[jillesvangurp]

Supplement the list provided in the article by more modern boogeymen such as Negroes, Jews, Arabs, etc. and you have a nice explanation of recent history. I realize this may be deeply offensive to some of the readership here and emphasize that I don't look at the world in these terms. However, recent history is full of people that actually do demonize these groups of people; no matter how irrational that is.

Nothing has changed here except our ability to find meaningless differences among groups of people with enough of a qualifier to split the world into "us" and "them". It's a natural reflex that transcends genetics, race, and other ways to qualify people as us and them. There have been plenty of experiments to suggest that this us and them reasoning does not really have to involve anything meaningful or substantial. E.g. the Stanford Prison Experiment is a great example where giving some people a uniform is enough to trigger the effect.

IMHO Neanderthals did not actually disappear and the different subspecies of humanity simply merged to create a more fit offspring. Apparently humans carry enough neanderthal DNA to suggest that inter (sub)species breeding was a thing. Is that "us" or "them" or does that even mean anything? What do we call the humans without this DNA? Pure breads or ancestors? Is that better, worse, or just different? Is that even a thing? I.e. didn't those humans just die out?

We like to dramatize things into epic battles, fights, etc. But life a few thousand years ago was brutal and very much survival of the fittest biased. Apparently, humans with some neanderthal DNA were somewhat fitter and survived into modernity. No need to get judgemental about that.

[jgilias]

We should be careful not to chastise people from the past from the viewpoint of our comfy and safe lives. It's easy to sneer at our ability to divide people into 'us' versus 'them' over meaningless differences, when it's not you worrying about a night raid where you get scalped and your wife raped.

[moate]

Meh. The vast majority of people subscribed to some religion or another and all the major religions say don't do rape or murder. I think it's reasonable to point out the moral failings of the past relative to their own morality.

Seems perfectly reasonable to say "these people did bad things". If you want to then go a step further and say "they did bad things because reasons" that's fine, but the bad things were still done and pretending that providing some context justifies it is just as flawed an analysis as saying it doesn't. The world is nuanced AF.

[jgilias]

We have literally no idea what kind of a morality the vast majority of people who have ever lived subscribed to. I mean, even today there are still cultures around where literally kidnapping a teenage girl and keeping her hostage is the virtuous traditional way of getting married.

What I was trying to allude to is that it's easy to sit on our high horses and bash people from bygone times about how stupid they were for dividing people into 'we' and 'them' over minuscule differences, when they were mostly just faced with a simple choice - 'we' dead, or 'them' dead.

[wolverine876]

> We have literally no idea what kind of a morality the vast majority of people who have ever lived subscribed to.

Human beings have consistent morality, in many ways, across space and time. As the GP pointed out, look at all the religions and cultural rules against the same things and encouraging the same things, such as not harming others and respecting your parents. There are differences also, but the extreme relativism is plainly false.

[jgilias]

We really can not know this. We can only infer from cultures and religions in the relatively short timespan covered by written history. And even then, morality has changed significantly through time. A simple example - would you think that someone telling a story about someone else beating his wife to a pulp is something to laugh about?

Here, check out how the audience reacts just a bit more than 50 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccyu44rsaZo

I think the only moral that may have been something close to universal throughout times would've been something like: "Don't kill a member of in-group without a good reason if you're not the head honcho."

Everything else? We have literally no idea.

EDIT: Really, watch the video, it actually applies to the discussion really well. It's basically an argument about morals.

[wolverine876]

> We really can not know this. We can only infer from cultures and religions in the relatively short timespan covered by written history.

That written history covers an enormous amount of ground, with records going back 6,000 years and in diverse cultures, from Sanskrit in what is now India to cuneiform to China for thousands of years, etc., and those records including older materials. Anthropologists have been studying different cultures for a long time and have plenty of evidence of what is consistent across them. Much is known about how morality develops in children. Etc.

Every human being understands it. You don't walk into a room in a strange culture and wonder, 'maybe these people think it's funny to poison each other' or 'maybe they are pure anarchists' or 'maybe they eat all their children'.

We can't have perfect knowledge of this question or anything, but to confuse that with no knowledge is absurd. For example,

> We have literally no idea.

Why is it important to you (and others) to try to push a transparent falsehood that empowers evil behavior?

[wwtrv]

I think outright religious bans on murdering, raping or enslaving people outside of your community are fairly recent developments. Even the old testament is fairly ambiguous on this.

[wolverine876]

I think it's much more complex than that. The Old Testament both insists you must treat strangers well, but also describes slaves and conquering Jericho. 'Thou shalt not kill', etc. however, are blanket statements.

We need more evidence and research; the Bible is long and we can find a statement here or there that supports almost anything. But as I said, while there are variations, much is the same.

I'll even speculate that it's predictable - I doubt I could walk into 99% of human communities in the history of the world and not have a reasonable sense of the morals (social customs might be tricky though!).