The Flintstones Fallacy and The Word of God: Part 2

Read The Flintstones Fallacy and The Word of God: Part 1

Let's think about the way we have treated each other over the course of human history.

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Think about the Crusades and how countless thousands were slaughtered in the name of God. Ordinary people could commit acts of barbarism at that time that we would only attribute today to psychopathic serial killers. Never mind for a moment the religious aspect of that horror; just the fact that so many felt that human lives could be snuffed out for simply believing the wrong things is unimaginable. And the argument that life did not have the same value back then only supports my point. We've changed.

Think about slavery. The practice of owning other humans was deemed acceptable for eons, and scripture was even used to support that position. Not all who supported slavery were heartless monsters. The practice was so widespread that it is simply not possible. It's not that they didn't know any better; there wasn't any better to know. Many were good people who were simply operating within the parameters of the "humanity software" of the times. An upgrade was needed, and with time it came.

We could go on. There are countless examples of how we treated our fellow human beings with unimaginable cruelty. The problem of course is that we are looking back through the lens of our current worldview. There's no avoiding that but we need to grasp that what is abhorrent to us now was considered normal and acceptable then, at least to the majority of people. That is what we need to get our heads around. We haven't just tightened up our morals, we have changed who we are, and what it means to be human.

 

Stay tuned for The Flintstones Fallacy and The Word of God: Part 3

Comments

[Steve]

Hi Mike,

Interesting post, I'd like to think that. My hesitation though is that we're slaughtering people by the thousands across the world today, and more people are in slavery than ever before.

Is it that we've changed, or that those who object can be more connected? Or something different - apologies if I'm missing the point completely.

Steve

[Mike]

Hi Steve - Thanks for the comment. I think there's a couple of things I'd want to say here.

First, it's definitely an evolution. It takes time. And you're right of course, there's still a lot of tragedy in the world. But I would maintain that the trajectory - a word I'm really coming to love - is upward. I would highly recommend Steven Pinker's excellent book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined for a detailed, quantified analysis of how violence is indeed declining in the world. I agree some days it sure doesn't seem like it, but it is.

In the previous chapter of my life I spent 10 years with an organization that worked with marginalized women, so we were deeply connected to the trafficking issue. I know how serious it is. Here too there are things to point out. No one knows what the numbers really are. What is slavery, what is trafficking, and what is migration gone wrong? All of it is unacceptable, but I'm not sure we can draw direct comparisons to the slave trade of centuries past. Also, legally things have changed as there is a law against slavery in virtually every country. And morally no one is trying to justify slavery as legitimate. While the problem hasn't gone away, the attitude of the majority of us has changed dramatically. That is progress.

The last thing I'd add is based on what I think is a universal law that I first became of in the stock market, oddly enough. Progress, or evolution, or growth of any kind is never smooth. It goes in fits and starts. Very crudely we might draw a graph that looks like a flight of stairs from the side. I also think that we never move to the next level until the current level becomes untenable. We must face a crisis before we are willing to change. In that sense I think that "it gets worse before it gets better." I believe we are in one of those periods now. Things are deteriorating because we are on the cusp of advancement. For that reason I agree that it's easy to get discouraged and think that the world is a worse place than it used to be. In the very short term that might be true (maybe... stay tuned for Part 3 of this brief series) but the longer trajectory is clearly onward and upward.

[Steve]

Thanks for the response. I agree traffiking is more complicated, and you're right, less acceptable in many cultures, if not most.

I like the staircase idea. In tension monitoring we use a windscreen-wiper model to ply tensions, but often lack a strategy for moving beyond the tensions rather than simply placating them.

I like the hopful approach - I'll look forward to the next section :)

[Erin Wilson]

It seems that the justifications we use have changed, at the very least. Perhaps more people in the past justified behaviour with God's will or blessing. I'm thinking about war/killing in particular here. When now it seems, for the most part, to be justified under the label of self defence.

[Steve Frost]

I was going to ask something along the lines of The Other Steve. Rwanda came to my mind.

So, I like your use of the word "trajectory." Helpful.

Puts me in mind of parabolic arcs. Last time I looked up parabolae on Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabola] it talks about mathematical parabolae as true parabolae and parabolic arcs which occur in the physical world as "approximations of parabolae."

In other words the perfectible and controllable mathematical definition, in a tacit and slightly smug way, takes precedence over physical reality.

The problem with the mathematically perfectible view of things is Gödel. Or more accurately, Gödel's Incompleteness theorems. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems] I don't really understand them, but riding on the coat tails of the understanding of others and their subsequent explanation, the nub of the matter is that certain systems, like mathematics, "cannot demonstrate its own consistency." Put another way, that mathematics is self-referentially true is the most mathematics can "prove." Put very simply, and this could be highly contested as being overly simplistic, the notion of truth is stronger than the notion of proof.

We post-moderns, who are pretty Modern in our thinking, don't like to hear that. We like the perfect mathematical parabolae.

When we throw a stone in the ocean the consistent force of gravity acting upon the consistent acceleration of the stone creates a trajectory (eh?...eh?) that is parabolic. But, the trajectory of the stone won't ever be perfectly parabolic in the mathematical sense, and we tend to see that as less than perfect rather than just the way things are.

We're very Greek (Platonic) in our thinking that way, and it contrasts with a Hebraic way of thinking that would give the tangible embodied physical world primacy.

I think you mentioned in a comment on part one of this post, Mike, that church has had a static view of things. To add to that, I think we've tended to have an abstracted, heavily Greekified and Platonic (i.e. Modern) view of change and motion.

If we're expecting beautiful mathematically perfected arcs of change, we're going to find the real world dips and bumps pretty alarming.

So, for all those reasons I like "trajectory," at least, I like an embodied, Hebraic earthy version of "trajectory."

[ichabod]

"There's no avoiding that but we need to grasp that what is abhorrent to us now was considered normal and acceptable then, at least to the majority of people."

Really?

I don't think humanity has changed that much. We have gotten lazy and fearful, who in their right minds would walk across a desert with a sword to fight a foe?

Now we have drones, missiles and so on.

Why do we fight? Because we believe in different things.

[Mike]

Some great comments here.

Great thoughts there Steve Frost, thanks. Ichabod, I'd go back to the earlier reference to Steven Pinker's book. There are more people and less violence on earth today than at any other time. The problem is, our global communications have never been better, so we are more aware of every incidence of violence. (And the media presents it in a doom-and-gloom manner to keep us watching, but I digress.)

In a comment to Part 3 our friend Erin points us to this Steven Pinker TED talk from 2007. This is 4 years prior to the publication of his book, but you can see where he is going with his meticulously referenced analysis o the decline in violence.

I took some convincing, but I now see it.

Is this good enough? Of course not. We have a long way to go. It's two steps forward and one step back, but we are heading in the right direction.