Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
No, you really can't.
There is absolutely no way to ensure that future individuals or societies will hold the values you expect.
For example, it is always possible that today's democracies could morph into totalitarian states, much in the same way the Roman Republic lurched into an Empire largely commanded by a single man, or Nazi Germany went from a representative democracy to fascist state in a few short years.
Or in the modern world, a series of food and energy crises could easily knock most of humanity into a pre-industrial state, replete with a return to feudal states and repressive theocratic injunctions on behavior (made all the more persuasive due to a lack of resources).
History does not aim to turn the entire planet into a series of liberal democracies, and such beliefs are equivalent to wearing blinders.
Some do, some don't. Plenty of imams, Hindu politicians and Chinese Communist bureaucrats have no qualms about suppressing content and expression.
There is absolutely no way to guarantee that social mores will become increasingly liberal in the future.
I do not support bans. (Nor can we set up accurate counterfactuals of what would happen if certain texts were or were not banned.)
However, that's completely irrelevant.
The point is simply that the future is utterly unknown. If the United States turns into a theocracy in 2060 years, outlaws homosexuality and bans pornography, is it valid for them to look at individuals in 2010 as a pack of godless debauched degenerates wallowing in sin and vice? Should we describe ourselves that way based on the mere possibility this is how the future will turn out?
The world is not "progressing" uniformly to highly liberalized democracies. Ascribing such a teleological necessity to the mechanics of history has far more basis in bad Hegelianism (as if there is any other kind...) and a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution than in facts.
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While your argument is technically correct, I think it might be a a type of strawman in that it can be applied to Any argument, which means we can't predict anything. If I said the sun will rise tomorrow on earth, you could say aliens could blow up the planet, and no one could argue against that. I hate to Godwin the tread by dragging Hitler into it, but in your Nazi example if I argue that history will look down on the Nazis, you could say that the US could get taken over by Neo-Nazis and approve of what Hitler did. You can't disprove a negative. I think the onus is on you to support your claim that the US is moving toward a more fascist regime that supports book banning. So far no democracy I know supports it? If you compare yourself to china, then anything goes, you can sell organs from dissidents on the black market there.