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wjbc t1_iqyhlm0 wrote

You always have to be careful about claims that one dynasty is more modest and moral than its predecessor, since it's likely the historians or storytellers in the new dynasty writing about the old one. The oracle bones and tombs from the Shang Dynasty suggest it was highly bureaucratic, meticulous about keeping records, and orderly in arranging the tombs. There's no archaeological evidence of lakes of wine or forests of meat or mass torture.

Many modern historians believe the last king in the Shang Dynasty was as reasonable and intelligent as most rulers and not as decadent and cruel as following dynasties portrayed him to be. China is justifiably proud of its long history, but modern archaeology and historical research has often cast doubt on the reliability of written records, let alone popular folklore and literature.

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gimhae_pyeongya OP t1_iqyws6j wrote

I agree - it's just such a story so deeply ingrained in the 2,000 years of the dominance of the Confucian ideology, so I just released it as I remember it. Most East Asian people (in Sinosphere) would recognize the idiom

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HappyFailure t1_iqymj0v wrote

I'd heard that there was a find of something that could reasonably have been the lake of wine. Trying to google on it, I end up getting directed to Wikipedia, but I guess it boils down to an artificial pond/lake that doesn't seem to have been used for drinking water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_Terrace_Pavilion

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ddrcrono t1_iqyww81 wrote

This is just an off-the-cusp thing but my understanding is that some research has found a correlation between the complexity of moral/religious systems and the size/complexity/density of society. It makes more sense since keeping track of people individually gets harder / there's more anonymity / you have problems you wouldn't have had in a sparser setting. I'm not sure I'd say more moral in this case, though.

There are also some writers like Steven Pinker who actually uses violent crime, etc. statistics to argue that the world has gotten more moral / good over time. (I find this somewhat tenuous in that it might just be that we're better at making people not want to do bad things, rather than them actually being morally superior).

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wjbc t1_iqz02jd wrote

Yes but Pinker’s argument has nothing to do with individual rulers.

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ddrcrono t1_iqz19s6 wrote

>moral

In Pinker's case, he's talking about society and statistics in general, but I think it's generally the case that individuals grow up within and are affected by a society - the most immoral anyone can "get away" with being in one place and time is different than another.

That particular point aside, I actually got the impression that OP was talking about moral standards in general and using the sorts of things rulers did as examples to highlight the state of affairs.

My general train of thought here is that if society and/or rulers were held to higher standards over time that it would be analogous to the arguments that Pinker makes, or more generally, to the overall idea that morality develops over time. (You don't need to think specifically about Pinker for this, as it's a point that's been made elsewhere in different ways).

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DaKeler t1_iqz7ae6 wrote

Would you mind providing sources for those modern historians?

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wjbc t1_ir04s6k wrote

I’m getting this from a lot of sources. It’s just a general trend among ancient Chinese historians.

For example, Records of the Grand Historian is the first of China's 24 dynastic histories and was written in the early 1st century BC by the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian. But it covered a 2,500-year period! That’s why modern historians don’t take everything in it as gospel.

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