I think that it is intended as an exercise. Put yourself in the mindset of an average 18th or 19th-century individual, and imagine the 21st century as an idealized future. Things seem pretty wonderful; machines do most of the work, medicines cure disease, air travel lets you get anywhere on the planet in a single day.
But then, what?! Women can vote, and run businesses? And legalized gay marriage?!! How shocking and disturbing.
It’s almost a given that the future’s values will drift apart from ours, although we can’t be sure how and in which direction they will go. So something about this idealized future would be likely to seem abhorrent to us, even if normal and natural to the people of that time.
I think—and this seems to be the part that people don’t understand at first—EY is not suggesting that rape should be legalized, or painting this as his ideal values of the future. EY is saying something about the way that values change over time; the future is bound to embrace some values we find abhorrent, and the way that he can convey that feeling to us is by picking some abhorrent thing that pretty much everybody would agree is bad, and depicting it being normal and acceptable in a future society.
That’s the only way that we can experience the feeling of how someone from the past would feel about modern culture.
That’s the only way that we can experience the feeling of how someone from the past would feel about modern culture.
The easiest way to experience something close to what someone from the past would think of modern culture, is to imagine how you would feel about their culture. “There are no nuclear weapons, Al Qaeda is a nonentity, the NSA can’t spy and taxes are very low. On the other hand medicine is in a horrible state, there’s no gay marriage, religion is everywhere, and women can’t vote.”
although we can’t be sure how and in which direction they will go
Sure. They will continue to drift in the direction of the values of descendants of New England Puritans, as they’ve been doing for the last few centuries.
I admit that I found this really disturbing too.
I think that it is intended as an exercise. Put yourself in the mindset of an average 18th or 19th-century individual, and imagine the 21st century as an idealized future. Things seem pretty wonderful; machines do most of the work, medicines cure disease, air travel lets you get anywhere on the planet in a single day.
But then, what?! Women can vote, and run businesses? And legalized gay marriage?!! How shocking and disturbing.
It’s almost a given that the future’s values will drift apart from ours, although we can’t be sure how and in which direction they will go. So something about this idealized future would be likely to seem abhorrent to us, even if normal and natural to the people of that time.
I think—and this seems to be the part that people don’t understand at first—EY is not suggesting that rape should be legalized, or painting this as his ideal values of the future. EY is saying something about the way that values change over time; the future is bound to embrace some values we find abhorrent, and the way that he can convey that feeling to us is by picking some abhorrent thing that pretty much everybody would agree is bad, and depicting it being normal and acceptable in a future society.
That’s the only way that we can experience the feeling of how someone from the past would feel about modern culture.
The easiest way to experience something close to what someone from the past would think of modern culture, is to imagine how you would feel about their culture. “There are no nuclear weapons, Al Qaeda is a nonentity, the NSA can’t spy and taxes are very low. On the other hand medicine is in a horrible state, there’s no gay marriage, religion is everywhere, and women can’t vote.”