#1 21-02-12 23:15:53

blissed

Member

From: The bus station of the future

Registered: 17-03-06

Posts: 5,622

Modern morality

I use to think modern egalatarian morality was mostly influenced by Christianity, but now I think Christianity was just moderated and then largely dumped by modern morality. I think modern morality is a product of mass literacy and that  instead of only having local elders, people could share ideas with lots of points of view, over large distances and many decades. You could do pretty much what you liked to someone who couldn't read, it was all off the record, but not to a person who can write in a world where everyone else can read, and modern morality seems to have developed at the same pace as the audience for that writing and the sharing of those ideas.

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Last edited by blissed (21-02-12 23:21:36)

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(Self made tycoon and independant financial advisor to the stars)

sonice

Member

Registered: 25-04-09

Posts: 70

Re: Modern morality

While the printed word remains a powerful descriptor of  personal human experience, I believe the proliferation of video devices is the stronger opinion mover.

I grew-up in Los Angeles California USA during an era when the excessive use of force by the police was standard operational procedure.

I am African American and in my community, as a teenager, I experienced treatment by the LAPD that was simply wrong.  You could not pick up a paper without reading some account of questionable police actions. Then came the Rodney King video.

I'm not saying it change everything but it displayed my view of reality in a way that I couldn't possibly have written. It got people to entertain the idea that maybe in some cases, justice was not being applied fairly .

blissed

Member

From: The bus station of the future

Registered: 17-03-06

Posts: 5,622

Re: Modern morality

Yeah I think video is another way people are held accountable and a very good one, so is the internet and they both evolve modern morality.

What would southern slave traders from 1850, without the moral evolution literacy provided have made of the Rodney King video. It was their routine daily experience and it was not only hidden out of site and out of mind from the people who would be disgusted by it but so was any real knowledge of it's existence.  Now universal condemnation can be expressed but it's why we condemn something like that that's interesting when at one time when a variety of diferent kinds of people were being beaten, amazingly condemnation wouldn't have been a universal reaction.

The pre universal literacy world was a male culture that accepted brutality and in many ways gloried in it with violent discipline, medals and glorious/cruel invasive military campaigns. Post universal literacy (we're talking about a 100 year period (1913- 2012) everyone gradually got to read all about what was happening and put simply the ladies culture didn't like it, and as their writing and published ideas became accepted and they gained in confidence and influence and influenced male culture enough to get the right to vote, the brutishness was gradually no longer acceptable, and I think a tipping point for this process was the 1960s. Prior to this evolution there were lots of people who would have thought what happened to Rodney king was good for discapline and good for everyone and everything "Dog, wife and walnut tree, the more you beat them the better they be"  The world that thought that was a good joke was fucking awful and even though now isn't perfect I'm glad I live this end of the 100 years

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Last edited by blissed (22-02-12 13:13:38)

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(Self made tycoon and independant financial advisor to the stars)