It is interesting how we can look back and say "Man, those medieval people were dumb from living with rats and that's why they got the plague."
But maybe in the future it will seem just as obvious why we are currently dying of cancer or heart disease or whatever. We'd be just as ignorant and primitive-seeming to them as medieval people seem to us.
Look at AIDS, for example. In areas where unprotected promiscuity is the norm, it spread very quickly, and is causing a lot of harm. Hardly any of them suspected what was going on, and perhaps many still don't in places like rural Africa or Asia. Same thing with Avian Flu, which is said to come from crowded, intensive animal farms. If it happens to evolve and kill off half the planet, the survivors will probably say "gosh, they were dumb for cramming 40 000 birds into one small shed, pooping all over one another... why didn't they see that that was bad news"...
But that's just the thing. We are going on without really thinking or planning about the side effects of our actions. We don't know that what we are a doing may be setting us up for a whole lot of pain.
Another example: most of the African-americans are descended from slaves. There is to this day a great deal of hostility between the euro and african-descended people in the states. Also you see a higher crime and violence in some of those communities of slave-decendants, which affects the whole nation. Couldn't the slavers 200 years ago understand the simple fact of "what goes around comes around"? The damage they were doing to those human beings and their descendants? They probably saw almost nothing wrong with it, but because of them everyone is suffering.
What are we doing today that we see nothing wrong with, but is harming our future generations? How can we even know?
But maybe in the future it will seem just as obvious why we are currently dying of cancer or heart disease or whatever. We'd be just as ignorant and primitive-seeming to them as medieval people seem to us.
Look at AIDS, for example. In areas where unprotected promiscuity is the norm, it spread very quickly, and is causing a lot of harm. Hardly any of them suspected what was going on, and perhaps many still don't in places like rural Africa or Asia. Same thing with Avian Flu, which is said to come from crowded, intensive animal farms. If it happens to evolve and kill off half the planet, the survivors will probably say "gosh, they were dumb for cramming 40 000 birds into one small shed, pooping all over one another... why didn't they see that that was bad news"...
But that's just the thing. We are going on without really thinking or planning about the side effects of our actions. We don't know that what we are a doing may be setting us up for a whole lot of pain.
Another example: most of the African-americans are descended from slaves. There is to this day a great deal of hostility between the euro and african-descended people in the states. Also you see a higher crime and violence in some of those communities of slave-decendants, which affects the whole nation. Couldn't the slavers 200 years ago understand the simple fact of "what goes around comes around"? The damage they were doing to those human beings and their descendants? They probably saw almost nothing wrong with it, but because of them everyone is suffering.
What are we doing today that we see nothing wrong with, but is harming our future generations? How can we even know?
