> Comintern wrote:
>
why should intelligent people try to improve the world when society's ideals change and whatever you accomplished to try to improve the world has an extremely good chance of eventually helping the world become what you would consider worse?
I'm guessing this is a moral question. But I question your assumptions here. What does 'changing ideals' or more appropriately, 'changing paradigms' do, in particular, to discourage intellectual discussion and innovation? It is, rather, intellectual discussion and innovation, along and implicit in the shifts in material modes of productivity and the relations to the mode of production that 'produce' shifts in 'ideals'. Ideals would not shift without the co-requisite intellectual dialogues that accompany historical shifts in productivity, technology and social relationships (intellectual dialogue and innovation is, in many respects, included in social relationships).
So my answer then is simple. Intellectual innovations should be encouraged since it is a consequence of shifts in historical modes of productivity. Thus, shifting ideals, a consequence of both material and conceptual evolution, is appropriate to expanding productivity. Civilization can be scientifically measured by its productivity - thus a shift in ideals is a produced of changing productivity and is conducive to the expansion of increased productivity. For example, the antagonist material forces (the class contradictions) of feudal society erupted in revolution. The ideals and philosophy that accompanied the material shift allowed for the expansion of the bourgeois mode of production (of capitalist production) and, thus, allowed for a vast increase in human productivity, i.e. of human civilization.
To halt intellectual progress and dialogue won't allow productive forces to expand after the resolution of material contradictions in society. The contradictions in capitalism, then, could result in barbarism without Marxism rather than scientific socialism and the building of communism which would expand productivity and lead to a quantum leap in civilization (as capitalism was that leap from feudalism). Although, the material tendencies of capitalist society is toward the organization and collectivization of distribution because of the way in which capitalism has already socialized the mode of production (i.e. production has become a global, socialized process, however distribution still remains a local, private process). Still, there is a chance that even given these tendencies, there can be no resolution of the class contradictions of capitalist society, and its disintegration would lead to barbarism, a dark age and a rollback of human productivity. This happened with the Roman Empire where class contradictions were not resolved, and Europe rolled back the progress of human productivity after the system collapsed.
first of all, let me apologize, i must of gotten banned around the time of your post, i would of responded to your response 
you basically say that ideals shift as a result of the technological changes that improve productivity, right? but that assumes an objective view of productivity. Productivity is the turning of one thing of a specific value to one of another value. the value of these objects change and a different compared to each individual. there are not right ideals because there are no right values, and the best you can do is hold to your own ideals, which you know humanity will betray sooner or later to become more "productive" and when they become more productive, its because of their technology, which changes their ideals, which changes the values for certain objects and how productive things are.
in short; we both acknowledge the change in ideals over time. the change in ideals means that it is likely that their ideals will eventually contradict our ideals, and any help we've done to progress our ideals have helped go against them. we can either accept the trivialness of ideals inwhich case you arent motivated to do anything; or you can hold to your own ideals; which would mean any work towards them would be betraying your ideals because any work you would do for them would eventually help betray them.
I wasn't defining the whole context of the story,