What would be the signs of a truly enlightened and advanced society?

Question

I am mainly looking for social and cultural indicators, but feel free to discuss transport, military, employment, food, globalisation etc if you feel like it.

Hint for anyone whose main goal here is to get a valuable and heart warming two points: This should take more than two lines!

Thanks everyone.

Answer 1

watch they treat the helpless unfortunate ones

its an index of how advanced a society is as a whole

how do they deal with crazy people for example

do they lock em up or kill em, or do they let become productive members of society?

if the crazies are free, so is everybody else.

Answer 2

The first thing that came to mind was the elimination of the death penalty. I feel that a truly advanced society would find no need to exact revenge by eliminating them entirely from the planet. At the very least keep them confined in a cell where their freedom is limited for the rest of their life.

And while we're on that topic, I feel that prison conditions and prisoner rights are another signal of how advanced our society is. How we treat the people that are "outcasts" of society, the people who have gone against society's rules, is an important indication of how advanced we are. A truly advanced society would focus on rehabilitation and would prevent some of the conditions we see today in prisons from happening.

Another issue would be human rights in general, which I think is fairly obvious. This includes the elimination of racism and affirmative action (simply because an advanced society would not have a need for it, I'm not arguing for or against AA), etc.

Another sign would be the justice system, which I believe today is fairly advanced. However, one thing that I would think an advanced society would have that we don't is the elimination of legal costs. I don't mean this as in having free lawyers, but I believe that one problem in today's society is the fact that some people do not pursue legal action when they should simply because they cannot afford legal help. On the other side, some people (and companies) sue everything in sight, using their resources as a way of bullying someone into submission. This is obviously unfair as injustices are happening because of resource problems. So by the elimination of legal cost, what I really mean is the elimination of legal costs as a constraint on legal action. You could also argue that the costs are preventing some really stupid cases from coming into court as well, but I believe the injustices outweight the silly cases.

I'm sure there's more signs, but these seemed to the be the first to pop into my mind.

*Edit
I wanted to add one more that I believe is important, the embracing of science. Today, I feel that America is fairly hostile to science, as can be seen by the slow acceptance of evolution as well as the shortage of engineers we have in the economy. A truly advanced society would accept science and not take it for granted as we do today.

Answer 3

A truly enlightened society is characterized by:
*Rational sincere government, with dominance of statesmen over politicians.
*An insititutional setup characterized by clarity, elasticity, tolerance, value oriented according to heavenly virtues, disciplined, human rights observant, and make use of available human, social and cultural capital as well as gifted and talented individuals.

Answer 4

I guess a society that is able to recognize the value of each individual and reward it approriately. Every individual finding its place in society and living up to its full potential, the society recognizing its contribution.

In essence finding a way to develop each individual and using a scoring system that is not cash!

Answer 5

Everyone in the world is you basically. There will never be such a thing.