Discussion Main / FutureSocietyPresentValues

• Not even The Bible is immune to this trope. Some end-of-the-world prophecies in it run along the lines of: "Two women will be grinding corn together. And one will be taken up to heaven, the other one not."
  • This could be explained in part as being the use of imagery which would have been familiar to audiences in that setting, common in prophecy as well as in things like the parables of Jesus. A lot of Biblical allusions and metaphors are like this, which is why they often need explanation to modern audiences. (It is also true that some societies are still of the primitive agrarian type for whom such sayings are current reality. So your mileage may vary on how "current" or likely they are.)

This example needs a TON more context to explain why it (might) fit the trope. Might since the two women example is talking about Final Days (which is its own set of tropes) rather than what life's like in the future.

But even if it is an example, it fails the requirement to explain to someone with no knowledge of the Bible or the values expressed by the various writers why it fits the description of the trope. Some Christians haven't read any translation of the Bible through (and many non-Christians have). It's simply not dependable any person would know without context why this trope might apply to material from the Bible.

(Heck, the reply -which needs nuking- refers to the trouble that happens when you don't write down references you assume everyone knows.)

As someone who has read the whole thing -in more than one translation- I don't see how the example fits, even with context. It might fit some Final Days/Apocalypse tropes, but not this one that discusses the continuation of future society.

Removed:

• The Warriors (1979), based on a book from the mid-1960s, is supposed to take place "sometime in the future" (as the opening of Walter Hill's "director's cut" makes clear), but even leaving aside the film's Totally Radical fashions, hairstyles, and slang, there are a number of other elements that now strike us as Zeerusty. Most prominent is Cyrus's claim that a citywide gang could control everything and thwart the NYPD... when, just a few years after this film's release, the LAPD began to employ military technology in their fight against street gangs. There's also the failure of any character to suspect that a woman sitting alone on a park bench very late at night might be a plainclothes police officer.^note Which is especially stupid of them because they are themselves examples of dangerous gang members in a park, and one of them is a potential if not actual rapist.

These aren't very strong claims. A single, unified gang in all of New York City would be like a Mexican cartel, and we've seen how difficult those have been to thwart. And predators will accost lone women to this day.

Discussion page of Society Marches On was moved to Future Society, Present Values per TRS

A lot of these seem more Failed Future Forecast, e.g. many failed predictions about what the future would be like based on the times concerns, not outdated mores per se, or sometimes Technology Marches On (where outdated tech's shown as still around years after when a work is set).

Deleted this paragraph on The Simpsons. At worst, calling a parent by their first name was considered disrespectful. It hadn’t been “utterly shocking” since the 1970s at least.

• When the show first came out, the idea of Bart calling Homer by his first name was utterly shocking. While it's still not exactly a popular idea nowadays — just ask any dad what he thinks about it — it's far less shocking than it once was.

Removed the following page quote, since it had nothing to do with this trope. This trope is about outdated societal norms in old media depictions of the future. Disney's Cinderella (which is humorously criticized in the quote) wasn't an attempt to depict the future. ^note And one could even argue that the quote is not about societal change over time at all, but rather about two different ways people view women today.

The quote:

"If you're so adored
Where's your Academy Award?
I'm the smart female heroine
That can't be ignored
The moral of the quarrel
And why I've got you beat:
It's what's inside that matters
Not the size of yo' feet"

—Belle to Cinderella, "Princess Rap Battle"

Now this page needs a new page quote.

Have removed the mention of Gundam Wing in the Animaniacs example as it wasn't the first anime adaptation in America where death was a major issue. Robotech was already doing this back in the 1980s- there are numerous cases where major characters such as Roy Fokker, Ben Dixon and implicitly most of the SDF-1 bridge crew die, as well as most of the population of Earth getting wiped out by the Zendraedi loyal to Dolza... and that's just the Macross Saga.

Is it just me, or should this trope focus exclusively on examples set in the present? It's impossible to say whether, say, a sexist society with advanced space travel is realistic simply because we don't know whether or not social values will have regressed by that point.

I would claim that the Music, Tom Lehrer example is not an example of this trope. The song is not about how things would be in the future, but about how things were right there and then. The pedagogical trend was called "New Math", and it's still called that, even though it (like for example Modernism) isn't very much associated with the future anymore. "New" need not imply future tense.

Also, for what it's worth, one of the greatest flaws of the New Math was sloppy execution on the part of textbook authors. Many of the new ideas introduced, such as performing arithmetic in other bases than ten as described in the song, were intended primarily as a means for educating the teachers in how math worked, so that they would have a deeper understanding of it (rather than merely know which sequence of operations would produce the right answer), and thus be better prepared to themselves teach it their pupils. This was flanderized into assuming that the same new material also should be taught to the pupils themselves, often with a focus on form (e.g. the answer to 2+2 would not be 4, but the singleton set {4} whose only element is the number 4, because for an equation with multiple solutions the correct answer should be phrased as the set of all those solutions) rather than content. Schoolteachers still learn how to do arithmetic in bases other than ten, because this is enlightning (just like learning another language can help you understand the point of grammar), but the textbooks of their pupils no longer has exercises on the topic. (Except, I believe, some US curricula have introduced base eight and base twelve arithmetic as a method of dealing with some aspects of the antiquated non-decimal systems of measurment that Americans insist on using.)

Do things like the Jetsons or Looney Tunes really count? They're Played for Laughs, not seriously predicting that the future will be just like the present. (This is especially obvious for the Jetsons when you remember that it's a counterpoint show to the Flintstones, which similarly projected 50's culture onto the cartoon version of the ancient past for the purposes of humor.)

Uhhh...

"In Omnivore, most of the melodrama pivots on Aquilon being torn between her feelings for Cal and Veg, her colleagues on a far-future space mission. It's blatantly obvious that Polyamory would be an acceptable solution for all three of them, yet she's too afraid of looking like a slut to become sexually involved with either man, let alone both. Maybe that's how scifi readers felt about things in 1968, but now it just seems like prudish Wangst."

What society did the writer of this example live in in which polyamory is considered acceptable?

This isn't exactly an example because the social mores haven't changed.

I've noticed in some old Literature, like Roald Dahl, the idea that TV kills the brain or make people stupid. That made sense back in the 50s and the 60s when TV was mostly stupid variety shows and sitcoms. Nowadays, while most of TV is still stupid, we have more complex, thought provoking, and even some downright mindscrewing shows, so the critic feels a bit snobbish.

Anyway, my point is: is this change in attitude examples of this Trope?

A Lovecraft story about the evils of alcohol? HUH? Can anyone provide a title for this? If not, I think the example should be deleted because I suspect the poster was confusing Lovecraft with some other writer.

So, why were all those Asimov examples deleted?

Im not sure that this is Did Not Do The Research. while you can make educated guesses there's no way to know what the future will hold. Also like Politically Correct History most writers are more interested in conforming modern day viewers than honestly predict what tomorrow's society would be like.