“But I read a book written by one of the few people who were privileged enough to read and write, and things didn’t seem so bad!”
This is a real issue though. A lot of the writings on the actual lives of random people are from the perspective of “look what these weird foreigners do, instead of being normal like us”. And that’s not the most objective source.
This is what I dislike about most historical dramas. They focus almost entirely on the pampered (thought no doubt dramatic) lives of the rich and privileged, and lettered, ignoring the great majority of humanity that 1) were engaged every day with the drama of survival, 2) did all of the labour that allowed for those frilly few to write their letters all day.
EDIT: I write from the comfort of my home office on break at my WFH job… >_>
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I don’t think that was the point of the post.
It was more “Never fall for a ‘things were good back then’ narrative because actually shit sucked even more in the past”
aright cool nothing matters
Back in my day we worked 28 hours a day and didnt complain!!
(They put cocaine in coca cola and lead in the water)
…and could afford houses and food
But now I sound like I’m wearing the same rose-tinted glasses as the folks I was making fun of
And the… non-WASPs knew their place. They loved it too in fact!
(I’m paraphrasing some actual things that actual people have actually said about the good old days (but I can’t remember their actual euphemisms (dysphemisms) for non-WASPs))
The ones I grew up around called them heathens.
It never occurred to me that I should be grateful to have heard “heathen” used only by history professors and sarcasts.
The Amazon reviews are really bad. If anyone is looking for a book with this same idea, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker is really great.
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It’s not plagiarism if you plagiarize yourself! 😎👉👉
(Disclaimer: this is a joke, pls don’t tell hbomberguy I said the p word) (that was also a joke, no offense hburgerguy)
The other comments are quite sarcastic and I want to give you a bit of a less antagonizing response why Steven Pinker is kind of a hack.
He more or less “cooked the books” when it comes to explaining how much good capitalism helped the people around the world by doing very selective data analysis. In the end he really advocates for being complacent with the status quo and basically argues for the argument of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (which has been disproven a lot by anthropologists.
These videos are quite long but go into more detail:
And if you prefer to read: I’d recommend The Dawn of everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
Thanks for the information, I had no idea that Pinker had such an anti-following. I’ve not read or even thought about him in years. I just vaguely remembered that that book did a lot to make me more thankful for the current state of things compared to how they used to be. I appreciate you letting me know that he is such a questionable fellow.
Yep, I have found that just accepting one person’s words alone, especially in a field as politically charged as economics, is a terrible way to gain knowledge and understanding, just more misunderstanding. Pinker does a great job of being technically correct, but like the other commenters have pointed out, he is very careful of showing only some numbers and ignoring others, in order to massage a narrative that the status quo is flawed but ultimately not to be challenged.
The main things that stuck in my head after all those years was that stuff like assault, rape, murder, torture, entertainment-based animal abuse all used to be much worse. He said that people used to nail cats to posts around town so they would flail around until they died, just for the hell of it. I never fact-checked these claims.
I certainly believe it! Colonization and Imperialism in particular have an absolutely brutal history. Japanese soldiers occupying China and Korea used to catch babies on bayonets, and had quotas for how many ears they cut off. Dutch occupiers of the Congo would cut off the hands of underperforming workers, including children, and give the hands to their parents.
The thing is, generally, humans are guided and shaped by material conditions, and material conditions improve with democratization and industrialization.
Cool that you weren’t scared away by all the Toxicity in he other comments.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=fo2gwS4VpHc
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=zwXV71hF7cs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Yeah. Enjoy the meme. Don’t buy the book.
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Love me some Steven Pinker. Should probably read one of his books. Does he do the reading of the audio books, does anyone know? He has lovely diction.
I didn’t know Amazon review score of books can get so low
In the past everything was better, even the future.
Karl Valentin
There’s a reason most historical fiction focuses on nobles and land-owners. You can tell interesting stories about them, and modern people can sort-of relate to their lifestyles. If you told stories about the common people, modern people wouldn’t be able to focus on the story, and would get distracted by how brutal and awful their day-to-day lives were.
Now fairy tales, that’s where the brutality comes in. Ever heard of “The Death of the Little Hen” collected by the Grimm brothers? The last line is, I kid you not, “and then everyone was dead”. Gotta get those kiddos used to pandemics and family sized tombstones.
Not really
You tell stories of people who could have it recorded and preserved
I’m reading The Way We Never Were and it’s amazing how much we get wrong about the good old days.
Ah the good ole days when children and infants were dying left and right, a splinter could mean a slow painful death by infection, and the local doctor prescribes drilling a hole in your head to release bad spirits
Don’t forget the “bloodletting”. Got to get that bad blood out along with the head spirits.
Some people today practice self-trepanation
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
“It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.”
You stupid monkey!
“He drinks a whiskey drink, he drinks a vodka drink.”
Nope. Just the worst.
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And yet it ends talking about going to a far better place than any before, so it must not have been all that ‘best’ after all.
Hawaii was great until the haoles fucked it up. So was a lot of pre colombian america. And parts of pre colonization africa.
Just because Europe was shit doesn’t mean it was shit everywhere. Europe is pretty unique in that it has been total warring itself for over 2000 years straight. The streak ended in world war 2, but goes back to the bronze age.
Could those places I listed be improved by modern medicine and trains? Sure. Doesnt mean they were terrible.
Those areas are also wildly romanticized. Let’s not forget that one of the ways that some Europeans got established was by trading guns to indigenous people so they could go off and kill other indigenous people for their land.
The idea that we were warmongers was made up to justify stealing our land. Who was it that welcomed the colonists with open arms until they spat in our ancestor’s faces? Our stories talk about war parties going out and coming back home with zero blood shed. What conflicts we did have were extremely low intensity, we didn’t have the numbers for the horrific wars like the ones waged against us by the colonists.
Many of the tribes were nomadic, we didn’t have oil reserves to war over. We had hunting grounds and fishing spots and art, and just about everyone agreed that these things weren’t worth dying for.
Similarly in Australia there were a lot of symbolic battles that never resulted in serious injury or death.
That said I wouldn’t characterise pre-invasion Australia as great, most of the country is pretty fucking hard to survive in (let alone over 60k years of climate change)
And yet, life is called a gift.
“Gift” is a German word that means poison
Yeah how’s that return policy on white elephants going
Life seems like the result of such an unlikely complex Rube Goldberg machine where everything was just right to let life start then survive for a very long time. Plus we are made of various elements that had to be created in some of the universe’s biggest explosions.
It seems then that life should be something to be cherished while we briefly have it. I try to do just that.
…then we get to watch people around the world working hard to make life worse for those around them.
Curses can be gifts
I like my entertainment violent and educational.
Was just having a conversation recently on whether things have always been this close to a complete existential crisis for humans or is the current global situation unique. Most people felt like things have always been bad but I still feel like, with everything going on in terms of global conflicts and climate change, things are uniquely, complexly and extremely bad on a global scale compared to the past.
things are uniquely, complexly and extremely bad on a global scale compared to the past
I’m with you. But also, has every generation said exactly this?
Yeah, I imagine a lot of people alive during the world wars thought things were going to collapse any second as well. But I just feel the added background anxiety of the status quo causing the Earth to heat up catastrophically but slow enough to be ignored adds a novel layer of messed up to everything.
Ugh. I totally get it. And I feel like my older family felt the same way about the Cold War. Like can you imagine sitting through Bay of Pigs listening for potential incoming annihilation?
It’s true, the past sucked even more than now, and now sucks too, but their clothes were prettier–God, their clothes were so pretty. I can read about the horrors of the past all day, but I’ll always be just a lil jealous of the clothes
You can always wear vintage clothing, you know.
Ancient Horrors Beyond Comprehension
Modern people are smart and everybody in the past was dumb.
All that religion and mysticism. All that stuff about gods, little people, spirits, elves, afterlife, etc. Stuff that all the smart people talked about for thousands of years.
It’s all wrong. They were all just dumb.
Does that count as romanticizing too?
The problem is modern people are in fact not smarter. We’re in fact doing the exact same thing we’ve always been doing
Time is a circle
I agree. And every time a new way of thinking comes along, everybody hates all the other ways of thinking.
