4 ms·
> I think your comment falls into the “it was unadulterated hell being a peasant”-trap that I was referring to You might be reading my comment as if that were
by guntherhermann 4y ago
> I think your comment falls into the “it was unadulterated hell being a peasant”-trap that I was referring to
You might be reading my comment as if that were the case, but I assure you that my thoughts are not that.
Humans adapt to any situation, that's why we are the superior species, we are the world's greatest adapters. Peasant life wasn't misery all the time, but there was FAR MORE misery on a FAR GREATER scale than there is for the average Brit. That's my point.
I think it's important to understand how many things we have that most of us take for granted (refridgeration, essentially infinite light, the world's information at your fingertips, I could go on).
I have read a few articles over the past few days about people waxing lyrical about how great medieval peasants had it, and my comment is merely counterpointing those arguments.
> As for children dying - maybe the children of peasants would die in greater numbers than the aristocracy, but nothing stopped their children from dying of an infected scratch or a bacterial infection, any more than anyone else, before the invention of antibiotics.
I think picking one bit of all of my examples, countering it, and then treating the rest of my argument as if it is worthless is a really bad way to engage with people. It's why I stopped commenting on HN, it's full of pedantic tripe like that.
Take care.
- null_object 4y ago> full of pedantic tripe like that. Ah here was me thinking this was an uncontroversial and enjoyable discussion on HN. Anyways. Once again, just to underline what I wrote before - my comment wasn’t supposed to suggest that there was a golden age of Elysian harmony in the pastoral landscape of Europe, somehow superior to the ‘terrible’ existence we have now, with our hospitals, antibiotics, electronic gadgets, space travel etc. Over the last few years there’ve been quite a few studies linked on HN that have begun to give a nuanced image of life in the ‘Dark Ages’ - albeit one that was ravaged by conflict and disease. I thought these interiors gave another dimension to this new perspective. That’s all my post was about.
- germinalphrase 4y agoPerhaps we should all be required to live for some period of time in the cold, hungry, dark pre-modern world such that we can return to modernity and be appropriately enthused.
- _a_a_a_ 4y agoI consider that a damn good suggestion
- bjelkeman-again 4y agoFor me it has been enough visiting subsistence farmers. I really don’t want to live like that, and have spent a decade trying to help at some useful scale.
- pessimizer 4y agoMaybe we should examine why we think that the past was darker and colder than the present.
- pessimizer 4y ago> Humans adapt to any situation, that's why we are the superior species, we are the world's greatest adapters. Peasant life wasn't misery all the time, but there was FAR MORE misery on a FAR GREATER scale than there is for the average Brit. That's my point. Life expectancy dropped with the industrial revolution, and the condition of your average working class Brit was so abject that it literally inspired Communism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Condition_of_the_Working_Class_in_England https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Condition_of_the_Working_C...
- watwut 4y agoThe industrial revolution was even worst is not exactly argument for "average lowly peasant life was better then ours". It just means other (otherwise short) period was even worst. For that matter, medieval times had uprisings and discontents. Feudalism itself had also periodic uprisings, both during medieval times and after. French revolution did not exactly started when everything was fine and dandy.