Whatever the real outcome is going to be, it is likely that you'd be doubtful of it, though. People's track records on predicting the future weren't all that great even before tech took off on its probably-only-sigmoid-but-still-kinda-exponential-right-now curve.
"Can you think of cases where current popular sentiment is similarly charitable toward the past?"
It would be very hard. I am of the opinion that our current culture is excessively cut off from the past. While not every culture in the world necessary did things like ancestor worship (an extreme of past honoring), our culture is historically very unusual in its outright contempt for the past. And it makes me rather uncomfortable in a lot of ways because I think the 20th century is replete with too many examples of cultures going full on "let's start from a blank page and create the future that should exist!" and failing... several million bodies later.
I find myself wondering how much of it has been the natural severing of experiences due to the aforementioned changing tech (how can I emotionally attach myself to great-great-grandpa's experiences, when he lived his entire life on a farm, hardly moved from his village, and couldn't even imagine the job I currently have, etc. [1]), and how much of it is social engineering by people who essentially don't want you to find out just how many current political ideas have actually already been tried and failed, utterly and horribly. At the same time, in a lot of ways, I think we've changed less than we think, and our contempt for the past may well be one of those things that the future will have contempt for us for. For instance, it's obvious that we believe in many ways that we don't need "privacy" anymore, but it's not hard to see the current furor around social media as the beginning stages of laboriously recreating the need for privacy from scratch. It will be a different idea of privacy than what we had before, but having to tweak the lessons of old is something every generation has to do. How much pain could we have saved ourselves, though, had we tweaked our ideas of privacy instead of throwing them out entirely, only to rediscover them? (And that's before the totality of what the social media giants are doing has really come out and penetrated into the body politic. I suspect social media's troubles have just begun.)
[1]: Not just guessing that, by the way. That's what my family's genealogy has turned up. Seems like they moved maybe once in their lifetime, but certainly my ancestors were not travelers. My grandfather had enough of a hard time understanding my interests; I would appear all but an alien to my great-great-grandfathers.
Whatever the real outcome is going to be, it is likely that you'd be doubtful of it, though. People's track records on predicting the future weren't all that great even before tech took off on its probably-only-sigmoid-but-still-kinda-exponential-right-now curve.
"Can you think of cases where current popular sentiment is similarly charitable toward the past?"
It would be very hard. I am of the opinion that our current culture is excessively cut off from the past. While not every culture in the world necessary did things like ancestor worship (an extreme of past honoring), our culture is historically very unusual in its outright contempt for the past. And it makes me rather uncomfortable in a lot of ways because I think the 20th century is replete with too many examples of cultures going full on "let's start from a blank page and create the future that should exist!" and failing... several million bodies later.
I find myself wondering how much of it has been the natural severing of experiences due to the aforementioned changing tech (how can I emotionally attach myself to great-great-grandpa's experiences, when he lived his entire life on a farm, hardly moved from his village, and couldn't even imagine the job I currently have, etc. [1]), and how much of it is social engineering by people who essentially don't want you to find out just how many current political ideas have actually already been tried and failed, utterly and horribly. At the same time, in a lot of ways, I think we've changed less than we think, and our contempt for the past may well be one of those things that the future will have contempt for us for. For instance, it's obvious that we believe in many ways that we don't need "privacy" anymore, but it's not hard to see the current furor around social media as the beginning stages of laboriously recreating the need for privacy from scratch. It will be a different idea of privacy than what we had before, but having to tweak the lessons of old is something every generation has to do. How much pain could we have saved ourselves, though, had we tweaked our ideas of privacy instead of throwing them out entirely, only to rediscover them? (And that's before the totality of what the social media giants are doing has really come out and penetrated into the body politic. I suspect social media's troubles have just begun.)
[1]: Not just guessing that, by the way. That's what my family's genealogy has turned up. Seems like they moved maybe once in their lifetime, but certainly my ancestors were not travelers. My grandfather had enough of a hard time understanding my interests; I would appear all but an alien to my great-great-grandfathers.