Argh.
Let’s do that sappy phase again.
[tapping lecture] Ok from the top, people. [/tl]
Seven days without the SDMB makes one weak.
I’d do great in 1845 in Tennessee. I’d love it. Now my knowledge of what to do as a farmer is severely laking but I bet I could pick it up from somewhere pretty quickly.
And 1366 in England wouldn’t be too bad for me either. I’d be up in some small town with a coudple dozen families.
Of course I’m one of those people who’d live a long time back then. My grandchildren would talk about their grandfather who climbed a hill to raid a honey bee hive at 101. A real story in my family. And I sure wouldn’t mind having a dozen kids. The better to care for me a missus when we’re too old to care for ourselves. And put those little buggers to work when they hit 5.
I bet I could. IF I had the information I know now back then. Like if I knew that I should keep cats so they could kill the plauge carrying rats. It’s good that we have history, because if history decides to repeat itself, we can save ourselves with what we know. This doesn’t mean I’m going to study any harder of course:)
hey-they were only rounding. Who wants to say “Starbucks wouldn’t be around for another 158 years.” It’s close enough.;j
There was also the series “Pioneer Quest” from Manitoba where they sent two couples out to live on a section for one year. It was a good indication of how hard it would be for modern people to go back to those older ways.
They all made asses of themselves for the first few months, being complete fishes out of water despite doing research beforehand and really wanting to be there. For example when they started plowing the field as one of their first big undertakings, it took both men to hold the plow and control the horses… and the plowing was still pretty bad. The women saw this and didn’t even try - they elected to do the “womans work” instead, knowing they couldn’t handle the more physical jobs. If only they knew…
Truth is that a good 75%+ of problems you’d encounter would be to do with attitude and mental conditioning… it was even evident in the show when these two couples brought misconceptions back in time with them. One was that it was the man’s job to grunt and toil in the fields and muscle a living through brute force. The funny thing is that the type of plow they were using was designed to be used by a child… yeah - one 12 year-old kid should have been able to control it and two horses alone (if you don’t believe that there are lots of B&W pictures of kids doing just that floating about). Instead the two of them spent weeks banging their heads against a brick wall trying to get a job done that either of the two women could have done alone in half the time. So in that case the modern guys had too much of an old-fashioned “do it the hard way” attitude.
People of previous eras were not “tougher” or “better” than modern people, they were simply conditioned to survival in their time. Imagine Zeke the sawyer back in 1845 having to know half the stuff we need in our modern day jobs, as much as you need to get a GED, or even to be able to make sense of an ingredient label on a can of soup today. You could compare a British farmer in 1720 to an American gunfighter in 1885 to a spanish pirate in 1500 to a German housewife in 1940 to a soldier in Rwanda today, and debate “who was better than who”, and you’d still end up with the same answer.
Whatever pluses a lifestyle at some particular time had, there were an equal number of minuses. And you can throw in all the modern personal problems you know of into pretty much any time period as well… there were always drunks, bullies, fools, corruption, murderers, cowards, racists and bigots, men & women argued and cheated on each other, kids talked back (trust me, your parents are lying if they say they didn’t - just ask the grandparents ;)), perveted relatives molested them, work sucked, you never had quite enough money (goats, land, whatever) prices were too high, the weather stinks, you didn’t marry the person you really wanted, the grass was always greener somewhere else, the assholes over the fence/mountian/ocean are up to something…
IOW 99% of the things that piss you off today have always pissed people off and always will. It’s easy to romanticize the past, usually because nobody from it is still alive to tell you how much it sucked! Perhaps you may have harder lifestyle than someone 50 years down the road will, but does that help you today? Nope. People of any era didn’t sit around the fire at night making themselves feel good by gloating about how much tougher they thought they were than their 7th generation of grandchildren will be 200 years in the future. They considered themselves just normal shmoes who probably always wished for just a bit more for themselves… which is how I’d consider them too. I don’t think I’m worthy of admiration for anything I do today, but no doubt 75 years from now people will be thinking I am. :rolleyes:
Well considering I’m diabetic and have been taking insulin for over 20 years, I probably wouldn’t be alive if I lived back then.
So does that make me a wimp?
Thank you for that Denise Leary-esque commentary. But you bring up a good point Mike. However, if you were that pissed, you could always just shoot’em.
Sorry about all the superfluous apostrophes, I’m an archaeologist, I avoided English classes. Oh and BTW, when Idefended my Masters thesis, the first question out of one of the Profs mouth was, “Did you proof this? Your spelling is atrocious and your grasp of the english language is, how shall I say it, horrid.” Though he went on to say, “However, your thesis is nothing short of brilliant.”
I love profs in the UK, so sincere yet plucky at the same time.
Back to my OP. I would love to travel back to the mid-rennaissance say 16th century. I’d have wanted to be a baron, or philosopher, someone of the earliest science, neoclassic physician possibly. Difinitly one who owned a workable latrine.
Lissa - I’ll validate the nitpic, but the medieval period ended in the 15th century - give or take - potatos were first introduced to the European continent in the late 16th century…I wasn’t too far off. Cite
Except the odds are you’d end up a peasant. And let’s face it…being a peasant sucks.
Ha ha ha, yeah, you could just shoot/stab/flail someone if you were pissed off at them - you still can. But then as now you had to deal with the consequences, such as that guys cousins rowing over to your village and burning it to the ground, starting a fewd, or just plain killing you in return. I’d say in a round about way that justice was not all that different in days gone by. Some were above the law (just like now), some were down-trodden and treated like animals (again this still exists today), and most of the population didn’t want to deal with the consequences of doing something drastic - be it a mob or the king’s army hunting them down with torches at night or a swat team calling you out of the car with a megaphone- , so they just kept their urges under control and did their best to get along… just like we do today.
I don’t think actual people–the raw clay–have changed much except, for some of us, in our conditioned expectations. Let’s face it, there are folks in the world right now who live under conditions that aren’t that dissimilar from those in non-urban 1845. People do what they have to to survive.
From my very limited attempts at “from scratch”, I’m always chastened and amazed at how damned much hard work, skill and time are required. Sawing and planing wood manually. Caring for sick family at home. Baking bread. Canning food. Need a new dress? Sew every inch of it by hand. Want to bathe and/or wash clothes? Haul the water and then heat it–after guaranteeing the fuel source. I once got to try plowing with a team of horses–and even that was a bitch. Spading and hoeing even a small garden. Hauling and laying brick; mixing the mortar. Just doing myself all the little, ordinary stuff I take for granted is exhausting and takes forever. It’s less nerve-wracking in some ways but it would be an inescapable, draining burden in others if done for real, for the long haul.
I forget where I read it (Bujold?) but there was a reference to our civilization being more in our things than ourselves. Might be a point there. I suspect we mature slower now in the sense that our luxuries allow us a certain distance from the edge.
Veb
Count me in with those who say that you can’t say ‘wimp’ in general. Someone from 1845 in today’s western world would have a very hard time to make a proper living: he’d lack the skills for even the simplest of jobs. Would that make him a wimp?
Conversily, any of us would probably have a hard time adjusting to 1845 because our expectations are very different. I’m not going into the issue of emancipation, which is an entirely different (though very valid) debat. But in 1845 you could get away with reeking, since mostly everyone did. Hence there was not so much a need to wash your clothes continually. People didn’t take baths or showers so often as today, and apparently were quite comfortable with that. For people like us who have been indoctrinated to be very clean, it would be highly uncomfortable to stink all day. But does that make us wimpy?
In fact, I think most people will survive (begrudgingly) if they would find themselves thrown back in circumstances like 1845. Think about people traveling to underdeveloped countries, who don’t shave or wash for weeks on end. I’m also considering Dutch people who survived the Hunger winter in WW II (1944-1945), when they ate rats and tulip bulbs.
When we think about the past, we shouldn’t forget that a lot of people who survived in a certain age were not exactly happy about their circumstances. That we wouldn’t like it either in those circumstances isn’t wimpy; it would be only wimpy if we’d sit in a corner, crying about the unfairness of it all. My guess is that most people, if forced to, would indeed adapt to more dire circumstances. As did the good people of 1845. (like Veb said)
I doubt the average American knows enough about herbal remedies to be able to prepare their own, or even to know the names of different herbs and what they’re good for, but you do have a point here. I’ve sometimes thought that if I could travel back to 1366 I could astound everyone with my amazing powers of disease prevention by using such revolutionary techniques as, say, boiling water. Or killing rats.
On the other hand, I might well end up being burned at the stake, and without modern medication I personally would be dead within a couple of days anyway. But modern adults in good health transported back in time might well continue on in better health than many of the locals. After all, they’d be vaccinated and immunized against many diseases that were big killers then, and they’d likely also have a natural resistance to many diseases (after all, we are all the descendants of people who didn’t die young from contagious diseases). They wouldn’t have the health problems of people who grew up malnourished, and they’d likely want to keep themselves and their homes clean. The hard work and lack of Big Macs might be hard to get used to but would be a health benefit in the end.
But of course if the crops failed you’d be screwed. If there were an outbreak of smallpox or the plague, you’d be screwed. And if you got cancer, or had organ problems, or diabetes, or even a hormone imbalance, you’d be screwed.
Someone from the past transported to the present time would be a real fish-out-of-water, but if they had someone to help them learn the basics of modern life (like, say, how to open a checking account, or catch the bus, or what a checking account and bus are) then I’m sure many could hope to find work as cabinetmakers, bakers, seamstresses or something like that. Or they could hawk their authentic period-style goods on the Ren Faire circuit…