> all so that we can stare at them in a museum for 30 seconds
So that we can study them, learn from them, and let them tell us their stories, so that they truly live on after death.
So that we can study them, learn from them, and let them tell us their stories, so that they truly live on after death.
To me the long dead are meaningless, and the recently dead are mostly so. I have the utmost respect for the living, and those who are recently dead have people who care about their legacy. But the farther you go back you go, the less direct connection the dead have with the present, and the simple fact is that the dead are gone.
Our preferred projection of them in our own image?
Or a meeting-in-the-middle between you and an individual's preferred presentation of themselves?
One of the reasons the Git version control system caught on is that it lets you rewrite history...
I could see an argument made for modern remains as there are living people/descendants who have a strong connection with the burial beliefs and practices. But make no mistake, even in that case it is about the living and not the dead.
The modern world has no respect for anything.
Nothing we do today affects those people or their beliefs in any way. Those people no longer exist and cannot be harmed or protected. Ideas about respect and proper behavior around their landmarks only affects people who are alive. It is only important to the extent that it is important to us. It is clearly important to you but not others. So why should it matter to others if it doesn’t?
I hate to use this example, but your argument would also basically say a genocided people is completely unimportant and unworthy of respect, as they no longer exist either.
Aside from the obvious problem of their being living people who experienced the holocaust (so they still exist), this example seems to imply that I'm saying that there's no need for empathy and respect for the people who came before us. I don't think that anything I've said implies that. Instead what I'm saying is that the dead need no protection and can receive no pain or insult. Anything we do for "them" is really for "us", because they do not exist.
>Because it’s a simple matter of recognizing other human beings and respecting their cultural achievements and desires. Just because they don’t exist anymore doesn’t mean they weren’t humans worthy of our empathy.
You seem to be implying that not honoring the wishes of the dead is an empathic failure. How so? I can empathize with someone's wishes, understand where they are coming from, and even respect who they were. None of that implies that I owe their desires a place in the world now. And in fact as modern people we MUST make choices about what pieces of the past to revere, revise, or pave over. Otherwise the world becomes a mausoleum to the past.
Case in point: the people who've actually died in said genocide cannot have any feelings about what we do about them, so to consider those feelings would be nonsense (according to the person-affecting view).
Of course, if someone living (such as yourself) cares about this, then it would still make sense to care about it, since the feelings of an actually living person are concerned.