And this sounds silly to us, because we know that “kicking the sunrise” is impossible, because Sun is a planet, it is far away, and your kicking has no impact on it.
I think a lot of contemporary cultures back then would have found “kicking the sunrise” to be silly, because it was obviously impossible even given what they knew at the time, i.e., you can only kick something if you physically touch it with your foot, and nobody has ever even gotten close to touching the sun, and it’s even more impossible while you’re asleep.
So, we should distinguish between people having different moral feelings, and having different models of the world. If you actually believed that kicking the Sun is possible and can have astronomical consequences, you would probably also perceive people sleeping westwards as criminally negligent, possibly psychopathic.
Why did the Malagasy people have such a silly belief? Why do many people have very silly beliefs today? (Among the least politically risky ones to cite, someone I’ve known for years who otherwise is intelligent and successful, currently believes, or at least believed in the recent past, that 2⁄3 of everyone will die as a result of taking the COVID vaccines.) I think the unfortunate answer is that people are motivated to or are reliably caused to have certain false beliefs, as part of the status games that they’re playing. I wrote about one such dynamic, but that’s probably not a complete account.
I think a lot of contemporary cultures back then would have found “kicking the sunrise” to be silly, because it was obviously impossible even given what they knew at the time, i.e., you can only kick something if you physically touch it with your foot, and nobody has ever even gotten close to touching the sun, and it’s even more impossible while you’re asleep.
Why did the Malagasy people have such a silly belief? Why do many people have very silly beliefs today? (Among the least politically risky ones to cite, someone I’ve known for years who otherwise is intelligent and successful, currently believes, or at least believed in the recent past, that 2⁄3 of everyone will die as a result of taking the COVID vaccines.) I think the unfortunate answer is that people are motivated to or are reliably caused to have certain false beliefs, as part of the status games that they’re playing. I wrote about one such dynamic, but that’s probably not a complete account.