Unashamed Sodomites, We
One of my annual pleasures is the State Of The World conversation held at The Well, between Bruce Sterling, John Lebkowsky, and a rotating caste of various other smart people. This year Bruce said something about ethics that I thought would be of broader interest to the ErosBlog audience:
If you’re a futurist, you become aware that ethics change. Judgements of right and wrong are historically ductile. People do sense that, but they don’t know how to deal with it. It seems sinful.
By historical standards, we’re morally horrifying here in our shiny new 2018. The oligarchs at the top of our society are incredibly greedy, grasping and unfair. The rest of us are unashamed sodomites with fantastic amounts of legalized marijuana.
Our behavior is damnable on its face by the moral standards of one century ago, or two, three, four, five centuries. To find a sister society to our own – meaning people would consider us in 2018 to be normal, A-okay and entirely sensible – you’d likely have to go back to the Rome described in the “Satyricon” of Petronius Arbiter. The heroes in that proto-novel would have no big problem with our cheerful gay sex and the conspicuous wealth of our vulgar oligarchs.
But we Americans wouldn’t own up to our own moral decadence. No way. We’re super-scoldy and scarily confident about our superior ethics. We’re bold and praiseworthy ethical pioneers, or else, we’re the heroic last-ditch defenders of Judaeo-Christian decency.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=20218
Except that the Romans of Petronius’s time would have been completely unable to understand our squeamishness about slavery or paedophilia.
It’s not an analogy where the arrow runs both ways; he’s not saying they would agree with all of our ethics, or we all of theirs. Just that we have to back that far to find a crew who is content with (as I parse him) our general level of hedonism.
Sorry.
I was pointing out that the ethical justifications for our behaviour and the Romans’ behaviour were very different. In fact, the Romans had the equivalent of “heroic last-ditch defenders of Judaeo-Christian decency” even before the inventors of Judaeo-Christian decency turned up there. The Stoic philosophers took a very different view of morality.
In fact, Petronius didn’t consider the behaviour he writes avout “normal”. The Satyricon is a satirical novel. Given the material economic and social situation of his time, the number of people who could engage in moral decadence was very small and the kind of things those people could do were much more varied than mere consensual buggery or dope-smoking. Epictetus – the most influential Stoic – was said to be the victim of a perfectly legal experiment by his owner to see how far he could twist a leg – Epictetus’s – before it broke. A Roman paterfamilias had absolute power over his “household” and everyone in it. He could kill his children or he could break a slave’s leg or he could have a slave thrown into a pond of moray eels to be eaten if he wanted. There was no morality involved.
Even if we are students of history, are there enough of us to actually find a new path? I’ve done many a task in the service of building a better society, but will they be enough?
I believe that this generation’s trial will be seizing the means of communication, not of production.