“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!”
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.
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 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))
…and could afford houses and food
… as long as they were white.
But now I sound like I’m wearing the same rose-tinted glasses as the folks I was making fun of
In the past everything was better, even the future.
Karl Valentin
And yet, life is called a gift.
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.
Yeah how’s that return policy on white elephants going
“Gift” is a German word that means poison
It’s true, the past sucked even more than now, and now sucks too, but their clothes were prettier–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.
Not really
You tell stories of people who could have it recorded and preserved
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.
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?
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)
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.
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aright cool nothing matters
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”
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