How to introduce modern morals to an ancient civilization?

[EmptyHusk]

Let's asume that by some reason you have been sent to the past, be it Rome, Greece, Egypt, a civilization from an alternative Earth, or any other civilization that practiced slavery, aka, practically any human civilization that developed agriculture (Humanity, fuck yeah!).

Now, for some reason you have the power to influence the course of the nation. Maybe you were made into king/queen/emperor/emperatriz/sultan/pharaoh/whatever in your travel to the past, or you are have become an advisor thanks to your inexplicable good education and view of the world (as well as your inexplicable ability to understand the local language).

Now, the thing is, live sucks for everybody except you and some rich lucky few.

To put it symply, you can expect 80% or more of the population to be slaves.

Most of them are farmers, (peasants and serfs). Uneducated, they are bound to work the land of their lord in exchange of protection (Unless it is like a dictatorship).

Then there are those that are a luxury, servants working directly under a high class citizen.

Lastly, there are those heavily discriminated, that can't even work the land, or criminals, who are sent to work on the mines until they die.

Your objectives would be giving better rights to the masses, improving living conditions, giving the peasantry a voice, abolishimg slavery (without harming the economy and army, no point if you become an easy target to be conquered), making a society based on merit (and lessening racism), gender equality (by it originally a matriarchal or patriarchal culture), making education a right, not privilege, probably making a centralized government, and preferably keep the crown in power (or another method of fight off corruption.)

Also, make an army that doesn't kill, plunder, and rape every city they conquer would be nice (establish war crimes).

You have access to all the information about farming techniques, engines, industrialization, medicine, anything you can find in the internet.

You kingdom is feudal, so you would have to be careful if taking the power out of the nobility, and guilds are a thing.

Now, how would it be possible to enlighten this civilization to more fair and liberal society?

And once this changes have been set, how would you deal with a word that keep such practices?

 

[Cloak&Dagger]

80% of the population is slaves? Damn, this place is a shithole even by ancient standards.

As for how to do it, at the end of a gun.

Use the money from inventions and bureaucracy to build an utterly loyal government, then fund the military to force things through.

 

[EmptyHusk]

80% of the population is slaves? Damn, this place is a shithole even by ancient standards.

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Pretty much because 80% of the population are farmers, they had so little rights that one could argue they were slaves.

The thing is, in ancient times there were little if any difference between commoner or servant.

As for how to do it, at the end of a gun

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Well, if possible avoiding civil wars.

But besides that, revolutions can often lead to dictatorships, and besides YOU are the crown or a great supporter of it so it would probably end with you death.

Use the money from inventions and bureaucracy to build an utterly loyal government, then fund the military to force things through.

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So, get money, support an army, use diplomacy of the biggest army, then take power away from the nobles to the citizens?

That sounds like a terrible way to weaken the country and rally everybody against you.

You see, nobility was more of a necessity to keep the country strong, by giving more rights to the civilians, you get paid less.

Of course, there is guns help, but that would need both a great economy and years to mass produce to equip an army.

Still, I was thinking more on how to change the economy and culture from a position of power, like using invention to free people from agrucultural work, offer them work on industries, adding a tax to slavery in order to slowly erase it, etc.

 

[galahad]

Can you have modern morals without modern technology ?

 

[EmptyHusk]

Can you have modern morals without modern technology ?

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That is exactly what I am asking, or more specifically, which technologies you would need to introduce in order to make a smooth introduction of modern morals, without a civil war if possible.

 

[Pidl]

That is exactly what I am asking, or more specifically, which technologies you would need to introduce in order to make a smooth introduction of modern morals, without a civil war if possible.

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A mind control ray.
Anything less is probably going to end with your unfortunate death.

 

[ZUCLUGU]

Well, can you make a cube if you don't know what is a square?

Exactly. You have to introduce a crapheap of intermediate values, so basically you should give up on adults and focus on the young

 

[EmptyHusk]

Well, can you make a cube if you don't know what is a square?

Exactly. You have to introduce a crapheap of intermediate values, so basically you should give up on adults and focus on the young

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So, basically things like morals values should come after education can be made public, with certain degree of influence on it?

Kind of makes sence, and I suppoce that you would need to prepare the economy for that notion by improving agriculture and freeing people to do more industrial work, that should allow an army to be established and thus avoid falling behind other countries. Then you would need to add a tax to slavery, which would increase with time until it becomes economically unappealing (if putting the infrastructure of your country on the backs of those more likely to raise against to wasn't enough, especially once industrialization is a thing).

 

[Mortis Nuntius]

Public morality isn't something one individual or group can decide or really change. Rather you need to make the conditions on the ground favour the growth of your morality whatever that may be and you need to punish infringements on that morality and encourage acts that further it. Eventually you might shape society...or not. If you can shoehorn the existing morality and culture into it your odds greatly increase.

 

[Alane1]

80 percent slaves? Even the roman only had 10–15 percent of its population as slaves as far as I can tell and many of those were in italy where they made up as much as 35 to 40 percent of the population.

Where are all the free peasants, free laborers, miltary personal, artists, priests or even serfs(which aren't slaves)?

 

[EmptyHusk]

Where are all the free peasants, free laborers, miltary personal, artists, priests or even serfs(which aren't slaves)?

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For the third time, I am counting peasants and serfs, maybe even craftsmen, as slaves.

Moslty because they owned fealty to the local lord, aka, the lord literally owned them.

And yes, I know that these are considered people and aren't treated badly unless it is a dictatorship, but it isn't like they had much freedom on they lives either.

 

[Gunman]

You cannot "boot strap" ancient civilizations to modern morality like you can with technology. It's something that developed after thousands of years. A good amount of it may not even make sense in the context of an ancient civilization.

Modern technology is self-evidently better to older technology. Regardless of the time period or education, anyone can realize you live better and longer as a poor person in 21st century Norway than a rich person in 2nd century Norway. That doesn't apply to morality, since they're abstract concepts. There's very little room you can work with. At least with something like slavery, it's a fact that an economy of freemen will be more prosperous than one made up of masters and slaves. But you can't do that with other things, and the more recent the concept, the harder it will be.

If you had to start somewhere, it would be with religion.

 

[ZUCLUGU]

Exactly

It is so interconnected with the most seemingly irrelevant shit, but no single mortal can comprehend it within a lifetime

You could boost the state, and leave most of the knowledge to a successor who will spoonfeed the masses and so on so on, which over time has a massive effect

Example, if you start in 1000 AD in western Europe. Modernity will only be reached AFTER 1500 maybe even longer, but that's still a 500 year advantage

 

[Download]

80 percent slaves? Even the roman only had 10–15 percent of its population as slaves as far as I can tell and many of those were in italy where they made up as much as 35 to 40 percent of the population.

Where are all the free peasants, free laborers, miltary personal, artists, priests or even serfs(which aren't slaves)?

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Serfdom is generally considered to be slavery.

 

[Alane1]

Serfdom is generally considered to be slavery.

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I am aware of a number scholars have fierce debates about the difference the two but generally the two are considered different, we should also keep in mind that slavery did in fact exist in the middle ages often along side serfdom in a number of places in europe.

Some of the differences was that slaves were property while serfs were not. A serf could own property and work for his own profit while a slave could do neither.

Beyond that serfs had legal rights and their lords had legal duties to them while slaves had no rights not even to a family and their masters owed them nothing legally they survived solely on the 'charity' of their masters.

 

[Growl]

Regardless of the serfs vs. slaves thing, counting craftsmen as slaves as well is much less reflective of reality I'd say, since craftsmen could be fairly high-status depending on their trade and had organisations to regulate and protect their interests, hardly something that slaves would ever be allowed to have. The guilds were already mentioned as being a thing. Plus, cities in general were not necessarily under direct feudal rule even when the surrounding lands were, having their own law and administration.

As for the original question of how to introduce modern morals to an ancient-style society, I'm gonna go with Brecht: Food is the first thing, morals follow on.
Agricultural reform to increase yields until you no longer NEED such a large part of your population to break their backs doing farm labour or else face famine. The same goes for other types of work - slavery on the whole didn't end because people suddenly realised that treating other humans as property is a dick move, it stopped being as viable and thus was abandoned in favour of somehwhat less horrible options, like having a free but still disenfranchised underclass... Social mobility can also be achieved by a huge chunk of the people originally in better positions just up and dying, as the black plague teaches us, but overall that's probably still bad.
Enough food and the logistics to distribute it and keep everyone well-fed enough is pretty much the basis for all these forms of progress. Excess manpower that is no longer needed in agriculture can go into a standing army to protect your assets and take those of other nations to generate more wealth for your people, into a scholarly class to preserve, pass on and perhaps even develop your great knowledge, into centres of artisanship and trade that will make your country rich... Basically it's the same as in reality except fast-forward by trying to teach them superior farming and manufacturing technologies really early on. Having a religion with values something like Christianity probably also helps to introduce the concepts, although again in reality it didn't do much against slavery until other factors made getting rid of it viable.

Just hope that your territory is easily defended from the outside and your loyalist faction remains strong rather than you being burnt at the stake, and that the land has a relatively stable climate in terms of it's geographical features, and that some random catastrophic event doesn't decide to fuck you, and that...

 

[Steven Kodaly]

Also, make an army that doesn't kill, plunder, and rape every city they conquer would be nice (establish war crimes).

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That one will require a massive influx of revenue - foraging was part of how troops sustained themselves when out in the field. If you don't want troops laying waste to the countryside, you need to be able to pay, feed, arm and house them out of your own coffers.

 

[EmptyHusk]

That one will require a massive influx of revenue - foraging was part of how troops sustained themselves when out in the field. If you don't want troops laying waste to the countryside, you need to be able to pay, feed, arm and house them out of your own coffers.

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Basically establishing supply lines, maintaining them, making them secure, and making your country rich beforehand.

And that would also nullify to a certain degree scorched earth tactics against your troops, right?

 

[Triggerhappy]

You cannot "boot strap" ancient civilizations to modern morality like you can with technology. It's something that developed after thousands of years. A good amount of it may not even make sense in the context of an ancient civilization.

Modern technology is self-evidently better to older technology. Regardless of the time period or education, anyone can realize you live better and longer as a poor person in 21st century Norway than a rich person in 2nd century Norway. That doesn't apply to morality, since they're abstract concepts. There's very little room you can work with. At least with something like slavery, it's a fact that an economy of freemen will be more prosperous than one made up of masters and slaves. But you can't do that with other things, and the more recent the concept, the harder it will be.

If you had to start somewhere, it would be with religion.

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I agree with your thrust that a lot of modern morality doesn't make sense without modern circumstances.

That said, taken as a whole, that's not entirely true. Or rather, introduction of technology would erode some norms faster than others.

Medical technology to cut childhood and maternal mortality rates down would probably start to erode certain views on children and women relatively quickly.

Not quickly on a human timescale mind you. And it wouldn't turn out exactly like the modern world or change everything. But women would probably be treated quite differently in ancient Rome after a couple of centuries needing to rear only two or three children.

Same goes for children. While there woukd still be ample reason for disciplinarian child rearing in an ancient world with modern child mortality rates. The relative freedom to form emotional bonds from an early age without an undo fear of death would likely moderate a lot of the excess.

 

[EmptyHusk]

I am aware of a number scholars have fierce debates about the difference the two but generally the two are considered different, we should also keep in mind that slavery did in fact exist in the middle ages often along side serfdom in a number of places in europe.

Some of the differences was that slaves were property while serfs were not. A serf could own property and work for his own profit while a slave could do neither.

Beyond that serfs had legal rights and their lords had legal duties to them while slaves had no rights not even to a family and their masters owed them nothing legally they survived solely on the 'charity' of their masters.

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Well, the counterargument is that the serfs were on itself a resource of the local lord or king, which had absolute power and thus he desides which rights or not to give to the general population.

Of course, rule N°0 is keeping the military happy and normally said army is composed of serfs to lords will do what they can to keep them happy.

Or you can separate the farmers from the militia, as the Spartans did, IIRC, and then you end up with what I suppose could be called a dictatorship.

Regardless of the serfs vs. slaves thing, counting craftsmen as slaves as well is much less reflective of reality I'd say, since craftsmen could be fairly high-status depending on their trade and had organisations to regulate and protect their interests, hardly something that slaves would ever be allowed to have. The guilds were already mentioned as being a thing. Plus, cities in general were not necessarily under direct feudal rule even when the surrounding lands were, having their own law and administration.

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Well, I was thinking more about ancient civilizations un general, like the Romans, who enslaved skilled craftsmen and treated them fairly well until they were made citizens.

In the past there was a fine line between slave and servant.

Honestly, I think that most of the confusion comes because people thinks of slaves only as cheap labor workers, you could be a skilled artisan with your own store and your own possessions working by your master until you became a citizen, if that day ever came.

That being said, I understand that there is a defined line between being a slave and being a citizen.

As for the original question of how to introduce modern morals to an ancient-style society, I'm gonna go with Brecht: Food is the first thing, morals follow on.
Agricultural reform to increase yields until you no longer NEED such a large part of your population to break their backs doing farm labour or else face famine. The same goes for other types of work - slavery on the whole didn't end because people suddenly realised that treating other humans as property is a dick move, it stopped being as viable and thus was abandoned in favour of somehwhat less horrible options, like having a free but still disenfranchised underclass... Social mobility can also be achieved by a huge chunk of the people originally in better positions just up and dying, as the black plague teaches us, but overall that's probably still bad.
Enough food and the logistics to distribute it and keep everyone well-fed enough is pretty much the basis for all these forms of progress. Excess manpower that is no longer needed in agriculture can go into a standing army to protect your assets and take those of other nations to generate more wealth for your people, into a scholarly class to preserve, pass on and perhaps even develop your great knowledge, into centres of artisanship and trade that will make your country rich... Basically it's the same as in reality except fast-forward by trying to teach them superior farming and manufacturing technologies really early on. Having a religion with values something like Christianity probably also helps to introduce the concepts, although again in reality it didn't do much against slavery until other factors made getting rid of it viable.

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Ok, so I understand the changes that would be needed to nullify, or at least lessen, that tipe of slavery.

By improving the working conditions and productivity of the ancient world with advanced technology, one could both increase the living conditions of the general masses and make forced labor economically ineffective by replacing human muscle with things like steam engines.

What I am interested, however is how to deal with the problems that this would provoque.

How do you make a smoother transaction from guilds made out of skilled craftsmen and artisans to industries, with patents?

And how do you deal with monopolies and try to about propriety and abuse, by making sure that there is always competence (supposing you can avoid an oligopoly) or by establishing minimum wages, working conditions, minimum accepted quality, etc. (I suppoce that you would need to make the general masses more influential or have a centralized government for this one)?


But more importantly, I see that most talk about the economical side of slavery, the cheap labor, but what about the more cultural one?

How do you deal with personal slaves as a luxury?

I don't think that just introducing one's morals would be enough, maybe introducing a fee to slavery that increases over time until slavery is no longer possible? But that is not a prohibiton...

I know that just hoping for people to be better by 'enlightening' them won't work, slavery was after all the result of looking for the optimal way of surviving against the competition, or at least I assume that that is the case, I am more interested in actual systematic solution, because humans suck at doing 'the right thing'.

 

[Volt Cruelerz]

Simple answer is you don't, but your legacy might.

1. Improve agricultural yields: less bodies have to be working in the fields at any given time, letting you move that manpower elsewhere
2. Invent germ theory (plus antibiotics and vaccines): infection rates plummet and living in a city is less of a death sentence by disease. Child and maternal mortality drop. Combine with proper city waste management to make your cities magnets for labor due to living conditions.
3. Invent guns and create standing army: use rifles and cannons to "liberate" the neighboring kingdoms that are less than friendly and assimilate those that are. This also gives you more raw resources that you need to protect, so you create a standing army. In war, they're always ready to respond, and in peace, you can use them to build roads and other large projects. As you get supply lines built up, increase penalties for war crimes until pillaging becomes a thing of the past for your troops. For even faster response, set up networks of signal fires, passenger pigeons, and messengers. Telegraphs are awesome, but require enormous resources investment to produce and maintain. Also, thanks to the disease resistance of your troops, your forces will win via attrition if nothing else. Bonus: if your country has major water access, invent better naval navigation techniques so they needn't stay near land.
4. Go Industrial: while your army is starting to deal with your enemies, invent the Bessemer Process and start mass production of steel and textile factories to mass produce cloth. This consumes the excess urban labor pool. While you're at it, establish some basic guidelines for treatment of factory workers. This gives you more trade goods and more guns.
5. Literacy and Education: invent movable type and better paper manufacturing to mass produce pamphlets, news, and the local holy texts. Demand won't be high initially, but this will create the supply. While at it, start working on public education in your major cities. Start by having a finite number of students who are selected by lottery (or pay or are geniuses) and scale up over time; select equal numbers of boys and girls. Make sure to ingrain in those children that the reason they're successful is their education and allow election into student body offices. This will start eating away at things like divine mandate, noble superiority, and male chauvinism while also giving you your next generation of chemical, material, and civil engineers. Do this right and after a decade, you'll have a few thousand educated workers that implicitly trust you, can act as your mouth piece, and can continue The Great Work even if you were to be struck dead by tragedy.

And that's about all you can do. Sure, you could continue being headmaster and scale up student body size and create patent law and eventually use your students to make steam engines and electricity, but the above should do most of it. All the while though, you need to have the mentality of and espouse views to the effect of "sure, X made sense in society before, but now that we've got Y, it's not optimal anymore." You can't outright change public opinion, but you can catalyze it. You just need to use your words to prime people to think of social norms as functions of tech level. Then, by increasing tech level, you give them an easy way to transition to new ideas without loss of pride.

 

[Erandil]

For the third time, I am counting peasants and serfs, maybe even craftsmen, as slaves.

Moslty because they owned fealty to the local lord, aka, the lord literally owned them.

And yes, I know that these are considered people and aren't treated badly unless it is a dictatorship, but it isn't like they had much freedom on they lives either.

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And that is frankly extremely stupid. You are mixing various social groups and systems together that in actuality had very significant differences and also ignore just how much variation there was in the single systems/concepts. The rights/freedoms of for example the serfs tend to vary to an extremely high degree depending on location and time and I am highly doubtful that blanket statements like the one you made above are correct or useful...

Your objectives would be giving better rights to the masses, improving living conditions, giving the peasantry a voice, abolishing slavery (without harming the economy and army, no point if you become an easy target to be conquered), making a society based on merit (and lessening racism), gender equality (by it originally a matriarchal or patriarchal culture), making education a right, not privilege, probably making a centralized government, and preferably keep the crown in power (or another method of fight off corruption.)

Also, make an army that doesn't kill, plunder, and rape every city they conquer would be nice (establish war crimes).

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Some of those are things are far more difficult than others (indeed some of which we haven't accomplished even today like a merit based society) while others (increased living conditions or better rights for example) aren't that difficult to achieve.


And I have to admit that I am a bit more optimistic than others here and think that especially in the medieval ages (and maybe others) we at least see some basic developments in many of those topics that a skilled enough and powerful enough ruler could build upon if he so desired. A good example would in my opinion be warfare in the medieval ages where we got both the whole concept of chivalry as well as the active efforts of the church to regulate warfare. Or the Magna Carta and its impact on government/relationship between king and nobles.

(And even in regards to merit based systems you have ample examples of kings/rulers promoting new, skilled men into positions of power so even there you have something you could build upon if you wished so.)

 

[EmptyHusk]

And that is frankly extremely stupid. You are mixing various social groups and systems together that in actuality had very significant differences and also ignore just how much variation there was in the single systems/concepts. The rights/freedoms of for example the serfs tend to vary to an extremely high degree depending on location and time and I am highly doubtful that blanket statements like the one you made above are correct or useful...

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Blame Wikipedia, not me...

Still, I think that I had already mentioned that I understand that serfs had rights and because of that I put then as another kind of slavery.

Honestly, all you would need to do for those would be improve their working and living conditions, then educate them so they can earn political influence.

And yes, I know that what I just said is horribly oversimplified.

powerful enough ruler

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Well, one of the topics was getting power away from the nobles to make a more centralized government.

And even in regards to merit based systems you have ample examples of kings/rulers promoting new, skilled men into positions of power so even there you have something you could build upon if you wished so.

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Any example? If you are talking about ruling positions, then the only elected absolute non-hederitary monarchy that I know about is the Vatican.

 

[Erandil]

Any example? If you are talking about ruling positions, then the only elected absolute non-hederitary monarchy that I know about is the Vatican.

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I wasn't talking about the top of the government but more the "middle-management" part of it where you have many examples of "new men/new blood" getting placed into positions of trust/power due to their ability/trustworthiness. Henry II of England did that (William Marshal might be a good example here) for example as did a number of french kings.

Well, one of the topics was getting power away from the nobles to make a more centralized government.

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A lot of the centralization in for example the late medieval ages was actual done be weakening the power of the "high" nobles while strengthening the lower nobility (who were more dependent on the central government).

 

[Volt Cruelerz]

Well, one of the topics was getting power away from the nobles to make a more centralized government.

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This is fairly simple: invent firearms and make a standing army. With them, you can conquer far faster and keep the lower nobles in line. You can see the historical effects of this by looking at maps of Europe over the centuries. The number of independent kingdoms nosedives as guns let the big ones conquer the little ones.