What do you think about the argument that we’re living in the best time in history?

[Measure_for_Measure]

@Odesio

I’ll reiterate: One of the problems when it comes to discussing the medieval period in Europe is we’re lumping in different cultures in different locations across a significant span of time. The medieval period covers the 5th century AD and ended in the 15th century…

… But I categorically reject the idea that a peasants life was necessarily miserable.

Oh I’ll generalize. There’s a whole level of widespread misery that they had that readers here do not. The heterogeneity doesn’t matter, because it sucked everywhere. We know it sucked everywhere because it sucked everywhere in 1830 as well. And the 1830s had more advanced technology we had in 1500, the end of the medieval era.

I agree that drilling into the complexities of human suffering is worthwhile: people adapt somehow to sharply lower life expectancy, the ubiquitous death of offspring, and the absence of water closets and sanitation. But it’s also worthwhile to contemplate the grinding poverty suffered by most of humanity during 90%+ of the past, as well as the other half of today’s world living on less than $7 per day.

@HMS_Irruncible : Yeah, it’s better to back away from Pinker and read DeLong.

[Sooner]

Well stated.
Short of a world wide dark age, I have no reason to believe it will slow for centuries.

[Little_Nemo]

Maybe we should be worried about the possibility that we’re living in the best time in history.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Best

[LSLGuy]

I did not see that one coming.

[DrCube]

@The_Librarian

Of course it doesn’t do any justice to individual experiences, it is just a number. But also makes it sort of objective.

I think this is the heart of the argument here. “The best time in history” is necessarily a question about subjective experience. Indeed, the subjective experiences of billions of dead people, only a tiny portion of which we can actually analyze through the limited and incomplete historical record.

When you try to make it objective and quantitative, you’re changing the question and answering that, instead. Not that it can’t be informative, and put things in context, but it’s never going to actually answer the question.

For various reasons, if I had a time machine, I’d love to visit the past, but I’d never live there. However, that’s my own opinion, and I’d never say someone else was wrong for coming to a different conclusion. In fact, I’m not even sure if “would you rather live at any other time in history than now?” is even the same question as the OP. But I feel it’s about as close as we can reasonably get.

[LSLGuy]

Agree about subjective experience. But IMO it’s the collective subjective experience. Not that of a particular King or priest or peasant or slave. Or kid who died at age 3 days. But the subjective experience of all of them stirred together at each era in time.

[thorny_locust]

@RitterSport

@bump

I feel like it’s much like driving in the mountains. There’s a general upward trend, but not a straight slope - sometimes you go up steeper than others and even temporarily downward on some stretches.

Love this metaphor!

There’s a top to a mountain. After that, if you continue in the same direction, while you may go temporarily upward on some stretches overall you’ll be going downhill.

Our society’s assumption that we’re going up a mountain with no top to it may turn out to be unfounded.

@Thing.Fish

History shows clearly that the revealed preference of almost all peasants was to remain peasants, so clearly it didn’t seem so terrible to them at the time.

And that the revealed preference of almost all hunter-gatherers was to remain hunter-gatherers.

@Exapno_Mapcase

History tells us that they did not appreciate how wonderful their lives were, at least if one looks at this seemingly endless list of peasants revolts, the majority of which are European and from 1300 on.

Were they revolting because they wanted to live differently, though, or because they were being required to live differently and didn’t want to?

@Little_Nemo

But that was not generally true in history. (It wasn’t even always true in America.) A more common formula was the farmer worked on land that somebody else owned. They were expected to pay the landowner for the use of the land.

More common worldwide and throughout the last 10,000 years? Or more common in medieval Europe?

@Measure_for_Measure

How the hell do you feed your entire family on 5000 calories

Not well.

Which is why the Europeans who first came to what’s now called North America were startled at the much better physical condition of the mixed hunting/gathering/agricultural peoples they encountered (those who’d survived the smallpox moving ahead of the European explorers and settlers, anyway.)

Picking the worst portions of medieval Europe as one’s comparison point is certainly going to have an influence on conclusions; even if it is what most of us have had the most instruction in.

[RitterSport]

@thorny_locust

After that, if you continue in the same direction, while you may go temporarily upward on some stretches overall you’ll be going downhill.

That’s certainly true, and the future is looking downhill due to the effects of climate change. But, the future isn’t here yet and I would imagine that if you looked at key global wellness stats (famine, disease, poverty, violence), they probably look better now than in 2015, which was probably better than 2005, and certainly better than 1955 or 1755.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@thorny_locust

Were they revolting because they wanted to live differently, though, or because they were being required to live differently and didn’t want to?

Pretty sure they were revolting because they were starving, so the answer is both.

[Measure_for_Measure]

@RitterSport

But, the future isn’t here yet and I would imagine that if you looked at key global wellness stats (famine, disease, poverty, violence), they probably look better now than in 2015, which was probably better than 2005, and certainly better than 1955 or 1755.

I’ve mucked with those stats a little and IIRC, progress over 10 years isn’t assured. Recessions occur, the share of the world under democratic rule can rise and fall, regions experience lost decades and war. You probably want to modify your story with 20 year spans. 2025, 2005, 1985, 1955, 1755. Even then there are no guarantees (1923-1943 was probably a downturn on net) but it captures the general pattern better.

[RitterSport]

I sit corrected.

Just to be clear here, I’m no rosy-eyed optimist. But, Pinker sometimes does a good job helping us to step back and look at a bigger picture.

[thorny_locust]

@Exapno_Mapcase

@thorny_locust

Were they revolting because they wanted to live differently, though, or because they were being required to live differently and didn’t want to?

Pretty sure they were revolting because they were starving, so the answer is both.

My original education on this was very skimpy and I’m sure I’ve forgotten parts of it. Fifteen minutes on the net leaves the impression that a) some of the people revolting in “peasants’ revolts” weren’t farmers, but often included the equivalent of middle-class city businessmen and sometimes even nobles b) the causes were various, but didn’t seem to have to do with the peasants not wanting to be farmers, but were instead objections to the impostion of new taxes, and/or objections to pay for crops and work not increasing with inflation, and/or objections to imposition of a foreign governing class and/or of growing social and economic distance between classes, and sometimes included religious issues. Which seems to me a lot more like “we want to live the way we used to live” than “we want to stop living that way and all move to the city!” (though I expect some individuals did want to move to the city, and probably everybody would rather have had a choice in the matter.)

[Exapno_Mapcase]

Let’s start with economics. Though under a host of localized systems the general structure of a medieval economy involved a small percentage of nobles and a very large population of farmers. In the 17th century France had a population of 20,000,000 and Paris 400,000. Though the largest city in Europe it held 2% of the population. England had a much smaller population so London had a larger percentage but still single digits. Outside cities, there were merchants, craftspeople, fishers, and others but also tiny percentages overall. The vast majorities were farmers who lived under the protection - the term was used literally - of the local lords.

Being a lord was a full-time job and hideously expensive. Of course they lived well, in a castle or manor house or chateau, but also of course they had to pay to construct them and all the outbuildings, and maintain them. They didn’t live along. The lord had to house and feed all the retinue - ladies in waiting, knights, pages, counselors, soothsayers, jesters, etc. - and the servants and cooks and grooms and masons and sawyers and sewers and other million skills needed to be more or less self-sufficient. They had to do this all year long, even in winters, so they spent the summer creating stores, for the humans and the multitude of animals. Not to mention the visiting lords who required even better treatment. Being a lord was like being a CEO.

There was also that protection part. The lords policed the environs so that the bad guys - there were always bad guys - didn’t harass the locals too much. They also contributed men whenever the higher ups got into wars, i.e. frequently though few on a large scale. They had to spend money to outfit a bunch of knights who had nothing better to do between wars and keep them ready to go at a moment’s notice. Even a small local set of troops goes through huge amounts of food on the march.

Where did the lord get all this food and money? From the peasants on his land. Generally speaking, there were two ways. Either the peasant had a set amount of food to be collected annually or they could sell some excess or hand-made goods at the village market for a few coins.

You have it right when you say that many revolts “were instead objections to the imposition of new taxes, and/or objections to pay for crops and work not increasing with inflation.” But that’s much the same thing as saying they were starving. Taxes always went up before, during, and after wars because the only other way to offset these huge unplanned for expenditures was to haul away loot or force the loser to pay up, which of course drove up their taxes.

Alternatively, a famine, natural disaster, plague, animal or crop disease, or a big-time hex could disrupt the economic cycle. Lords were not the type of people who said “you had a bad year, keep your barley.” If you owed a bushel and a peck, you paid a bushel and a peck even if that meant that nothing was left over. Hey, peasants were easy to come by; they were making more every year.

Peasants had a range of options in such times, all of them bad. Some indeed ran away. Being a fugitive peasant was technically illegal pretty much everywhere but it’s not like they had ID cards. On the other hand, who wanted to take in more mouths to feed in a famine or potential carriers in a plague? Probably better to stand your ground that you knew. All the better if the lords also felt squeezed by the king and could try to take it out on him.

Although Europe had a few grand cities before the Industrial Age, most peasants did not try to escape by going to urban centers. How many of them had even heard of the grand cities besides some tall traveler’s tales? Or knew how to get there? Why, they didn’t even speak the same language in Paris as in the south of France.

Being a peasant was never an easy life. I assume that in good times under a good lord they were content, since they had little to compare it to and the local religion preached that their lives and duties were to obey the lord, lower and upper case. But in bad times under a bad lord, life was very, very bad indeed. Franklin popularized the saying that nothing was certain except death and taxes but any peasant would have understood its gist immediately.

[msmith537]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

And again, all in all, we’re not actually doing so well. Here’s a good video by The Market Exit about how we’re not really as happy as we think we are, how being richer doesn’t generally mean being better off (in particular mentally—in fact, the correlation inverts at a certain point, on a national scale), and also how Pinker uses a few statistical tricks, like plotting on a log scale to make a correlation seem stronger than it is, to make his points:

https://youtu.be/9JBwTLLj3KA?si=mWzX2Hzo-7fJ54R2&1

I have a theory which I don’t think is inconsistent with that video.

The reason increased wealth doesn’t correlate to increased happiness in wealthy, highly unequal societies is that it requires an ever increasing amount of stressful, often bullshit work to build and maintain those levels of wealth. Meanwhile there is the ever-present threat of those jobs disappearing and knocking you down to the low-income part of the graph.

Like I’m fucking miserable all the time. I don’t think my wife is particularly happy either. We make a pretty decent living. But it also feels like it’s never enough money to raise a family. And not like we live a particularly lavish lifestyle. We just live someplace that is extremely expensive, particularly if you have kids. And it always feels like my job could be taken away at a moments notice (which it often is).