As we read things from the past it is as if we travel into the past not that we summon the author into our time.
Always kept that in mind. The author himself is a product of his time not of ours.
For one, culture norms can change in less than a decade, much less 1964. In 1964 there was still legal segregation in the US. And whatever you think "natural" today might not be considered so in 2030 or 2040, much less 2019 + (2019-1964).
Second, it's not like the terms men and boys don't carry different attributes still today, or just because the anglosaxon culture is going through an Emo hyper-sensitive phase that everybody of the 8 billions in the world will have qualms to use the terms "men" and "boys" in such a matter (more capable, more mature, etc).
We're riding an exponent in everything around us, culture included - not just in amount of transistors per silicon wafer. 2019 is much more different from 2009 than 1974 was from 1964.
> We're riding an exponent in everything around us, culture included
Popular culture perhaps - but in my experience there's a massive yawning chasm between 'woke' culture and the culture of the majority of the population, which has remained remarkably sceptical. The whole pronouns thing for example would still get very strange looks down the pub.
And I call your recency bias and raise a "things have always been the same" bias.
Whether exponential or not, we've had more culture-defininging technological, lifestyle, and moral changes in the past 200 years than in the previous 3000.
I'm not sure that I agree, given that those 3,000 years encompass the beginnings of (amongst other things) Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, as well as the development of printing, explosives, and algebra.
Christianity unfolded over 2000 years. It took around 500-600 years to dominate Europe, it wasn't some huge sudden shift.
Algebra didn't matter much (as far as life changing applications) for most of the time after its invention until around the industrial age. Then we had a huge math explosion, and a huge science explosion, physics, chemistry, etc plus practical applications as advanced as sending people to the moon.
Explosives and printing are part of the exponential curve we talk about. We went from knives, swords, arrows (used for millennia) to crude explosives to nuclear weapons and rockets between 500 years or so.
Same for printing. We went from stone carving, papyri, hand copying and limited literacy for millennia, to the printing press, mandatory mass education, and onwards to computers, and the internet, and now whole world knowledge reachable in one's pocket wherever they are in the span of 400 years or so.
Every day life in most of the world wasn't much different between 500 B.C and 1800 B.C. Ancient Rome, or Medieval Paris, could as well be Ancient Babylon. In villages life was almost entirely the same. The slow cultural changes (the introduction of Christianity, the change in rulers, etc) didn't change or affect much of everyday life.
People can't only be judged on where they are right now, you have to include cultural and sociological aspects as well.
I would consider myself open minded and liberal and for lack of a better term, "woke". But I was born in the 80s to parents who were born in the 60s and their parents in turn were born in the 30s and so on. So my parents were raised with some racism and a bunch of sexism. That meant I grew up with a bit less racism and declining sexism, but those things were still there.
In my teens I used "gay" as a slur.
Am I awful? Can you take one look at a forum post I made in the late 90s and judge me entirely? I'm doing my best now to fix these things so hopefully my son will grow up with none of this cultural and sociological baggage, but I'm not a bad person for acting in accordance with the times 20 years ago. Nor were my parents in the 80s. Nor was Knuth in the 60s.
Is it okay what he did? No, of course not. But let's not hang the man for something that wouldn't have raised an eyebrow at the time.
>Am I awful? Can you take one look at a forum post I made in the late 90s and judge me entirely?
The opposite. I'd judge anybody judging a person from a 90s forum post as awful scum themselves.
>Is it okay what he did? No, of course not.
Yes it is. It's not even that controversial. Men and boys, whether one is woke or not, have some different characteristics, age, maturity, strength, etc, being some of them. That was the purpose of the analogy, which was, and remains, a common idiom across the globe.
Is it okay for 2019 people of a particular (woke) subset of a particular (Anglo-Saxon) culture to impose whatever latest retrospective moral panics they have on everybody? No. For one, that's cultural imperialism...
