Submitted by thelivingphilosophy t3_zqrg86 in philosophy
Reply to comment by ApocalypseSpokesman in Do no conform: Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Self-Reliance argues that we should strive for greatness and self-reliance rather than the "meanness" of conforming to the society's dead institutions saying that "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind" by thelivingphilosophy
>Our ancestors were not all a bunch of deluded, doctrinaire fools
Yeah, no they very often were, and their tendencies to be deluded, doctrinaire fools gets passed down to their children.
It depends on what counts as evidence and knowledge and things. I think a lot of colonialists, for example, thought they HAD TO conquer peoples because that's what e.g. Rome did and Rome kicked ass. There was much hemming and hawing when it started becoming apparent that the new science of I think the 1600s was answering questions about the natural world better than simply consulting the ancient texts, and even then their answer was "we're just continuing what the ancients started," not, "they were confused, we should ignore what they had to say." That was more, what, the Modernism of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, when so much of so many people's experience had been so outside anything the ancients talked about that they could convince people it was irrelevant.
They weren't stupid.
Tradition and dogma is historically more of a propagandistic self-justification of any act they wanted to commit, than any actually consistently defined system.
This "consulting the ancient texts" stuff sounds a lot like "They were just silly little guys, they didn't know better!"
I think you're engaging in what I've heard called "the historian's fallacy"--kind of "Monday morning quarterbacking" and assuming people in the past had access to equivalent information and I guess perspectives and analogies and experiences as you.
I get heavily down downvoted and my posts removed on rAskPhilosophy because quite honestly I don't think I'm really doing philosophy--I'm much more interested in things like psychology, history, maybe a little political science and economics, BUT there exists something called "the curse of knowledge" where once you know something it can be very difficult to understand what it's like for someone who doesn't. We live in a very diverse, generally scientific, information-rich environment where it's very easy to see what good it does to be nimble and flexible and say, "I'd prefer to do it THIS way, but I can see where you're coming from if you want to do it THAT way, THAT way, THAT way, THAT way or THAT way." e.g. The Crusaders didn't know a God-damned thing about Islam because they didn't have relationships with them such that they could have a lot of translators and even if they could, they'd have to write down what they were saying and it was very difficult to make many books, so they'd kind of have to decide between learning about Islam or learning about Christianity. And they didn't live in a highly scientific environment where they felt like they had a good handle on how things were going to go--they literally saw God working on the world in their day to day lives when so much happened that they couldn't explain--all they could do to give themselves any sense that they could make any productive effort in the world and they shouldn't give up and just kill themselves to end their suffering was say "don't piss God off." This was before Modernism and existentialism and things--they didn't think "I should create my own meaning or at least select the one that best represents me from multiple available, viable possibilities," they thought "I must submit myself to the one, true God and the essence of wisdom, all else is folly and ruin."
And as I'm saying as time went on and other possibilities became apparent, it depends on what you think counts as evidence. People who it's sometimes productive to call my enemies, conservatives and traditionalists, basically, explicitly say things like "the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few has always caused society to survive and progress before," and I don't think they're explicitly, intentionally lying, I think they honestly believe it.
I'm on my phone and this is getting long, but I think that's the gist of it.
EDIT: PS I just thought of the example of I think it was Semmelweis and germ theory: he had scientifically come up with the idea of "corpse particles" that were being transferred between autopsies and childbirth, making the mothers sick and killing them. He tried to communicate this to other doctors, but supposedly one of the reasons this didn't take was they didn't believe that they, engaged in a learned, gentlemanly pursuit, could get dirty and need to cleanse themselves. They didn't say, "Oh, I see where you're coming from and these corpse particles I'm sullied with are killing people, but I think it just makes me look bad and is bad for the profession, so I just completely of my own free will with my entirely informed consent just elect to put my fingers in my ears and act like it's not true"--it went against everything they ever "knew" about what was morally and factually right, so they honestly didn't believe it.
EDIT 2: PPS They had had some success predicting and explaining things with miasma theory, e.g. designing hospitals for airflow. "The truth," such that germ theory is the truth, isn't simple and natural and obvious from all perspectives in all experiences.
ok
U jelly brah
There used to be this idea of Unilineal Cultural Evolution which we've dispelled. I'm not sure it was so much that Rome had influence, in that people viewed cultures as a linear progression from one era to the next, with more "advanced" cultures being the evolutionary pinnacle of humanity, and that anyone not as "advanced" was simply unevolved. We obviously know this is not true nor correct, but as a whole, at least in academia, it wasn't until recently that this shifted, and continues to shift.
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I think that indoctrination is more multifaceted than that. For example, how can there be Christian physicists and cosmologists when basically all scientific findings counteract the bible? It's because people can have cognitive dissonance to be a indoctrinated fool in one aspect while being a free thinker in another.
Yes almost everyone in the past were indoctrinated into stupid, illogical traditions but that didn't prevent them from being wise and accurate in other areas of knowledge. We shouldn't take past wisdom as gospel but we should learn from it.
I'm not saying that people in past generations were wrong on everything.
The problems arise when there's these extremely common justifications of "well they knew what they were doing" or simply, "it's tradition/how it's always been done", which are huge issues.
A lot of tradition is either originally arbitrary, arising from social contexts that no longer exist, or basically tools of control, and I think that we keep giving tradition too much credit.
Definitely agree with all of that. Tradition is almost always a bad reason to continue to do something unless it's harmless fun like Christmas or New Years. Even then things like New Years fireworks are actually really bad for the environment and public health.
> For example, how can there be Christian physicists and cosmologists when basically all scientific findings counteract the bible?
This isn't a well thought out position to maintain, as there is technically no disconnect between observable and measurable science and the notion of a (possible) creator deity/deities since the presupposition there would simply be that our science is the practice of understanding the world/universe/multiverse that was made by that deity. Science, in this regard, effectively becomes a branch of theology (for those who subscribe both to religion and the sciences). The science (as understood today) also doesn't change just because I may not believe in a creator god origin...I could believe in spontaneous existence or a non-deity "alien" creator and the measurement of forces and chemical compositions of substances remain the same, regardless.
To that end, a devout physicist or chemist or biologist is just plying their trade to understand the world they believe was made by their supposed creator. The hypothesis, measurements, and conclusions don't really care what the genesis of the subject was, we're just trying to understand what is in front of us.
I'm saying this as an agnostic secularist and not a practicing anything...as far as I know we have not disproven any possibility of a "creator god" with science, we've just gotten really really good at dissecting and explaining how (some) things in the natural world work...even if we can't always conclusively say where they came from, or why.
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