What views do you currently hold that will look outdated to your grandchildren?

[Mise]

I already don't like this. Obviously, people should be able to switch their names to whatever they want, but I'd be strongly opposed to my wife taking my surname.

Both of us agree with that in principle, but for practical reasons -- my wife's maiden name is really long and contains a hyphen, meaning it doesn't fit/can't be input into certain forms etc -- she changed it. She still uses it professionally though.

50 years is a really long time, some things will be same as today, others will not. For example Adam Smith criticized the greed of the merchants and economic inequality during his time but still we have about the same level of inequallity as during Adam Smith time and while mercantilism is considered outdated it is hard to tell if our own economic setup is really all that different.

On other hand there have been massive changes on how women are viewed in society, like Sweden had women salaries like 50 years ago and only had women sufferage for about 100 years.

Thus it is pretty hard to tell what the dominant views will be 50 years into future. Some things can change quite quickly, others much less.

Yeah this is the thing that really fascinates me about this. It's like looking at a photograph of a car: it's easy to see right now the direction of travel (or at least the potential to move in that direction), but we don't know how quickly it's moving, how many turns it will take along the way, or what the final destination is.

Racism and its likes will still exist in some form.

A few people have mentioned this - that while the extent of what we currently consider racist will diminish greatly, new things might end up being considered racist. It's something I'd personally like to be well ahead of - I'm not really interested in what "the line" is, I'd like to be as far away from it as possible.

On a societal level, I think we should be more concerned about the actual harms caused by systemic racism, than trying to work out of it's ok to do whatever the 21st century equivalent of blackface is. But that doesn't mean that the latter isn't important on a personal level.

 

[Tee Kay]

I think the idea of treating different people as equal - both in terms of individuals and people of different races, classes, genders, etc, whether that's equal in worth or equal before the law, will come to be seen as totally absurd.

 

[Traitorfish]

I think the idea of treating different people as equal - both in terms of individuals and people of different races, classes, genders, etc, whether that's equal in worth or equal before the law, will come to be seen as totally absurd.

Equality before the law is an idea which has persisted in some form or another for over two thousand years, and with the abolition of the few remaining legal distinctions between men and women in most developed countries would seem to be enjoying an historical peak; surely some special explanation would be needed to explain why it would be totally abandoned within a couple of generations?

 

[Tee Kay]

Equality before the law is an idea which has persisted in some form or another for over two thousand years, and with the abolition of the few remaining legal distinctions between men and women in most developed countries would seem to be enjoying an historical peak; surely some special explanation would be needed to explain why it would be totally abandoned within a couple of generations?

Just because an idea has persisted for a long time doesn't necessarily mean it will persist into the future. As inequality (real or imagined) between individuals and groups become ever more egregious, and resentment grows, it'll be harder to justify why we should pretend that humans are equal in worth or before the law.

It won't be totally abandoned. Like now even in the most nonreligious countries there are still people who believe in good old fashioned eternal damnation.

 

[W|M]

Equality before the law is an idea which has persisted in some form or another for over two thousand years, and with the abolition of the few remaining legal distinctions between men and women in most developed countries would seem to be enjoying an historical peak; surely some special explanation would be needed to explain why it would be totally abandoned within a couple of generations?

don't you mean two hundred years, and specifically in european and european-colonized contexts?

 

[EnglishEdward]

I find this thread difficult, there is what I hope will happen, what I think will happen and what I fear will happen.

Perhaps the best approach is to first consider it in reverse. What views did people hold 60 years ago that have changed?

 

[Traitorfish]

don't you mean two hundred years, and specifically in european and european-colonized contexts?

No, I do mean two thousand. In Europe, free men were formally considered to be equal before the law in both Roman and Frankish law. This was complicated by the fact that these societies comprised large populations of non-free people, that these societies usually possessed noble classes with additional legal privileges, and by the fact that societies governed by powerful un-elected aristocrats are not very reliable at putting their formal legal principles into practice. But, the principle of the legal equality of members of a political community, of what we would now call "citizens" has a much longer history than the Enlightenment.

We are talking about Western Europe and countries heavily influenced by European countries, but that's implicit in the thread premise.

 

[Aabraxan]

What views do you currently hold that will look outdated to your grandchildren?

I can't decide if I should put them in alphabetical order or just name the top ten.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I can't decide if I should put them in alphabetical order or just name the top ten.

Top 10 please.

 

[Sofista]

What things I hold dear would my grandchildren find outdated in 50 years?

Universal health care. Welfare state. Possibly my enduring love for meat, and definitely my childish fascination for gasoline-powered motorbikes.

 

[EnglishEdward]

I regard getting tattooed as a somewhat peculiar thing to do.

 

[gangleri2001]

I have opinions regarding Scottish independent and Irish reunification which will seem pretty silly to people living in some sort of pan-European federation.

No! No! Not the nightmare! The horror!

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I'm curious... Is anyone in this thread already a grandparent so they can answer the question in real-time?

Here are a couple of weird ones from my own grandparents that I would think any woman now would find preposterous:

1. That women are not supposed to have any opinions that differ from their husbands' opinions. This is actually one of the reasons put forth by male politicians as to why women shouldn't be allowed to vote: "They'll just vote the same way their husbands vote and we'll have twice the counting to do for nothing."

I remember my grandfather just expecting my grandmother and me to vote the way he decided to. It came as a shock to him when my grandmother, dad, and I all voted for the party we supported and left my grandfather outnumbered.

2. That divorced women were not supposed to live on their own. After my parents were divorced, my grandmother (dad's mother) expected my mother to move back into her parents' house instead of living on her own. It came as a shock to her when my mother said no, she planned to move into town (we were still living on the acreage at the time) and get her own apartment.

 

[Zelig]

Both of us agree with that in principle, but for practical reasons -- my wife's maiden name is really long and contains a hyphen, meaning it doesn't fit/can't be input into certain forms etc -- she changed it. She still uses it professionally though.

Oh I know that pain. I changed my own name because it was long and hyphenated, but I didn't have a partner's name to take.

 

[IglooDame]

Wait, where did I suddenly get grandchildren???

You can have a few of mine.

I'm curious... Is anyone in this thread already a grandparent so they can answer the question in real-time?

The nearby ones are 11, 8, 5, and .1, the other one is 13.

So far it's mostly technology differences, I'd say they're not quite old enough to express social positions dramatically different from their mother or grandparents. So yes, from someone (50, btw) who reached adulthood prior to the internet to talk about why it's called "dialing" a phone, "taping" a TV show, etc etc etc, I do get funny looks. The 11yo has been to the range with me shooting 22 rifle and pistol already, and the 8yo has learned the four rules of gun safety and has shot BB guns with me, so I don't think there's going to be substantial attitude changes toward gun ownership. Socially I think the adults are fairly progressive (certainly I like to think so), I've made a point to tell them things like boys can wear pink, and we're fairly careful not to voice anything that could be construed as a prejudice.

That's a 40yr difference, maybe it takes a bit more stretch for those sorts of changes to appear?

 

[Cutlass]

Equality before the law is an idea which has persisted in some form or another for over two thousand years, and with the abolition of the few remaining legal distinctions between men and women in most developed countries would seem to be enjoying an historical peak; surely some special explanation would be needed to explain why it would be totally abandoned within a couple of generations?

Like the ideals of the US Constitution, or the US Declaration of Independence, having an ideal doesn't equate to having a reality.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

You can have a few of mine.

Aimee's not old enough to have grandchildren, at least by modern standards. But if she lived in medieval times, she might well be a grandmother, assuming her own child had reproduced around age 13 or so (yes, stuff like that really happened back then).

Similarly, going the minimum age needed to reproduce, I'm technically old enough to be a great-grandmother (turned 57 almost 6 weeks ago). But the honest truth is that I've been happy raising cats, and prefer that any human children in the vicinity be both housebroken and capable of telling me if something is wrong, as unlike the Eleventh Doctor, I don't speak baby.

The nearby ones are 11, 8, 5, and .1, the other one is 13.

So far it's mostly technology differences, I'd say they're not quite old enough to express social positions dramatically different from their mother or grandparents. So yes, from someone (50, btw) who reached adulthood prior to the internet to talk about why it's called "dialing" a phone, "taping" a TV show, etc etc etc, I do get funny looks. The 11yo has been to the range with me shooting 22 rifle and pistol already, and the 8yo has learned the four rules of gun safety and has shot BB guns with me, so I don't think there's going to be substantial attitude changes toward gun ownership. Socially I think the adults are fairly progressive (certainly I like to think so), I've made a point to tell them things like boys can wear pink, and we're fairly careful not to voice anything that could be construed as a prejudice.

That's a 40yr difference, maybe it takes a bit more stretch for those sorts of changes to appear?

I still refer to taping programs, though in reality they're programmed to record on my PVR, and get funny looks from basically everyone born prior to when most people acquired computers and went online on a regular basis. As recently as 11 years ago I owned a phone with a rotary dial.

When anyone derides guys for wearing pink (there's a thread about clothing over at TrekBBS), I just mention that centuries ago it was normal for men to wear pink.

 

[AdamCrock]

1. Phone is a tool made for calling (SMS is tolerable) - I'm such a grandpa.
2. Political Correctness is crap.
3. My vacuum cleaner should not be smarter than me.
4. Same goes for computers and any and all electronic (and or) appliance (like a fridge) that cannot be thrown out of a window.

 

[Lexicus]

Like the ideals of the US Constitution, or the US Declaration of Independence, having an ideal doesn't equate to having a reality.

Yeah but that isn't his point. The right-wing's game today isn't to scoff at the idea of equality before the law, it's to pervert the concept into its opposite meaning. I'd say it seems more likely that we would have inequality before the law while still maintaining lip service to the idea of equality before the law, than that we turn against the idea completely and just throw it out.

But who knows? I would hope that most of my views will seem outdated in a few generations, if not all of them.

 

[Ferocitus]

That Radiohead are mediocre, at best.
That it is physically impossible for Putin to be Russian president for another 75 years.