For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
I know the study went through a ton of social surveys on morality phrased many different ways; I don't know that it made that distinction. An appendix lists the studies, but not the figures from them; I had to go to the Gallup webpage for the one I cited on being treated with respect.
(1: Interesting that KJV mistranslated "Gentiles" (ethnikoi) as "publicans" in the second of those verses, after that being a correct translation for the first verse.)
3.2 I'm no expert, but my guess would be that 'errors' in the KJV are all intentional.
4: Pretty sure there were a number of errors that militated in no particular direction, or even went slightly against KJV ideological preferences.
Yeah, they definitely made mistakes. They were smart guys but not infallible, and some of the obscurities in the original texts were beyond the understanding of seventeenth-century philology as a whole.
I didn't read the article because I don't know how to read, but I would break down heebie's two categories still further:
1. how well you treat friends, family, coworkers and acquaintances
2. how well you treat strangers you interact with (the cashier at Target, other drivers, people in line at the post office)
3. how well you treat people you don't interact with whom you consider part of a group you belong to (coreligionists, countrymen, people of your own race)
4. how well you treat people you don't interact with who aren't part of a group you identify with (undocumented asylum seekers, unhoused people, future generations who have to deal with our present-day climate policy)
Maybe (2) has gotten worse, but overall in America hasn't (4) gotten better? I mean, we're still terrible and garbage, but even as American politicians gloat about letting people suffer and die, there are at least like fifteen or so people in the country who feel bad about it, which is probably better than before.
They were smart guys but not infallible
An atheist acquaintance of mine questioned a Christian acquaintance on the subject of biblical inerrancy: "Are we supposed to believe that the translators of the Bible were also inspired by God?"
The response: "If I can trust God to get the words set down in the first place, I can certainly trust Him to get the translation right."
My atheist friend was dismayed that I judged the Christian to be the winner of that exchange.
pf: uh, wut? Surely there are known errors in the translation? I mean, how does this Christian account for those? Or does his brain prove "False" and then reboot ?
I don't trust God to get the words set down accurately in the first place. Therefore, it follows for both me and the Christian that translation is a nonissue.
Oh, there was also something they delved into more specifically on how cooperative Americans were with complete strangers - psychologists have been studying game theory cooperation/defection for so many generations there is now a huge body of studies to look at cooperation rates over time! Yuan et al 2017, Did cooperation among strangers decline in the United States? A cross-temporal meta-analysis of social dilemmas (1956-2017).
Basically, it seems average cooperation rates went up from 38% to 46% over that timeframe, a slow steady increase.
How well do you treat people you interact with?...I firmly believe that hasn't changed over time
Really? In most societies it's no longer acceptable for men to beat their wives, and it's no longer eccentric to oppose beating your children. These are huge changes for the better in the last 300 years.
Since I was a kid -- which is to say, since the '60s -- people have been lamenting the lack of heroes in the US. I think that phenomenon is related to the perceived decline in morality.
I assert, however, that it should be entirely uncontroversial that Daniel Ellsberg is a goddam hero, and an exemplar of the highest moral standards.
13: What would be the examples of Good Old Days heroes they're saying don't recur? (Or is it negative-as-well-as-spurious examples like Kitty Genovese?)
The common rendering, when I started hearing this in the '70s, was that MLK was the last American hero. We thought that Nixon had ushered in an era of cynicism that made hero-worship impossible. Fifty years later, I'm still not sure this is wrong.
The Stranglers held forth on this subject in their 1977 album "No More Heroes" and in the eponymous tune.
And now I'm free-associating on Nixon and cynicism. Here is Hunter S Thompson in 1971 in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back."
It took me until 1981 to accept that the tide had gone out.
(I'm distinguishing between the minute to and fro of waves, and the longer term feature of tides.)
"People you interact with" also includes varying types of morality (for some people) depending on power (im)balances- how you treat people you think are your peers is different than people you think are your superiors is different than people you think are your inferiors.
The internet really is worse though.
There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning
I have only now realised that the important word in this sentence is whatever, and it's about the illusion or enchantment that's necessary before you can be disillusioned or disenchanted.
I'm with ajay here. All that is not so much an evaluation (if it was ever meant to be) as it is putting in writing the optimism of youth inevitably dashed in one way or another. I went through something similar with the election of Obama.
I mean Alex. The capital A if nothing else should have stood out there.
I can get on board with both 7 and 18.
Alex, Minivet: huh, I read that sentence and thought "when they use the word `whatever' what they imply is that just by *being*, Americans were winning".[1] And yeah, that went "out", as the rest of the world stopped tugging the forelock every time America growled.
[1] I mean, when what you're actually *doing" doesn't matter enough to even describe it, clearly what *does* matter, is *being*. As in "being an American". It was enough, for a lotta years.
24: That's how I read it. The poignant key to that quote for me is here: "There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs."
I think that really catches the mood of a certain moment before the King and (Bobby) Kennedy assassinations. And another moment after Nixon's resignation.
And yeah, another moment after the election of Obama. But this isn't the naive optimism of youth, which is what I read Minivet and Alex as asserting. These are moments of genuine hope, and they feel just the way Thompson describes. It's not foolish to believe history could be on our side -- even if things don't work out that way in the end.
I feel compelled to add that my seeming digression starting in 13 is, in fact, on-topic because it is a discussion of moral progress. But justifying on-topicness is like explaining jokes. If you have to do it, you're probably off-target.
24 This isn't about that. It's an internal thing.
24 is pretty difficult to parse but it sounds like you're connecting to jingoism and imperialism? Not a bad starting point to look for, but in context it seems to be pretty clearly describing the 60's counterculture which included, among other things, trying to end the Vietnam War. (With Nixon's election and the war's continuation seen as its failure.) Against "the forces of Old and Evil."
An imperfect movement, as what ones aren't, but still something different from the longer-running norm.
Right, the enemy in the clause isn't the Viet Cong, it's Nixon.
25.3: Not the straightforward proposition that there was hope in the 60's, but the weirder one that after the 60's there were no more heroes.
I assert, however, that it should be entirely uncontroversial that Daniel Ellsberg is a goddam hero, and an exemplar of the highest moral standards.
Daniel Ellsberg went on Al Jazeera TV last year and said that he thought the war in Ukraine was being deliberately prolonged by the US so that US arms manufacturers could make more money. This is a lie, and one that forms an important part of Russian war propaganda.
He compared NATO to the Mafia and Putin to Abraham Lincoln ("from his point of view, he's trying to prevent secession"). This is a bizarre comparison.
He added that the US, by allowing former WP nations to join NATO, had deliberately tempted Russia to invade Ukraine. This is a lie, and one that forms an important part of Russian war propaganda.
He claimed that the US had broken a promise never to allow NATO to expand to the east. This is a lie, and one that forms an important part of Russian war propaganda.
He claimed further that, in April 2022, Russia was "close to a peace deal" with Ukraine until Boris Johnson visited Kyiv and, in what Ellsberg described as "a crime against humanity"*, persuaded Zelensky to continue the war. This is a lie, and one that forms an important part of Russian war propaganda.
*He has not at any point, as far as I can tell, ever used the words "crime against humanity" to describe any action by Russia.
Ellsberg may once, for whatever motive - ego, conscience, revenge - have done something worthwhile. By the time he died he was a hopeless old fool who was so puffed up with his own fifty-year-old sense of self-importance that he had lost his moral compass.
Ellsberg I can see the progression from having decades of a career primarily based on retrospectives of the great thing he did, into self-absorption and soft-headed conspiracism. I feel more wonder at people like RFK Jr., who had outwardly completely functional upper class professional jobs and slowly went off the deep end. Maybe part of the problem is environmental impact law, where you can usually assume your opponent is covering things up with ill intent, or where that working assumption is still good to stick with. Or who knows, maybe he was never a super functional lawyer and his career was founded on influence and name.
Not quite to 40 comments so I guess I'm breaking two rules but all this talk of how you treat different categories of others was on my mind when on Fresh Air yesterday I heard a guy whose schtick was that to "Present You," "Future You" is equivalent to that person at work that you recognize but don't really interact with. If they were moving house that weekend and asked if you'd help you'd find a dozen reasons you were busy. I really liked that framing for why people (not me, obv) live their lives as if that double-cheeseburger and three slices of pie for dessert, procrastination on work, and all the other short-term strategies, would have no consequences. Consequences only for future you, and fuck that guy.
I suppose I'd amend 34 by pointing out that not only is "Future You" that person at work that you recognize but don't really interact with, but also you are about to leave work forever and move to a different country. It doesn't matter how badly you annoy Future You, he's never going to be in a position to retaliate.
What has Future Me done for Present Me lately?
31 He's not alone in this. There's a real 'if your only tool is a hammer' vibe. There *are* nails, to be sure, but it's the insistence that this is one.
36: Future Roko's Minivet will devote his time to simulating Present Minivet and nagging him about eating more healthily and cleaning the bathroom.
OT just been to the gym and a small child in the changing area was singing a skipping rhyme
One two fasten my shoe
Three four knock on the door
Five six pick up sticks
Seven eight Andrew Tate
Nine ten begin again
...I'm not sure *all* the kids are all right.
32 is good advice, and is why I haven't had any heroes for the last 50 years.
"Being against the Vietnam War" in the US context didn't actually mean being against the actual Vietnam War, which was overwhelmingly, by number of troops involved, casualties suffered, and stake in the game, a war between North and South Vietnam. (The government of North Vietnam very much wanted to invade and annexe South Vietnam, and kill a substantial number of its population, and the people of South Vietnam generally didn't want this to happen. The result was the Vietnam War.)
It meant being against US military involvement in the Vietnam War and against US support for South Vietnam.
Ellsberg was in this position because he didn't think the US could win and he did what he did because he knew that the US government knew this too but was lying to the public. (This is a consistent position.) If Ellsberg had believed that the war was winnable, and that the US government was being honest about it, he would have continued to support the war - he said so himself.
But it does unfortunately put you on the same side as a lot of people, like Chomsky, who believe strongly that military invasion and annexation of other countries are a good thing as long as they're done by people you like.