Quote: (09-29-2015 10:51 PM)PapayaTapper Wrote:
If it were a one way ride I wouldn't want to go. We tend to "romanticize" the past when in fact for most of human history the vast majority of humans lived short, miserable, extremely difficult lives.
We may complain about a lot of shit but the nature of our "modern problems" pale in comparison to those of our ancestors. Go spend some time in some 3rd world shit hole like Somalia and you'll likely get a good taste of what most of humanity historically lived with.
Do you really believe this? That humanity was just wasting away until the our so-called "age of enlightened reason" started?
The idea that humans lived lives of quiet desperation is born of a presentist mindset that can't conceptualize the emotional and psychic depth that makes life worth living -- regardless of any technological, economic or political "progress."
People in the past often lived lives of rich emotional and psychic depth, their lives made whole by family, religion and friends. It is a depth of feeling that seems alien and threatening to our present selves. We kid ourselves that our consumptive lifestyles and our "cult of self-fulfillment" make us truly happy, when our lives and views like yours betray a deep, terrifying pessimism of the present age.
Few people here truly want to go and stay in a world, say, 500 years ago -- we are too attached to these deeply-pessimistic ways of viewing the world, too familiar with the dull lifelessness of "enlightened reason" -- but we want to appreciate the past for what it was and make sense of it in the brief window we have on this earth.
As they say, those who have no past have no future. We can't ignore the past nor can we ruthlessly devalue it by projecting our own hatred, pessimism and fear onto it. We can only pick up the well-worn pieces of the past we find and remind ourselves that happiness and contentment in this world comes in a litany of ways -- but the one universal arbiter of this happiness is the deep, binding love of family and friends.
So, no, my friend, the people of the past didn't live short, brutish lives. Their lives were very different than ours, to be sure, but what made life worth living then is what makes it worth living now.
Oh, yeah, I'd go back to the 1920's, throw some moonshine back in a speakeasy and pull some flappers. Cheers!