We look back on the Victorians today and laugh; about ankles being considered too risqué to be seen in public, and pianos apocryphally having skirts around their legs to hide the piano's ankle; about their belief in the supernatural, and participation in seances; scientific predictions that they pretty much knew everything there was to know about physics, that ships propelled by a motive force at the stern wouldn't be able to go in straight lines, and later, contradicting Newton, that rockets wouldn't be able to move in space because they had nothing to push against; and at their approach to the the developing field of biology, which involved shooting and often eating anything that was new, and particularly anything that was rare and prized. By today's standards we find it difficult to comprehend a society that could hold on to these ridiculous notions.
Let's have a look at the the state of our own society, and consider what will be mocked in a hundred, two hundred or five hundred years' time:
Our attitude to resources
"Son, can you imagine that back in the 2000s, people drove around in cars guzzling fossil fuels, knowing full well that they were a finite, irreplaceable resource? They drove all around the country, often for no good reason. They took their cars down to the shops when they could have walked! The richest people drove cars which used up fossil fuels at a much higher rate, and everybody admired how successful they were. They even made TV programmes dedicated to watching people driving around in the most inefficient cars!"
We make plastic bags from petrochemicals, use them once and throw them away. PG Tips give away promotional tea bags, each individually wrapped in cellophane, surrounded by cardboard, then wrapped in more cellophane. We put millions of tonnes of irreplaceable materials into landfill and leave it for somebody else to worry about.
Sustainability of the food chain
"A couple of hundred years ago, did you know people fished and fished until many of the fish species were almost extinct?"
"How did they not realise what they were doing? Surely they could tell that the fish stocks were running out?"
"Oh, they did. Scientists showed time and time again that what they were doing wasn't sustainable. But politicians carried on allowing it to happen, because it protected the jobs of a few thousand people working in the fishing industry. They risked an entire global ecosystem because of a conservative minority in denial of the evidence."
Animal welfare
"Can you believe that once people thought it was totally acceptable to keep millions of animals in laboratories, to test cosmetics and drugs on them?"
"What about the welfare of the animals?"
"People largely ignored that. Towards the end of the 20th century there was pressure on the companies involved to improve the conditions they kept the animals in, but most people thought the welfare of the animals wasn't really important, even though they were horrified at what their predecessors in the 18th and 19th centuries did to animals."
"Oh yes - wasn't that when people would buy a dog from a breeder as a pet, bond with it as a puppy, then lose interest and then give it to a charity to have it kept in a cage and then euthanised?"
Discrimination
We already look back at 1950s attitudes to homosexuality and race with horror. But as I write, an armed white man has just been acquitted of murdering an unarmed black teenager on the basis that he looked like he might be about to do something wrong. The British media is still covering a story of a little English girl who was kidnapped in Portugal several years ago, whilst I can search the Web and find literally dozens of black and asian children in Britain who are missing without explanation, but whom nobody seems to care much about.
The Church of England is still deeply uncomfortable about the idea that men and women could actually achieve equality, and the concept of somebody getting married to another of the same gender has only just been accepted in Britain against considerable opposition from those who think homosexuality is unnatural or that the right to choose to share your life with a loving partner is arbitrated by a homophobic deity documented in dusty scroll fragments unearthed in the desert and written thousands of years ago by goat herders.
The human body
"Back in the 1990s and 2000s there was a chap who decided to walk from Land's End to John O'Groats with no clothes on. He was arrested more than 20 times, and imprisoned. They wouldn't let him out of prison because he had no clothes on!"
"But didn't everybody have the same organs? Were people actually surprised to see what a naked man looked like?"
"Everybody knew what nudity looked like, because you could access highly sexualised images freely on the Internet. But the idea of actually seeing such things in public, in a non-sexual context, horrified people."
Tobacco
"In the 1900s, huge multinational companies made a business out of selling people a herb that gave them a good feeling whilst polluting the air around them for everybody else. Quickly people realised that the herb was also appallingly bad for your health. People started dying of cancer from it; those who used it had their life expectancy shortened by ten years on average, and stood a 50% chance of dying from it."
"So didn't the governments care about supporting an industry which survived on the basis of making people addicted to something that would kill them?"
"Governments were highly sensitive to the idea of substances which could harm people; such things weren't allowed in the food chain, or in pollutants from cars, and were tightly controlled in industry, even if they were only a little bit harmful. But the tobacco industry was so large and wealthy that it bought control of the governments and made them support its sales & marketing of tobacco, against all scientific advice and public opinion. Politicians just pretended it wasn't an issue."
"So companies put financial profit above the health and eventual death of their customers?"
"Sure - the society at the time rewarded them handsomely and pretty much encouraged them to do so!"
Superstition
Turn on the TV late at night and you'll see adverts for "psychics" who can apparently predict your future, for a substantial price (not from the kindness of their hearts). Many daily newspapers have a section devoted to horoscopes - the idea that the pattern of balls of fusioning gas billions of miles away at the approximate time of your birth can influence whether you'll get a job next week.
But millions of us are prepared to accept this, and perpetuate it with our own money, without a shred of evidence to support it, against all reason. In a few hundred years people will be thinking of this and laughing their socks off, but it's still a pervasive thread in our society.
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