The Day of the Triffids

by John Wyndham

“Well, indeed do the French say autres temps, autres mœurs. We must all see, if we pause to think, that one kind of community’s virtue may well be another kind of community’s crime; that what is frowned upon here may be considered laudable elsewhere; that customs condemned in one century are condoned in another. And we must also see that in each community and each period there is a widespread belief in the moral rightness of its own customs. “Now, clearly, since many of these beliefs conflict, they cannot all be ‘right’ in an absolute sense. The most judgment one can pass on them—if one has to pass judgments at all—is to say that they have at some period been ‘right’ for those communities that hold them. It may be that they still are, but it frequently is found that they are not, and that the communities who continue to follow them blindly without heed to changed circumstances do so to their own disadvantage—perhaps to their ultimate destruction.”