The “Olden-Days” were Not So Long Ago
When you think of life as it was 100, 500, 1000, or 2000 years ago, it seems incredibly far-off and different, while the people of those times seem superstitious. However I believe that this is a type of illusion, as those times were not so long ago and the residents not so different
I remember clearly the world of sixty years ago, when I was 5. I was a little sponge, taking in everything that happened, the music, people smoking & drinking, what kids and parents did. I spent long hours hearing my grandfather talk about his grandparents, who were born in the early 1800s. If I survive to know my grandchildren similarly, that’s 300 years of word of mouth testimony! The more you learn about the past, the more you learn that many things haven’t changed, and that our lifespans are significant. When you watch a movie from the 30s, you’ll notice that although the technology has changed, people act more or less the same. I believe that all this is part of an illusion created from having poor historical records, and from the vanity of believing we are smarter than previous generations.
When you see an old photograph, let’s say Civil War vintage, you see a bunch of humorless and dirty faces that seem to be saying “I can’t tell you how much we have to chop wood and our lives suck!”. Yet it turns out the exposures were long and they had to remain motionless, plus the old sepia tones make even nice clothes and rosy cheeks look drab. National Geographic took photos of modern people with old camera techniques at a Civil War re-enactment and surprise! We looked a lot like them! There is a great saying that goes “each new generation thinks they invented sex”, which is funny because of course we wouldn’t be here if we were the first to invent sex. I believe the only thing keeping us from knowing that George Washington didn’t live that long ago (and wasn’t a taller, braver version of Mike Pence) is the lousy record keeping of that era (including lack of decent movie cameras) plus our need to be respectful, but feel superior (kind of like how we feel about our grandparents, only more so).
So let’s talk about our grandparents…of course we love them and respect them, but we feel in our innermost heart of hearts that their sex lives were very limited (like sex in “The Handmaid’s Tale”?), that they survived some stupid war and maybe learned a few outdated subjects like Latin (in a stuffy segregated school like in “Dead Poet’s Society”). They may even harbor some kind of strange political or conspiratorial belief that occasionally comes out (like Mexican Caravans, Pizzagate buggery, or that Trump is a devout Christian). But if you take a lot of movies of all this, and then get old yourself, you realize that although the technology has changed, you are not much different from them. The reason things don’t change much is the following:
1) The technology changes, but in rather meaningless ways. In a 30s movie, they use a daffodil looking phone thing, in the 1860s a telegraph, while you use an Iphone. So effin’ what? Communication is communication, and though your circle of contacts may be wider, theirs was much more real. Advantage old people.
2) You think you are much cooler because you’ve had more sexual partners than they did. But first, you reread history and start understanding there was a reason it was called the “Gay 90s” or the “Roaring 20s”, people then did know about drugs and twisted sex, they just didn’t talk about it…plus as any Christian would tell you, its not the number of partners that counts, it is the overall frequency, which our grandparents may have excelled at. Advantage old…young people! (I changed my vote when I realized how women get to enjoy sex more now than in the old days, when an orgasm might’ve been called “hysteria”)
3) You also think your car was way cooler, since you grandparents maybe didn’t even have one after using a horse and buggy for many years. Then you start to realize that given pollution and recklessness, maybe a horse and buggy were cool after all, especially since they additionally had many trains and ships that were almost plane-like in efficiency. Advantage old people.
4) You think your food is cooler until you realize your Grandparents were forced to eat fruits, vegetables, and free range meat, and that your “cool and modern” food has processed elements that are bad for you. Then you start to eat like your grandparents (without the Crisco). Unfortunately, this health advantage of yore is offset by all the tobacco, alcohol, and lack of vaccines and antibiotics. Advantage young people.
5) Finally, after watching Gilbert and Sullivan’s “HMS Pinafore” (1877) and liking it, you realize that about 75% of what people have been doing throughout history is more or less the same. Its not as though they didn’t have entertainment or dirty jokes back then…they actually had a highly developed sense of storytelling and homegrown music (they had to…they didn’t have TVs or radios back then). So while we have more “quantity”, they may have had superior “quality”. Advantage old people.
So now we’ve established that your grandparents are not that different from you, they laugh at similar jokes, eat more or less similar food, wear clothes that look outdated and silly (along with some of their opinions), but they put their pants on one leg at a time and have just beaten you 3 to 2 in a comparison. Now how do you compare with people that lived 500 years ago? I read “The Decameron” by Bocaccio many years ago, a collection of stories written in Florence Italy during the Great Plague of 1350. I am getting ready to finish “Canterbury Tales”, a similar collection of stories, written in the 1370s by Chaucer in England. The interesting thing is that they were both collecting stories that were then several hundred years old. Even the “genius” of Shakespeare may be due to the fact that he was “retelling” older stories, that were subsequently lost to time. If you read “The Decameron”, or “The Miller’s Tale” (from Canterbury Tales), you begin to realize that the common people have always carried out their lives more or less dutifully, with a kind of sex and alcohol laden debauchery around the edges. In addition, they harbor a resentment of the seemingly self-righteous royalty and clergy, that manifests itself in a kind of twisted and humorous payback (like our modern dirty jokes and bar room songs). Much of this is lost to history, as the royalty and clergy always said “stop that!” and buried it, until the printing press was invented (not coincidentally around the time of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and John Wycliffe, who printed the first English language Bible). It makes you realize that people back then were…sorta like us! Except their voices were stifled while the church and royalty got to rewrite history and make themselves heroes larger than life (while the common people died in wars, from frequents diseases, and lack of food). (Boccaccio, 1353)(Chaucer, 1400)
Some modern jokes and songs date way back in history, and people like the Lomax family (father-son John and Alan Lomax) have fortunately collected folk songs, otherwise being lost to history. Their collections have made their way onto the hit charts as cowboy ballads (ie The Streets of Laredo) and folk songs by Leadbelly and Pete Seeger (ie “Midnight Special” and “Goodnight Irene”). As another example, the hit song “The House of the Rising Sun” (made popular by “The Animals” in the 60s) has been traced to a 16th Century English ballad “The Unfortunate Rake”. Printed jokes became popular after the invention of the printing press, with the Facetiae by Bracciolini being printed in 1470 (note how the Italian society must have been more tolerant of naughtiness). A similar height of tolerance seems to be the 5th Century BC in Greece, as the “Philogelos”, a printing of 265 jokes has been found. The oldest known joke is a Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC which states “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap” Need we find any more proof that people of long ago were not dissimilar to us? This is actually pretty funny too, as you can imagine a Cleopatra looking woman sitting on her Pharoah-looking husband’s lap and going “brrrrrffftttt”, and so it’s a kind of classic (I suppose it would have to be, to have lasted 3900 years). We of today arrogantly think we are so much funnier, but humor is notoriously frame of reference dependent, and so it is unlikely that “Did you hear about the Hearst Burger? It has 2 buns but no Patty” will withstand the test of time (when I tell it, my boys give me the canine twisted neck “mmnnhh?” look). (Winick 2015)(Hetzron et al nd)
Though we brag about our fancy Iphones, cars, drugs, and sexual preferences, even the common people of 4,000 years ago had communication devices (clay tablets and papyrus, but they were communication devices), modality (chariots, horses, and walking), drugs (alcohol certainly, plus holding their breath?), and weird sex (where do you think all those camel and sheep jokes came from?), so THINGS WERE NOT THAT DIFFERENT!!! If we kept better records, communicated with our forbearers more effectively, and invented a device that could take snapshots of everything that ever happened, we would realize that LIFE IS PRETTY MUCH THE SAME ALL OVER! and that we have simply created a kind of arrogance to help us cope.
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