Dawkins Moral Zeitgeist

The Moral Zeitgeist is an idea that has been well formed. With quite a few examples from moral leaders of their time like Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Henry Huxley, Dawkins lays out how throughout time morals seem to be evolving and improving. This moral zeitgeist shows us how people like Hitler seem so evil to us because they lived in our century, even though people like Genghis Khan did far worse things than Hitler. The difference was that our morality has grown since the time of Genghis Khan and we now see things differently than the world did in his time. Hitler had moved on in the moral zeitgeist and the was more expected from him morally.

My question is can we really apply the moral zeitgeist to the whole world evenly. Dawkins made the point that a good historian doesn't judge the contents of a paper in the past on moral values of today. But what do we do in places where the country has not advanced the same level as say Europe or North America. There are places in the world where there is not education of this century, where people seem are still raised in an old cultural setting. Here in Peru in parts of the mountains and the jungle the people have a totally different way of looking at things, ways that we in the states would say is further back on the moral zeitgeist. These people would have to be judged in their own cultural setting and according to the moral zeitgeist of the time in history of their culture. Would they not? If morals are a work in progress, how can we expect a people who are further back on this timeline to live according to our standards? It is like expecting a man who has never seen a computer to have the skills to work one. It is an irrational thing to ask. Likewise, how can we expect someone who has never heard of the concept that a woman is equal to a man to act on those principles. It is irrational. More so, to ask him when everything and everybody around him tells him otherwise.