[thinkingemote]

> 1 Are there really people ... Why would their lives be assumed not to be "real", what even is that mindset?

Yes, there are a very great many!

The philosopher David Gray says that most modern thinking sees our way of life and liberalism and "progress" as meaning growth and change. It implies it is inevitable, a kind of always changing improvement.

Change that has occurred is for the good and its impossible to go back. I like the ${current_year} meme where someone says "it's 2026 things have changed, sweety". The joke is funny because that's what people actually say and that they say this every year but they don't notice that they say that every year.

So the modern way of life has many people who view people in the past as not real, as figuratively made of wood, who are primitive, who didn't lead complex lives.

David Gray concludes by saying that Liberalism therefore needs to be constantly fought for, that you cannot rest on your laurels and think that humanity is naturally and inexorably progressing.

These scrolls and History as a whole challenges a fundamental psychological investment in modern liberalism.

To think of the world as always improving and evolving for the better directly opposes a kind of empathy about how people 2500 years ago are the same human beings as we are. The scrolls should humble us.

Given this.

> 2. "Real and complex lives" doesn't mean "just the same as ours", mind you.

They are more like ours than we like to imagine. We prefer to think of ourselves as improved.

[card_zero]

OK, one of those "we need humbling" assertions. No we don't need humbling.

I reckon you motivation is the other way round from what you state. Claiming to be empathetic about how people 2500 years ago are the same human beings as we are, and claiming that others miss this, is a way to oppose those who think of the world as always improving and evolving for the better. So it serves your goal, which is to dish out a humbling to all the naughty conceited moderns.

[thinkingemote]

Although advocating to have less empathy generally isnt considered good there are ancient and modern schools of thought that explicitly says that empathy can be bad.

To understand the enemy is to some extent to start to love the enemy and that's bad because the enemy is bad. The idea is that you can only have empathy for certain people.

Worth also pointing out that there's also a more modern but uncommon idea that empathy towards someone or a group may weaken and shutter their own "truth" or identity stories but this is for the moment only heard in radical academia not on the street.

Generally there's also a large amount of people who don't know what "empathy" means with the ever present confusion of it with "sympathy", endorsement and alignment.

[bhaak]

They are like us. If you could take a baby from the past and let it grow up in our time, you wouldn't be able to distinguish it from a baby born in modern times.

If you see value in travelling to other countries and appreciate experiencing the different human cultures there, you should also appreciate experiencing human cultures from the past.

They are separated from us not by distance but by time which makes it harder to experience their culture.

So much was lost that we can only get glimpses on how lives were back then. So anything that expands our knowledge on the variety of human beings experiences is worth it.