in the traditional community had its advantages, but it also had its disadvantages, as does modern society. I think it perfectly acceptable to criticize the failings of modern society (which are legion), but in doing so, it helps to keep in mind, to quote the song, “the good old days weren’t always so good.”