An interesting idea came up in one of my classes. One of the students made the comment that Medieval Japan seems "violent" and I asked the question what people in the future would think of our culture?
Another student raised his hand and said "People that study us in the future will see us as violent." After discussing the violent tendencies of our society, I began to tell the students that it's hard for us to see ourselves as more or less violent because we are living at the time and seeing our society as we want to see it.
When we study cultures of the past, sometimes we highlight negative, violent characteristics but when we study our own culture, it's hard not to immediately think of the positives. But, 500 years in the future, when new cultures are studying the United States of America (of the past), they will note the negative characteristics like violent video games, sports, movies, television, etc. This statement, of course, got the students concerned overwhelming with the thought of the United States not existing that far into the future. I could've frightened them ever more and named all of the cultures/societies/empires that collapse extremely horrifically in LESS than 223 years (our current age) but I decided to hold that off for another day. :)
Just a quick post. Now I'm going to see what Ibn Tufayl says about tabula rasa...
PS... Heading to the Poconos this weekend. Going to give the Android Blogger a whirl and maybe I'll post over the weekend!
No comments:
Post a Comment