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Eugine_Nier comments on Stranger Than History - Less Wrong
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If you were actually living in 1901 and got a bunch of future predictions made by people of the time, and chose the ones with similar absurdity to the ones described above, chances are very unlikely that you'd end up with an accurate prediction. Pointing out that an accurate description of today would have sounded silly in 1901 is hindsight bias; most things that would have sounded silly in 1901 really were silly.
Also, although it doesn't show up too much in the predictions you chose, people in 1901 had much lower levels of rationality than people from the 20th century. For instance, I'd expect someone from 1901 to think gay marriage is absurd, because beliefs about that have a heavy religious component and religion ruled people's lives in 1901 in a way that it does not now.
(And some of the items are described in a way that seem stranger to people from 1901 than necessary. What if you described the Internet as a network which controls fax machines that displays pictures so fast that they looked like flipbooks?)
First even 1901 atheists would consider gay marriage absurd. Also, in order to establish that this constitutes a lower level of rationality, you need to do more then show that their beliefs differ from ours, after all they looking at us would conclude that we are being irrational for not considering it absurd. What argument would you present to them for why they are wrong?
It only does any good to present an argument to someone for why he is wrong if he is rational. If someone believes something for non-rational reasons, there may not be any argument that you could present that would convince him.
Well, people changed their mind about this issue, and since you consider this a rational change, you presumably believe they changed their mind based an a rational argument. Or are you using "rational" as a 2-place function?
Hold on there. That doesn't follow. It is possible to do the same thing either for rational or irrational reasons.
Nobody who was an adult in 1901 is alive today, but for people who changed their mind and were adults many decades ago, I'd suggest that either
the influence of religion on them went down, so they were susceptible to a rational argument recently, but no rational argument could have convinced them in the earlier time period, or
they changed their mind about the issue for a reason that was not rational (such as their preacher telling them that God says gay marriage is okay)
"many decades ago" was long enough after 1901 that there wasn't as much religious influence on them in the first place, so they were susceptible to rational argument, but only because they were not from 1901
First as I explain in more detail here your claim that it was religious influence that kept people from believing gay marriage was a reasonable thing, appears highly dubious upon closer examination. Second, since you presumably believe that the arguments that convinced them to be less religious were also rational, you could presumably convince them using the rational arguments to be less religious followed by the rational arguments for gay marriage.
I do not believe that the arguments that convinced them to be less religious were rational (and probably weren't even, strictly speaking, arguments).
Then in want sense did you mean "people in 1901 had much lower levels of rationality than people from the 20th century"?
Since 1901 is in the 20th century, I think you need to be a bit more charitable and figure out that that's a typo.
Once you correct that, there are two things going on here:
People from 1901 and people from the 21st century aren't the same people. The people from 1901 didn't become people from 2014 and get more rational in the process; they died off and were replaced by different people who were more rational from the start.
Even limiting it to a shorter timespan, people who became rational didn't do so for rational reasons. In fact, they couldn't--it would be logically contradictory. If they became rational for rational reasons they would already be rational.
So what is the basis for your claim that these changes constitute becoming more as opposed to less rational?
What would it even mean for support or opposition to gay marriage to be rational or irrational? The utility function isn't up for grabs.
It would be an odd utility function which had an explicit term for gay marriage specifically. Arguments for it tend to be based on broader principles, like fairness and the fact of its non-harmfulness to others.
An irrational opposition might be something like having a term for fairness but failing to evaluate that term in some particular case, or becoming convinced of harmfulness despite the absence of evidence for such.
Do you have any evidence for this?
Read what Freud (who was an atheist) had to say about homosexuality for starters.
Also, France had a significant atheist population, no one there was proposing gay marriage.
Edit: By the 1930's there were several countries where Atheist Militants (of the priest-killing kind) either ruled or controlled large chunks of territory, none of them ever considered implementing gay marriage. So you can't even argue "the atheists actually thought gay marriage was a sane idea but didn't say so for fear of how they'd look to their religious neighbors".
You needn't go as far back as Freud. Hell, read what Ayn Rand had to say about homosexuality (and she thought that God existing was metaphysically impossible and religion was the "negation of reason").
I agree with the statements of fact but not with the inference drawn from them. While Jiro's argument is poorly expressed, I think it is reasonable to say that opposition to homosexuality would not have been the default stance of the cultures of or derived from Europe if not for Christianity being the dominant religion in previous years. While the Communists rejected religion, they did not fully update on this rejection, but rather continued in many of the beliefs that religion had caused to be part of their culture.
I am not sure that "the atheists actually thought gay marriage was a sane idea but didn't say so for fear of how they'd look to their religious neighbors" was Jiro's position, but I think that it is a straw man.
Blaming lingering Christian memes for the illegality of gay marriage doesn't seem right to me, because almost all countries that currently allow it are predominantly Christian or Post-Christian. Are there any countries that allow gay marriage that don't have a longish history of Christianity?
No. There are 17 countries that allow it and 2 that allow it in some jurisdictions. A list may be found here: http://www.pewforum.org/2013/12/19/gay-marriage-around-the-world-2013/
There have been plenty of cultures where homosexuality was accepted; classical Greece and Rome, for example. Cultures where marriage is predominantly a governmental matter rather than a religious one are all, as far as I am aware, heavily influenced by the cultures of western Europe. One might also observe that all of these countries are industrial or post-industrial, and have large populations of young people with vastly more economic and sexual freedom than occured before the middle of the 20th century. One might also observe that China, Japan and South Korea seem to be the only countries at this level of economic development that were not culturally dominated by colonial states.
The fact that a history of Christianity is positively correlated with approval for gay marriage does not imply that Christian memes directly influence stances on homosexuality. Christianity spread around the world alongside other memes (such as democracy and case law). Those countries where European colonies were culturally dominant also received the industrial revolution and the immense increases in personal rights that came as a consequence of the increased economic and political power of the working class. One might also point out that thinking black people are inferior is a meme that arose from the slave trade in Christian semi-democracies.
There seems to be abundant evidence that the Abrahamic religions have strongly influenced societal views worldwide with regard to sexual morals; indeed, I cannot imagine a remotely plausible argument for this being untrue. I also wish to observe that Eastern Orthodox Christianity survived the USSR and still affects cultural values in Russia; it seems highly improbable that it did not influence Russian culture in the 1930s.
I get the impression that both China and Japan (I'm less familiar with Korea) are accepting of homosexual desire and activity, and assumed that bisexuality (of some sort) was normal, and almost all opposition to it stems from Christian influences in the 1800s. I think that none of them have gay marriage, or any sort of serious movement towards gay marriage, because of a conception of marriage as family-creating, rather than bond-creating, and under such a view obviously sterile marriages are a bad idea. (Why not just marry a woman and have a male lover?)
This was certainly the attitude of ancient Greece, to a first approximation anyway (they didn't even have a social category for gay relationships between two men of equal status).
I'm not sure how much this was the case in China. Given how fashionable it is in certain parts of academia to retroactively declare historical people gay, I'd take this claim with a grain of salt.
Read Arabian Nights, blacks are portrayed pretty negatively there as well.
Arabs had been enslaving Africans since medieval times.
I've read it. Views about black people in the Islamic Golden Age were not the cause of views about black people in the nations participating in the transatlantic slave trade; a quick check of Wikipedia confirms that slavery as a formal institution had to redevelop in the English colonies, as chattel slavery had virtually disappeared after the Norman Conquest and villeinage was largely gone by the beginning of the 17th century. One might as well argue that the ethic of recipricocity in modern Europe owes its origin to Confucian ren.
My understanding of non-Christian cultures is that this claim is dubious. Of course the notion of a separation of religion and state is itself a modern western notion, so it's hard to say what this means for most cultures.
And, as Vaniver pointed out, feudal Japan and imperial China as well. However, none of these societies allowed gay marriage, as far as I know.
Note that in all pre-modern, and in particular pre-industrial, societies, economic and military strength were constrained by population size. Also, social organization was centred around clans/extended families.
Therefore, marrying and making lots of children was considered a duty of every man and woman towards both their clan and their country.
There seem to be some exceptions to the rule: the Catholic Church attempted to bar its priests from marrying, with little success until the 11th century, possibly to avoid priests spread in a multitude of countries, over which the Church had little control, to form dynastic lines. Priests still provided valuable services to their communities, hence the loss of fertility caused by the marriage ban was tolerated.
I suppose that similar arguments can be made for Buddhist priests, but I'm not as knowledgeable of Asian history.
Well, most strains of Buddhism don't formalize a role like that of Catholic priests; there are ordained monastics, some of whom are also teachers, and there are lay teachers, but there isn't a process of ordainment specifically for religious instructors. That monastic community is quite old and well-developed, though, and its members (monks, nuns) have generally been expected to be celibate.
Some strains do include variations that are less restrictive. The Dzogchen tradition in Tibet provides for noncelibate ngakpa, for example. Most Buddhist monks in Japan, and some in China and Korea, take vows that allow for marriage. Theravada traditions in Southeast Asia often encourage temporary ordination (generally for older male children).
You have to be careful with terminology here. Let's say that in some society it's acceptable for a man and a woman to live together and have regular sex. The society calls this relationship by the word X. In the same society it is also acceptable for a man and another man to live together and have regular sex. The society calls this relationship by the word Y.
Now, X and Y are different words but by itself that does not mean that this society does not "allow gay marriage". It might mean that all it does is distinguish between two (or more) kinds of "marriage".
To figure out whether a society "allows gay marriage" you probably need to taboo the word "marriage" and define what does your question mean -- most likely in terms of a bundle of rights and obligations that comes with the declaration of some sort of a union between some people.
The modern West treats marriage as being primarily about romantic love, which is an idea not shared by earlier cultures. A culture which does not see romantic love as the essential component of marriage would be unlikely to come up with the idea of gay marriage. There may be some convoluted connection between Christianity and the Western ideal of love-based marriage, but it seems likely that if there were a culture that had the same overriding love-marriage association without any religious objections to homosexuality, that culture would endorse gay marriage.