How Could They Have Not Invented the Internet in the 19th Century?
If you were alive at the time of people truly believing the earth was flat, wouldn’t you make decisions based on that belief? Eventually, someone challenged it and didn’t sail over the edge (some astronomers had figured it out but couldn’t really prove it). Until the 17th Century, mostly everyone from royalty to peasants believed in an afterlife, and made decisions based on that: buying indulgences, tolerating corrupt clergy, looking forward from awful lives for most to eternal salvation for almost anyone.
What beliefs are we defending today which are directing our current actions and, 50 years from now, will have “experts” scratching their heads about how we could have been so unenlightened? We think we’re masters of the universe because we can land some metal on Mars or create virtual reality. But once upon a time no one believed in powered flight, or radio transmission, or air conditioning, or abundance agriculture. And they acted accordingly.
One of these days “cancel culture” will itself be cancelled because we’re finally going to realize we’re not omniscient, we should stop being so condescending to people who lived in times devoid of our present knowledge, and that our present knowledge is also limited. Life is a movie, not a snapshot. I’m constantly surprised by how stupid I was two weeks ago.
Of course, some of you may think you’re smarter than that….
