Hindsight makes everyone look silly

When discussing the past, people often express wonder and amazement at behaviour which goes against current values.

"How could they think slavery was right?"

"Why were colonizers so brutal"?

"Why didn't they see that gays should be treated just like other people?"

"Did they really think codpieces looked good?"

And so on. It's relatively easy to spot these things in the past, because they conflict with current values. The contrast is glaring and evident.

What people are less apt to realize is that future generations will say similar things about our own society as well. It's hard to say exactly what they'll find wrong with us, because we don't know in what way values will change.

I've got one pretty good guess though. If we keep emitting carbon and permanently (on a human timescale) change earth's climate for the worse, future generations will curse us for it. Their lives will stuck, and they will have stories of the paradise that earth once was and how we ruined it.

At some point, future generations will no longer emit carbon (perhaps because we'll have used all of the oil), much like we no longer use slaves. No longer doing what the past did makes it easier to criticize. They'll shake their heads in wonder.

"They knew it was bad. Why did they do it? I can't believe how stupid they were. We had one planet and they ruined it. For what? To move giant rolling hulks of metal (cars) back and forth?

Maybe a new religion will form, dedicated to cursing us. People will read books written in our time just to laugh at them, much like we laugh at old discussions of the justice of slavery.

Really, from the perspective of the future, what we're doing now will look like the stupidest thing ever done in a long history of human stupidity.

Of course, it's not really our fault, just like past stupidity wasn't really the fault of those who did it. We're only human, and so were they. We think we've changed, but we haven't really. Read an old book, and you'll see things seem pretty similar to the present. I was struck by this while reading Thucydides. All of the same faults and virtues, in an older time, on a smaller scale.

So any humans could be as stupid as we are. It just so happens we've acquired a much bigger capacity to do damage. But we're no worse (or better) than those who chose to keep slaves or do other things we call terrible today. Take that for what it's worth.

In the future though, it's likely that few people will recognize this, and they'll think we were the dumbest humans in human history.

I can't really blame them for that. We do the same thing today, looking at the past.