The Impossible Contradictions of Mark Twain
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The world also tended to be far more violent in the past than it is now.
The TV show Dickinson has fun with this, juxtaposing its modern-sounding and often flippant dialog with things like whole families you knew dying of disease being a pretty common piece of news to receive.
Do you think people just dropped dead? Humans are not that fragile. The reason the average Roman age was relatively low is because of high mortality at childbirth. If you got to 20, chances were in your favor that you'd get to at least 60. This applies to non-roman, pre-vaccine societies too.
>Basically everyone suffered trauma we'd call fairly extreme, these days.
Eh, maybe. But at the same time, I don't agree that they would be "traumatized."
Heck, I bet if you could place a modern human who has lived his entire life in a developed Western country even a couple of thousand years back, I think he'd get pretty acquainted with that way of life in no time. If there's one thing we're good at it's probably adapting to our environment.
Life is a collection of habits. If you're used to death and destruction (though I am not saying that death and destruction were as common as you make it out to be), it won't phase you. Montaigne talks about this when comparing European society and moral norms to New World (Indian) societies and moral norms.
>The world also tended to be far more violent in the past than it is now.
No data proving this to be true, whatsoever.
Plus it's a vast overgeneralization. More violent where? In what today we would call France? China? Canada? Turkey? Chad? Argentina? Was there even a single event nearly as violent as World War 2 pre-vaccines, which happened 80 years ago? Your postulation is on very shaky legs, at best.
No, they intentionally killed each other.
If I recall correctly from the last time I read Stephen Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature the murder rate in pre-Industrialized Northern Europe is estimated to be between 50 and 500 per 100K which is anywhere from 10 to 100x as violent as the global rate today. And that's not including inter state or inter tribal warfare.
I don't think you realize just how funny of a source that is
I will just leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...
and this: https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violencenobelsymposium.pd...
And the following is from Pinker himself(https://web.archive.org/web/20201026010157/https://stevenpin...): "The upshot is that each of the following two assertions can be true: (1) the chances of war are lower than they were before, and (2) the damage caused by the most severe imaginable war is greater than it was before. That makes it meaningless—an issue of semantics—to speculate about whether the world is “safer” overall; in one sense it may be safer, in another sense, less safe. That is exactly why Better Angels does not claim, contra Taleb, that the world is “safer” across the board"
But I take the position that people are people, and tend to behave the same over time to similar stimuli.
My ancestors in 17th century Northern Ireland would be well acquainted with violence as Cromwell ravaged through and tried to cleanse them. I would imagine that familiarity would drive defensive behaviors - hoarding food, knowing when to run, being vigilant. That affects you.
If you’re a typical urban or suburban professional, you live a life free of strife or serious concern for bodily harm. That’s not the case for people who live a few miles from you, and certainly not the case for most people in the US even 100 years ago.
I don't think you realize just how weak central states were back in the day. To even call them states in the same vein as how we would today call a state a state is a bit of a misnomer
Cromwell lived in the 17th century, a time when there was no instant access to information between large (or small) spans of geography. A time when commands couldn't be given and executed right away
>you live a life free of strife or serious concern for bodily harm
Like in Cromwell's time, for the majority of even his opponents. Good luck finding your enemy who has no phone or any other device that emits signals. And if you do find him, good luck getting that information to your superiors before he can escape again
And to go a bit off-topic:
I don't understand why there is a tendency here where people think we live in these semi-perfect, vaguely utopian Times where life is so much better in every way compared to even 100, or god forbid, 500 years or more; and that these Times will only get better and better as the clock keeps spinning
People lived and flourished and did just fine back in the day. People weren't breaking down every day because they had no electricity, vaccines (im not anti vax before someone accuses me of being one), or any other things we have today that they didn't have back then
Sure, maybe life was shorter on average (mainly thanks to things like stillbirth), but I think we should question if our comparatively longer lives today (propped up artificially for the vast majority) are any more meaningful or better in quality just because they're quantitatively bigger
- just think of how many people rely on things like blood pressure medication to squeeze out another day instead of making meaningful changes to their lives (and most people could; exceptions exist, though very few) which would actually make their lives much better and more enjoyable
otherwise the stories from a thousand years or more past wouldn't resonate...
But then, there are cannibals
Asked the most difficult period was, he answered without hesitation the Spanish Flu, not any of the mass grave yellow fever epidemics.
"I would see an old friend in town in the morning, be asked to go check on him in the afternoon, and find the whole family dead".
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.