Twain's autobiography is amazing. By his own wishes, not published till 100 years after death; I got a copy pre-ordered on the date. His views on Christianity are spot on scathing captures describing their hypocritical behaviors today.
My grandmother was born in 1900 and every time I asked about her childhood she would say nothing and when pressed she would cry. Her parents died on consumption in the first decade of the new millennium. I think suffering was so much more common back then.
The time before antibiotics and vaccines is alien to modern people. Basically everyone suffered trauma we'd call fairly extreme, these days.
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.
>The world also tended to be far more violent in the past than it is now.
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.
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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".
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.
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Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html