How cruelly will posterity judge us?

My friend Aaron (let's just call him that because it's a totally quirky name, I mean what other name starts with "aa" except Aardvark of course?) is a happy guy - at peace with the world, and how things are generally going around him. The other day in the context of  some discussion he emphatically announced that we are all good people, that everything is basically Ok with the world,  things are going well, that we are all very civilized and humane now, our society is much less prejudiced and brutal than our predecessors, of  say a century or two ago. We have good laws, we do not persecute minorities, women are liberated, science and technology are developing at a never-before-seen rate, and have made human life easier and more pleasant than at any other time in the past.  Even things that are not right are being sorted out, things that are not perfect are being moved in the right direction. 

As much as I envy Aaron for his ability to be firmly  ensconced   in an optimistic bubble,  I am unable to share his enthusiasm for the current state of humanity.  Yet some of the objective points he makes are hard to argue with.  Let's compare the world of 1811 with 2011.  People were dying pretty young back then, from infectious diseases that couldn't be treated : maybe the average lifespan was 40 or 50 depending on where you lived.  People from western Africa were being sold as slaves in America, and the Native American genocide was on in full swing. Asia was being colonized by European powers. Europe was being ravaged by the Napoleonic wars. Feudal class systems were deeply entrenched in most parts of the world.  There were no unions defending workers' rights. Women had few rights to speak of.  It is not a pretty picture and one could be excused for imagining that we are much better off now.  

Leaving aside the broad brushstroke  presumptuous "we" that Aaron has used, ( who are "we" here? People like Aaron who hold  comfortable jobs in a Western democracy might of course be more optimistically inclined than a famine-stricken villager in sub-Saharan Africa or a child factory worker in an India or China.) let us take a different tack and try to convince him that people a hundred years later might look back on us and consider us  barbaric, ignorant, prejudiced and retrogressive in the same way that many smug people like Aaron view  the societies of a hundred years ago. 

What would be the top ten, or even top five things, that will strike people of the future as being horribly wrong with our society? This little exercise in introspection and imagination can do us no harm.

So here is my list.

a) Economic imperialism  and disparities :  The dominant bias in current economic thinking is free market economics, yet it is almost as Utopian as Marxism. The free market is a mythical beast, for markets have always been secured and dictated by political clout. The Neocon policies that led to the invasion of Iraq are a classic example of how the government intervenes with warfare if necessary to boost the interests of corporations.  Future generations if they have the good sense and fortune to move away from this form of multinational hegemony will find it shocking how naively we let corporations exploit so many people and control so many aspects of our lives. They will be puzzled how after the turbulent sixties and seventies when many people in the developed world and elsewhere rose up against established norms , the nineties could be anticlimactic.  It might seem like the Napoleonic usurpation of the French revolution.  They will be shocked at our casual assumption that profit is and should be the single biggest motivator behind human actions. Even feudalism did not breed as much economic disparity as today's system. The story is the same whether you talk of the top 1% in a rich Western country, or the 10% middle class in a developing economy, which has monopolized the benefits of industrialization to the near-total exclusion of any one lower down in the social order.  The irony of the profusion of communication technology in a country where large sections of the population are malnourished will not go unnoticed. The irony of "free" market capitalism in a tightly controlled police state will also be noticed. The misery that forced industrialization has brought upon millions of people engaged in more traditional occupations like agriculture will seem monstrous to future generations.

b) Environmental damage : Climate skeptics will be the new Southern slave owners, people who through their own myopia and greed will hold on to systems that are damaging to others. Despite unquestionable scientific evidence in favor of global warming, there has been little political will to combat it, little has been done in America for example to cure the addiction to fossil fuels. Established norms of development are extremely unsustainable in view of the Earth's limited resources - and a tremendous resource crunch is inevitable when the populous developing countries seek to emulate the industrial development and consumeristic practices of the West.  People in the 19th century hunted animals to extinction and that shocks us now. People of the 21st century have done this much more efficiently through habitat destruction.

c)  Health and Lifestyle issues :  While infectious diseases have been dealt with fairly well since Fleming's serendipitous discovery, new diseases such as hiv have emerged, an effective antidote to cancer is yet to be developed, and increasingly sedentary lifestyles with bad diet have increased the risks of heart disease.

People of a few centuries back may died frequently from bubonic plague, but at least they had food fresh from the farm without pesticides, worked out their calories in the fields, and never knew fast food.  People of the future will hopefully outgrow this fascination for industry scale food production. Who knows they might even find more ethical ways to treat farm animals.

d) Religious intolerance and terrorism :  The sooner organized religions go away the better. They obviously are still a very big presence.  Religious fanaticism inspired terrorism has been on the rise. The pre-20th century world knew brutal warfare, but cynical urban terror where sneaky violent  acts are cynically carried out to cause maximum civilian casualty and ensure panic are a relatively recent phenomenon. If the world turns saner and more secular in future, they will view our capitulation to a few religious crazies with great scorn.

e) Gender matters : Feminism is far from passe even if some would like to declare all its ends accomplished.  Women are still underrepresented in most sectors outside healthcare and education. There are few women in the top echelons of politics and corporations. Sexual minorities still face serious issues in most places. Girl children are unwanted in many cultures. Sex trafficking of women and children happens extensively. Rape as a weapon of war is being rampantly used in several theaters of war. Women cannot vote in Saudi Arabia, they could still occasionally be stoned for adultery in Iran, they do not have the right to choose their own sexual partners in many cultures. All this would appear disgusting to the dear little people from my utopian future.

This list could go on and on. I already feel better having vented out some of it.  The weakness of all the points made here is that they are all in vogue -  I have just repeated some common notions about how the world is going to the dogs, that are very much in fashion today.  There is nothing to tell us that the people from the future will think exactly like this - in fact  they probably won't.  But as you can see there's plenty material here to prove my friend Aaron wrong.