[TW] hi! just letting you know, as I forgot to put it in the video, that I'm discussing the topic of domestic abuse in this one, in case some of you would rather skip watching. take care! 💕
I do wonder if part of that is due to the art we have from those periods. Sitting/standing modeling for a painting takes days. Its very hard to maintain a joyous expression for that long. (I worked as a life drawing model in college. Just 45 minutes of one pose was exhausting.)
It’s ridiculous how long I went as a Youth ™️ thinking that people back in the Olden Days didn’t really feel strong emotions or care about loved ones or feel passionate about things because of how I saw people described when I was taught about history. Things were cold and merciless and there was no room for tenderness in so many descriptions.
@@Cruznick06 tbh I think it's just that those creating historical fiction often get stuck on the facts. By which I mean whatever background research they did. They sort of wish to create a narrative of facts, and forget it's supposed to be fiction. A novel is still a novel even if it's set in the past. Historical fiction is hard and time consuming to create, but detective stories and fantasy have their own difficulties too, and litterary fiction needs an outstanding use of language. Anyway what historical fiction needs is basic storytelling. And also the facts, I'm not saying it should all be fantasy, because that's a different genre. Just that creators need a better understanding of how to tell a captivating story.
My favorite of cultural snobbism: the medieval was dirty and trash was everywhere. They built Gothic cathedrals and founded the first universities but they were too stupid to wash themselves or keep their streets clean. Meanwhile I find plastic trash even in the deepest woods and our oceans have small continents of trash floating around.
@@linaaliomais6161 Nobody talked solely about europeans! 🤡 (And even then the first universities in europe also date back to 9th and 10th century. Aka the same time period)
The myth that enrages me is that, because childhood mortality was so high, parents didn't love or become attached to their children. One piece of 'evidence' is that they dressed baby/toddler boys and girls in the same clothes because they weren't seen as individuals until they were older. These were people who didn't have clothes bursting from their dressers. Of course you reused the baby clothes from kid to kid. As if we don't have hand-me-downs now. They dressed their little ones practically and that's where it ended. There's tons of evidence that parents adored their children just as much then as they do now. One medieval priest wrote about how heart wrenching it was to watch parents grieve and cry over the loss of a little one. It broke his heart. It's the same for the trope that men didn't value women. Hell, the Franklyn stove was invented purely because the tragedy of women's skirts going up in flames while cooking was intolerable. If a woman drown fetching water from the river, the town came together to build wells or come up with a safer system so such a thing never happened again. A lot of the nightmarish children's stories were told to scare kids straight. To keep them SAFE. They loved just as hard as we do now. They hurt from loss just as much as we do now. The crazy part is that they were strong enough to keep doing loving when the risk of loss was so much higher than it is now. I lost my son a few years ago and I cannot even imagine the pain of a mother who lost three, four, or even all of her children. There are stories of women going insane from grief and never recovering, and that I understand very well. Dehumanizing people is how we cope with our OWN pain when we hear about the horrors of the past. We soothe ourselves by telling the lie that, "This didn't hurt them as much as it would hurt us," so we can set that compassionate reflex aside and sleep better at night.
The bit when you said about boys and girls wearing dresses reminded me that I have an old photograph of my grandfather in a dress at 2 years of age so this was would have been 1909 or thereabouts. When I asked my mother about it she said boys wore dresses til about 3 years old and this was because it was far easier to change nappies and potty train given the type of clothing they wore back then. Whether this is true or not I don't know but seems plausible.
@@fionamacdonald1267 Whoah, I mean, it does sound pretty plausible. If it made things easier, then why not, right? lol Thanks for sharing, stories like this are interesting. It's like looking into a little window of the past.
I'm sorry about the loss of your son. I wish I could say something that could at least bring a little comfort, but I'm at a loss of what to say. I hope he is at least resting in peace wherever his spirit may have gone. ❤ Also, it is true, people will dehumanise others just to make themselves feel better or to try minimising the suffering of others. I'm sort of the opposite, I care too much, even about whether bugs feel pain or not. For me, every living thing matters, apart from myself, that is. I have trouble sleeping, due to guilt and shame and due to my emotions. I find it hard to put them aside or put my conscious aside. I wish I could...
@@ReptilianTeaDrinker I know right, I love history. I think there's some famous paintings that depict toddler boys in dresses too, I think Elizabethan ones If memory serves, but for the life of me I can't remember the artists or the paintings. Could well be later paintings not sure though. But yes the windows to the past are amazing.
"Rulers invaded kingdoms for stupid reasons" "People went to extreme lengths for 'beauty' " "People harmed other people just for racial prejudice" "Animals weren't treated well" "Mental health wasn't taken seriously" Sure, these things totally aren't happening now, are they? Edit- So I changed no reason to stupid reasons. Hope everyone is happy now. And I _am_ being sarcastic. I thought everyone would get it. Especially by the 'invading kingdoms' and 'beauty' part.
The "invading kingdoms for no reason" thing is _particularly_ false. Everyone likes to imagine that every conflict had a designated good side and a designated evil side when really, those wars often erupted for complex political reasons. People also like to believe that every war up to the 20th century was all because of religion and nothing else when that's blatantly untrue.
@@errortryagainlater4240 ah yes. My country was colonized for 350years because of "complicated political stuff". But why did it have to involve my country? We were just chilling trading and eating food Edit: Yall i know it IS complex. But nothing can justify what they did to my country. We are still impacted by it even after decades. Im just glad they didnt erase our culture
I’m an engineering major, but I had a professor this semester who took 5 minutes every week to go over a woman from STEM history. What blew my mind is how all of these women contributed major discoveries to time periods that we now write off as “when women couldn’t do science,” effectively erasing from history not only their brilliance, but their tenacity and drive to overcome the adversity they faced.
Oh my god I've just come across the same problem in biology! 😭 had no idea how much women really contributed to theories we take for granted today, but one of the professors at my uni is so passionate about naming the female scientists in eras I assumed women weren't even allowed to do science. I mean, the modern media doesn't even mention ANY of these women, I grew up thinking that even in the 1950s there were next to 0 women in science 😅 but there were SO MANY omg. Like not just the odd one or two, but entire labs
This goes for women in all fields! So many people act like all women were locked in their bedrooms and fed bread and water until about 1980 when they could suddenly do everything. Not only does that devalue the efforts of women of the past who worked their whole lives bit by bit so that we could be where we are 100+ years later, but it prevents us from seeing the privileges that especially white, wealthy women had in the past (early suffragists refusing to take a stance on slavery because they thought it would distract from people like THEM getting the vote, for example). And of course, like Karolina said, where we are now isn't perfect by a long shot.
As a history student I love that you're interested in this! And I love your prof for doing that. Interdisciplinary thinking is great! To add onto this, it was partly deliberately made difficult to see women's history not only because they were erased in their time and because of modern misconceptions about the past but also because of partly deliberate processes of erasure in the historical field. Women were simply not seen as a valid subject of history for a long time so we weren't studied and sources about us weren't preserved, which lead to us now having less sources about women to work with and less of a rich academic tradition for research about women which lends us less credibility in academia. This is also where the phrase "well behaved women rarely make history" comes from- we have way too few sources on "regular, every day" women so we sometimes only get to see outliers who really made a name for themselves even though "regular" women probably did really interesting and cool things as well, and would be crucial for research. Even now women's history is still seen a lot as just a niche gender perspective when it's like guys, women are people and we can include them in "regular history". But that's the result of a centuries long cycle of making women invisible in the time itself, and then afterwards in archives and academia. I hope someone who reads this will find it interesting and it's not just common knowledge, I always get really excited to share.
On this subject, a Tumblr post I like points out that we're all like "why did they use things with lead if they knew it was bad for them" but still use things that release microplastics into our food and water
lead is still in lipsticks and on kids toys funnier is that she pretends ethical consumption is humanly possible asia makes basically all fabric and there's tons of slavery
Often that was there best option &/or they didn't know how dangerous it was &/or the workers had no choice in the matter qv "mad hatters" - they used mercury as part of the felting process...
Exactly! As per my comment, I anticipate that observers of the future will have the same critiques on 'our' smoking, alcohol, obesity, working/stress patterns etc
It's important to note that in both cases, it's because the average consumer had no power to change that. The corporations/people in control of the industry got rich off of using harmful materials and the average person couldn't do a thing about it
Ah JK Rowling. How the hell did it take her going full TERF whackjob for people to realize that she's just not that good at writing. Everything she didn't plagiarize from the Wizards of Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin has just been disastrous.
I hate how people will make up facts about history without any research and assume they are automatically correct because they feel superior about seeming smarter. TikTok is very guilty of this. Everyone on there acts like everything they say is fact.
@@gothempress Those same people also scream and shout when someone shares an opinion that differs from there. It's a collection of hypocrites. Whatever happened to having a calm discussion?
@@gothempress Twitter is a cesspool of entitlement and people acting like toddlers. "OH MY GOSH, YOU LIKE WAFFLES! WHAT ABOUT PANCAKES! YOURE SO CLOSE MINDED."
Tiktok is full of teens, and teens have been stupid since the dawn of time. Now, if you're talking about adult people on Twitter and Facebook, well that's a problem.
As a teen I decided to find the oldest book I could find in my local library that was about humans harming the environment, and I found a very large book from the mid 1800's, which referenced earlier materials. The information and opinions represented could have been written yesterday. It changed my whole perspective on what we as a society call "progress."
I picked up one year of issues of a women's magazine from 1939 a few years ago. They could almost have been released last year... The travel articles, gossip about celebrities, recipes, and even the ads for make-up and period products, are very similar to the ones in the modern equivalent magazines.
I have a degree in Archaeology, and this is something that bothers me so much! People in the past are so underestimated. They were so so capable and clever, and throughout history humanity has consistently been inventive and curious, they made the best of what they had and our modern accomplishements are built upon their foundation! My favourite part of history to study is the everyday people, the little parts of their lives we overlook. They weren't all stupid and misreable and stoic. They were funny, creative, ambitious, imaginative, playful, and petty. They were US.
100% dead on. The people who built Rome or any amazing cities were not braindead. The Lighthouse of Alexandria might be long gone, but you can bet it was breath taking to see.
They were kind of like us but they had a whole different life. Today we talk about, movies, tv, music, books, music, etc. We watch prank videos, makeup, or watch a video like this. People back in the far past didn’t have thise experiences. I think our different experiences would set us apart drastically. Like if were able to meet them they would see us as the alien species.
Sometimes they were stinky lol. One certain French king was very much a stinkbomb. No one took regular baths but kings were absolutely forbidden so it would have been more difficult not to reek. This one guy though had a real air about him.
@@galanie People not bathing regularly is an example of a misconception that Karolina is talking about in this video. Perhaps in the past centuries, people didn't bathe regularly or every day. But I read an etiquette manual from the 19th Century (I think it was called "The habits of good society" from 1859) and in that book, they actually reccomend bathing after you rise from bed. Also if you think about it, wouldn't the royalty have more access to clean water? I haven't heard anything about European kings that were forbidden to bathe (although feel free to tell me if there is a source about that).
I also think it's interesting how we tend to mock "silly old wife's tales" from the past but can still swallow entire fake news on social media or believe people on the internet with a blind eye regarding products or experiences.
I'm currently reading arabian nights and I can vouch that these stories deserve to be mocked. One of the stories was that a woman was talking her husband in to doing something he didn't want to do until one of his buddies is like oh yea whenever my wife does that I lock her in a room and beat her with a stick until her arms break and the guy is like oh wow I never thought of that and preceeds to follow his advice and beats his wife and that's the end of the story lmfao.
"I heard that jf children go down to the fields (that just so happen to be over a network of limestone caves just under the surface) at night, they get taken down to the underworld and never come back" - silly, hysterical, clearly fearmongering, blatant fear of the unknown, ultimately stupid, only said by dumbasses with no idea about the world "The Jews are sending black people and Arabs to our country to replace the white population" - legitimate concern, fact based, narrative covers details to ensure message is conveyed, shows clear and present danger, saves lives, protects idiomatic local knowledge... Oh whoops, I got the descriptions the wrong way round
There's a quote in Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" that was an eye-opener of that sort for me. We all take part in cult rituals sometimes without even realising how weird they are viewed from a distance. " 'Professor Langdon,' called a young man with curly hair in the back row, 'if Masonry is not a secret society, not a corporation, and not a religion, then what is it?' 'Well, if you were to ask a Mason, he would offer the following definition: Masonry is a system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols.' 'Sounds to me like a euphemism for "freaky cult." ' 'Freaky, you say?' 'Hell yes!' the kid said, standing up. 'I heard what they do inside those secret buildings! Weird candlelight rituals with coffins, and nooses, and drinking wine out of skulls. Now that's freaky!' Langdon scanned the class. 'Does that sound freaky to anyone else?' 'Yes!' they all chimed in. Langdon feigned a sad sigh. 'Too bad. If that's too freaky for you, then I know you'll never want to join my cult.' Silence settled over the room. The student from the Women's Center looked uneasy. 'You're in a cult?' Langdon nodded and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. 'Don't tell anyone, but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh.' The class looked horrified. Langdon shrugged. 'And if any of you care to join me, come to the Harvard chapel on Sunday, kneel beneath the crucifix, and take Holy Communion.' The classroom remained silent. Langdon winked. 'Open your minds, my friends. We all fear what we do not understand.' "
An anthropologist pointed out that prehistoric humans were just as intelligent as modern humans, just the relevant knowledge they gained and problems they applied their critical thinking to were different in their worlds in the past. What I wonder about bleak depictions of historical society, if life was all misery and strife then why did we evolve a sense of humor?
Speaking of prehistoric humans, almost every aspect of their life got worse after they started farming. Their life expectancy decreased, diseases like type 2 diabetes and anemia became more common, sexism became more common and, in tandem with animal domestication, we got diseases such as the measles and smallpox (and thanks to us living closer together, they spread rapidly). But, because we tend to assume that more recent=more progressive, that is almost never brought up outside of anthropology, which just shows that societies are capable of regressing.
"Peasants in medieval times worked constantly" As opposed to now, where people... work constantly? Between workaholics, hussle culture, people working multiple jobs to survive, and things like sweatshops we've definitely turned this one around (sarcasm).
right, i see people saying they dont want 9-5 jobs but I rarely see one of those, all I see is 7-5, 8-6, 7-6 etc.. we have more access to doctors and health plans but we don't have time for going do the doctor, looking after our health and if we get sick and take a time off we're fired, we live for working too we just have more distractions
you know what's even more ironic? The medieval peasants might have had to work most of the year to see the fruits of their labour, but the actual daily time spend on working would be, maybe around 3 to 5 hours (maybe even less), except for like, the time of the harvest where they had to work as quickly as possible, but even then the whole village would work together as a community and afterwards they would get 3 months of preparations for the next season, because you can't really do anything direct during the winter. Of course, it was still a very hard, physical work, which wasn't helped by hunger, diseases, wars and being treated like literal slaves by other social classes. It was the industrial revolution that caused the insane work hours, because suddenly one person could do much more work across a day and the society still haven't really healed from that yet, because 9 hours is still insane and it's not like people really stop working when they get back home and the last time the workday was lowered was about 70 years ago.
just read Malcom Gladwell`s Outliers recently, and apparently, farmers in Europe actually didn`t work that much. once you plough the fields and sowe seeds, you just wait till it grows, then you work during harvest, but during winter, they just lay in bed and "hibernated" to conserve energy. (rice farmers in Asia, on the other hand, worked every day from dawn to dusk)
I had the "people in the past were just people, too" moment when I first read about the graffiti in Pompeii. It just says silly things like "I was here" or "I f*cked the barmaid" similar things that you can find in walls of High School bathrooms today. Even though it's been 2 thousand years, it's so funny that in a fundamental level people don't change.
Or like I was super surprised and really impressed when we studied a certain Latin intellectual, teacher, writer, named Quintilianus, because his theory about pedagogy and how children should be taught is so "modern" and just really amazing
A Viking tagged "Halfdan carved these runes" which was basically the same as "Halfdan was here" on marble in the Hagia Sophia in formally named Constantinople around the year 900.
As my history teacher once said:"To us it seems like no other turn of events was possible, but for people in the past it was just a life they lived. Someone in the future will be berating us for our choices because they know better. But they do because of us."
The people of the past figured out everything for us. it's why we have electricity, it's why we have running water to hour homes. It's how we went from a biplane to space travel in under 70 years. The achievements we find in this time ( hopefully) will benefit people 300 years from now; all for them to call us stupid, and maybe a few to defend us like I or you do now.
We fail to consider that our grandchildren may live in a world not as good as ours but think their way of doing things is better. OR they will have regressed to barbarism.
Being a historian myself I have to say: YES! Really specifically hate the narrative of women with broader agencies in early modern times being viewed as "ahead of their time" when in fact we just shouldn't take our expectations and solely wanting to see them 'verified'.
Little rant of my own: This entire video is just so accurate. My mother grew up in the Soviet Union during the 70's and 80's. Her mother was a person who would always save money. She never spent it on improving their tiny, tiny flat, or on buying another one, or on anything of the sort. She had enough money to make an investment and get them out of the poverty they were in, but she was saving it for a better day. In 1991, when the USSR fell apart, she lost most of that money. Obviously, it was a large regret, but my mother didn't berate her for that, because how would she know? Just apply the same logic from our own decisions; We never know what's a good investment or what's a good decision to make until we see the outcome. I also had a classmate with whom I got into a heated debate with, because she claimed we did not need to teach history in school. This is the result of misinformation that comes from history class. There's two opposite extreme views; One that Karolina discussed in the video, about people thinking us modern folk are so much better, and one that we did not improve at all and are constantly repeating the same mistakes. Obviously, both of these extreme opinions are false; We need to acknowledge that while we do make many of the same mistakes and history does often repeat itself, we are improving in some aspects and have the potential to do so further if society is properly educated. Lastly, it's so amusing to me to see a lot of people nowadays discovering things that have been in use for as old as time, and often marketing them as something out of this world. For some reason, using natural oils for the hair is something insane to some Westerners. Meanwhile, I live in an Arabic country where this is something a lot of people do, and I know for a fact the Middle East is not alone in this. This is just one example, there's hundreds out there. However, for some reason, when a Western Tiktok star discovers something like that, it's something amazing. But when societies who have been using it since the start of history share their knowledge, it's backwards or primitive. That doesn't seem fair. Oh, and one more thing; Can we please go back to having high quality items produced that actually last for maybe a decade? I have a bunch of clothes from my mum that is two decades old and in perfect condition, it is very much doable. As Karolian said in the video.... Modern infrastructure is really not it. That's all, this video triggered a rant that I felt I had to get out XD I love the video by the way-
@@kurkosiaa Not really buying, I am aware, it was the wrong term to use, no need to be so rude about it. Renting it from the government, then, but the main point still stands :)
@@HolandaChiquita That's a very good point! I actually agree with all of what you said, it is great when cultures share too, but yes, crediting is also important!
My history professor completely changed my perspective on the "middle ages". I used to hate the middle ages in school because all we learned about was the plague, that everybody believed "the earth is flat", witch hunts and blind religious fanaticism. That people didn't love their children and didn't have emotions at all. My perspective has completely changed now- there was a lot of science, people were curious about the world, people laughed and danced and grieved and loved their children so much. It's like people from the past aren't even depicted as human beings just like us, but like some kind of different species in media and history books at school. And while it's important to focus on some of the bad stuff that happened, history shouldn't just be reduced to "the past was terrible but everything is better now" as if our own modern world doesn't have it's own flaws.
Thinking that the Middle Ages was so backwards was propaganda in part in an organized effort to take womens social and economic power away. The maternal and child death rate went UP in the enlightenment as male doctors took over and punished women midwives (and the witch-hunts went up). The propaganda lasts still
I’m so glad. I’m writing a novel set in a fantasy world inspired by late 19th century China, England, and a smattering of other places. I have a character from a futuristic world who rolls her eyes at things like a gorgeous half-human half-snake lady existing, or that there’s elves and a simplistic, somewhat racist and misogynistic social structure similar to things she’s learned have been left behind in the past… but everyone is just people, there’s things she heard were bad that are actually just fine. Things are primarily different instead of necessarily worse. Her new friends are in a similar situation to her with surviving by freelancing and crime, and they protect her somewhat from being treated differently… though she’s very uncomfortable with it, it’s mostly because who wants to be stared at constantly, even if it’s because people think you seem cool?
They were likely smarter as the consequences for not being so were more severe, as Edward Dutton would explain, we are well past peak smart, it's been downhill for a while now
"Why were people OK with..." Simple answer is that they weren't OK with those things...which is why they found new a different ways to do things and therefore don't do them anymore.
@@Jhud69 or they get the reasons it was "okay" completely wrong. For example, even decades before suffrage, common women still needed to work hard and sell things/go to workhouses to bring extra income for their family. But certain groups think that "trad" wives all through history did nothing except bake stuff and clean. And that gets preached as an "ideal" even though it's an archetype that literally never existed. A bit of an extreme example I know, but even "progressive" people tend to write off this image of women in the past and it's pretty annoying.
true! I went to a college that was founded in the 1830s by radical abolitionists, and the college was for anyone (race and gender) who wanted to study there. They originally built it as a work-study college so you could afford tuition at any budget.
I do find it funny how the “traditional” house model never really existed in history. Unless you were upper middle class or higher, both parents worked in some form or another
As an archaeologist I've often approached culture past and present with cultural relativism, and chronological snobbery is an excellent term that I will start using. Thank you for this rant!
Yes. I challenge anyone to grow up and live in a society with slavery...and claim that THEY would be the one, the very first person to stand up against it. "This is wrong! My advanced futuristic moral compass cannot stand by and allow this injustice!" 😒
I understand why you would approach the past through relativism but I don't think cultural relativism in regards to the present is a good thing... Some cultural practices are and were just horrible. We shouldn't excuse them...
@@guyver441 tbh they actually did. a good example was slavery in early medieval ireland, which became unacceptable and was basically eliminated, but then had a regression thanks to scandinavian settlements, with that being extinguished as a practice again a LOT quicker than it took in the americas/ caribbean more recently. on the flip side, our world today has slavery and almost nobody makes much of a fuss.
I remember being so mad at one of my teachers who said "Pre-20th century clothing were poorly made..." she backed this up with the idea that if more cloths were well made we would have more samples from that time. The next day I brought a photo of my great-grandmother and told her that the blouse she was wearing was resewn from her mothers wedding dress. The jacket that she was wearing was a hand me down from her cousin and the skirt was re-sewn from a fraying bed tapestry... The reason things did not make it into the 21st century was because they were used, reused, repurposed, resewn, re-cut until they were rags. PS my Great-Grandmother looks amazing in the outfit in this photo!
And the rags were then used to make paper, which was used to make books. So if you want to find out where all the historical clothes went, walk into an antique bookstore.
Frankly, clothes overall were somewhat better quality because they were made to fit the wearer and serve their specific needs! Factory cloth and clothing manufacturing led to poorer quality clothes since more could be made, so less specifically made clothes, with greater focus on fashion and replaceability came about.
The thing I hate the most is how people claim ancient civilizations had “aliens” or some kind of power because of the things they built. Like no they deserve credit for creating feats of engineering like the pyramids of Giza! People of the past had skills too people!
We still don’t know how the acropolis was built, even with modern computers a university team could not replicate the math necessary. We still don’t know how to recreate Roman concrete that can withstand (thrive in) saltwater. But yes clearly they were stupid, we’re better, and it was the aliens.
I watched the BBC's documentary with Ruth Goodman abt how castles and stairwells and fortresses were built in the old days. They used relative simple math, but relied heavily on symetry and stability, natural rules that that hold those structures in one piece centuries later.
PLUMBING! I forget which civilization had it, thousands of years before Rome with thier aqueducts, but PLUMBING EXISTED waaaaaaaaay farther in the past than that. GOOD plumbing. That worked WELL. And then, something happened to the civilization, it failed, and the plumbing (and the knowledge behind it) was lost to the ages, and had to be reinvented. People joke about reinventing the wheel, but sometimes I wonder, "Just how many times was the wheel invented, before it stuck?" It's not JUST inventing a thing. It's spreading that knowledge to other civilizations, so that when your civilization fails, the others around you will carry on the knowledge you had.
I love the marrying age myth, like, I've seen incels be like "you're a 20 yo man without children? Your ancestors would laugh at you". I actually did research on my family tree and calculated the average marrying age to be like ~27
Last month my grandmother and I were talking about her mom and I asked how old she was when she gave birth to her. My grandma said she was 30 and I said "wow it was late for that time" and my grandmother looked at me really weird and said "what do you mean? No it wasn't. It was common, my dad and my mom were both working hard etc.." it's crazy all thay cliche that hear all the time
A lot of people also seem to think that a century ago a girl would typically get “married off” by her family as soon as she hit puberty and she would have no say about it, which in the context of western society is ridiculous. True, parents were generally a lot stricter with their daughters, but in practice that often meant marriage happened later, not earlier. My paternal grandparents met in 1920s New Zealand. They were both from Irish Catholic immigrant families. She was 16 but had already finished school and was working. They fell in love and wanted to get married but her family wouldn’t hear of it, not just because of her age but also because they didn’t approve of him as he was several years older and worked as a musician rather than having a “respectable” job. Back then she couldn’t get married until age 21 without her parents’ consent, so they just kept courting on the sly for the next 5 years and got married right after she turned 21. Their first child, my father, was born 6 months after.😅
@@guyver441 It's also a pretty sure thing that people nowadays couldn't be civil to each other long enough to come up with algebra, let alone the moral code that is part of Western society.
@@guyver441 Most people back in those days could't *invent* algebra either, so there's that. Modern society is different. Part of it is that modern people don't have to invent algebra.
This reminds me of two things: 1) “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” - Monty Python's Life of Brian. It was learning about the Roman Empire what opened my eyes about the concept that current humans are not necessarily smarter and the things we have now are not necessarily better than people and things of the past. 2) "Kids are not stupid, they are just inexperienced." Cinema Therapy. This one goes along with the chronological snobbery. People back then were not stupid, they just didn't have the experience/knowledge that we have nowadays. I thoroughly enjoyed this TED talk
Yes, several of those items on the list from a Monty Python movie about Rome did exist before the Roman Empire, BUT only In a few areas and not to the same extent. The Roman Empire was huge compared to other civilizations at the time, covering several vastly different cultures. The difference is that Rome shared these great (and some other not so great) ideas from one culture to another. For example: Roads. Having a road in and around a village is a given, but Rome built a VAST system of roads that made trade between areas much more reliable. So yes, other civilizations had many if not most of the items on that list, but not to the extent of the Roman Empire.
My story of how fast perspective can change and wrong assumptions begin: I grew up in the 70s and 80s, when the focus of women's lib in the USA was on the law and the workplace (equal rights, equal pay, etc.) Watching the original Star Trek, where the women all wore miniskirts while the men wore pants, struck my generation as totally sexist. We assumed the women had been made to dress that way because sexism. Well, then I heard Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura) talking about those skirts in an interview. She said that in the original pilot, the women wore pants just like the men (you can see this in the 2-part episode "The Cage," which used portions of that original pilot in flashbacks). When that pilot was rejected and they were retooling the show, it was the WOMEN in the cast who asked to wear miniskirts instead! She said this was because 1) the focus of women's lib in those days (1960s) was on sexual liberation and autonomy-women being free to exist as sexual creatures just as much as men, and to wear whatever the hell they wanted to wear; and 2) the women in the cast, going on the assumption that this Star Trek future was a place of true equality, meant that women in that future would be accepted as such without judgement and leering, not being forced to either be sexless or "just like men." So they saw those skirts as a symbol of liberation and equality! It made perfect sense once she explained it. But in just one generation - really just 10-15 years - that context had been lost, assumptions had been made, and their symbol of liberation had become a symbol of sexism instead. Totally blew my mind.
It’s like makeup. In the 1920s, it was seen as a symbol of freedom and liberation and rebellion against Victorian values/norms. But in the 1960s, it was seen as a symbol of sexism and was something burned in the 1968 Miss America protests. And alcohol. In the late 19th century first wave feminists joined the temperance movement and fought to ban alcohol because of women having few resources to leave abusive men who were alcoholics. But then when prohibition actually happened in 1920, the flappers came along and drank alcohol illegally as a sign of liberation and the blurring of gender lines.
"Would an average person willingly use dangerous chemicals while witnessing the short term effects first hand?" Yes, everyday. People do this every day.
Those who do that do so because they think that the reward outweigh the damages. If you work in a dangerous site, it's usually because that's the only job you could find, or the only one that pays you enough to help your family, or any number of things that would make you willing to do so despite the downside. No one does this because they like it or, as the thesis of this video says, because they are too stupid to notice the effects.
@@jonjohns8145 Drinking to excess...or the use of soaps, perfumes (even botox, etc), ingesting foods with potentially (or even proven) dangerous chemicals. In many cases people choose to expose themselves to chemicals with long term ill effects because they LIKE IT in the short term. Often it is very much a choice.
One of my favorite examples of historical people actually being smarter than us is that fact that most "new" and "sustainable" practices are literally just normal practices from the past. Like, prior to the invention of single use plastic and paper products, people were using reusable products all the time, creating things using what they had on hand, reusing materials, and taking good care of their existing items. People of the past were, in many ways, incredibly resourceful and ingenuitive, especially compared to us now.
yesssss also, im so happy that so many people are trying to bring back old ways of doing stuff when they're the most secure/hygienic/ecofriendly ways, I hope this sticks around
But people in the past weren't smarter than us, either. That idea is just as flawed as the one Karolina is criticising in this video. For instance, with your example, they weren't using more sustainable products because they knew better than us - they were doing it because those were the best resources they had. If they had plastic, they would probably have used that instead because that's exactly what ended up happening. Remember, plastic was invented in the big, wide, nebulous place known as 'the past' as well. It didn't pop into existence because people got stupider or less resourceful. It *was* the resourcefulness. It's just a shame that resources often come with faults (the same is true for some historic and sustainable resources, too, by the way. Just look at the dark side of the cotton industry both in the past and today!)
@@catherinepolshaw1444 I agree completely. I don't think that people of the past were generally smarter than people now or vise versa. I just wanted to illustrate a way in which practices of the past may have actually been "better" than certain modern practices. I think humans are flawed no matter what era they're in.
A great example of the cycle of problems: last century began with a devastating Depression caused in part by the fact it was built on a system where people had to keep buying to sustain it. Engineers not wanting to see it repeated, came up with a clever system called planned obsolescence. And because its easier to predict when a washing machine will give out than it is the fluxtuations of the market or how to stablize inflation, this is what we got.
All the "green" and organic farming ideas are what my gr grandparents did on their farm and what their parents did. Younger generation thinks they invented earth friendly ideas, none of you have anything on my Grandma born in 1920 lived in poverty and the Great Depression to boot. Everything was used until worn and then repurposed, nothing went to waste or was tossed out. She composted before it became popular. And she would laugh at those in the grocery stores paying high priced for "organic fancy eggs" or free range eggs. She would shake her head because it was just the same practise her parents did.
"A) Nothing in history is as simple as it's told, and B) if something I just learned sounds shocking and incredibly stupid in most cases it's just not true." Nailed it!
Well, the crusades did happen, and witch burnings did, as well. I generally agree with the statement that people weren't that different back then and many of their irrational behaviours still exist these days. But history does include a lot of shocking and stupid events... as do modern times (like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Brexit or the election of Donald Trump).
@@crossroads8370 You mean because Trump tried to sabotage the election? True. He should have accepted the fair and democratic win of Biden. Instead he told alt-rights to revolt against the constitution and thus commited high treason.
Well, Hedy Lamarr WAS ignored and dismissed most of her life... to the degree that she only got recognition for her intellectual and technical brilliance posthumously... oh... wait... 😳
I feel lucky to have grown up in a multi-generational household with my grandmother who also grew up in a multi-generational household with HER grandmother who was born around 1890 in the “old country” Without those direct links to the past it’s easy to assume anyone born before the mid 1970s was just an NPC with no internal monologue or curiosity about the world.
This is one of my aspirations in life, to raise my kids in a multigenerational home. Grandparents belong with the family. They are our connection to the past and we need to keep them close.
I was born in the mid 70s and i now routinely get accused of this by some of the most ignorant and brainless people in human history, nearly all of whom were obviously born after 1994. It was bad with the ones born 1982-1994, but much worse with the ones since. Of course i have something huge working against me. I was raised partly by grandparents who were born in the 1910s. I know people only 10 years younger than me, all of whose grandparents were born within three years of both of my parents, and whose great grandparents were young children the year my grandfather graduated from university. As a kid, at three years i used to sit on the lap of a healthy, happy great grandfather who was born in 1891, whose father at the age of three saw Abraham Lincoln at a campaign stop and remembered it the rest of his life. And my grandfather's grandmother, born in 1834, at the age of 86 finished building her dream house, which ended up being the house my mom was raised in and in which i spent a number of vacations. My grandparents voted for Stevenson twice in the 50s; in the 2000s, they were able to clearly recall the issues in those races and give a cogent argument about where they stood and why. Today's millennials, some on the cusp of being grandparents themselves, largely consider any interest in that to be a sign of insanity and even fascist tendencies. Of course they don't know the candidates or the issues of that decade at all, but fancy that they do. Meanwhile, most of them wouldn't be able to name a single one of the candidates in the 68, 72, or 76 elections and about half wouldn't be able to do so for 80, 84 or 88 either. About a quarter would now have great difficulty naming even one candidate from 1992. But if i tell them that i know more than they do because i come from a more enlightened generation than theirs, most of them will immediately cut all contact. This is the nature and level of degeneration we're dealing with. Older generations had false optimism _despite_ the reality of their mediocrity. This generation has false optimism _because_ of their mediocrity. I.e. they know they're inferior, and by their new lexicon, (invented by them, for them, when they were still kids), being inferior _is_ superior. That's their story and their sticking to it. And after 20+ years of feeding themselves this stream of garbage, they've started to believe their own propaganda.
@@NJGuy1973 Most do, but an alarmingly high number do not. Bear in mind that nearly half of them were not even born on the day of that election. And this tends to be people who are uninterested in the details of what happened before their own time. Yes, of course they know _of_ him. But if you don't mention the name and just say, Who was running that year, i think you may be surprised. I know I've been. I can name nearly all the main candidates from memory going back to 45 years before my birth, and i can name about two thirds of them prior to that and going back to 1900. Not because someone made me memorize it. Because i consider it a civic obligation to do my best on that. This is what's missing in most of those folks.
It's pretty much the same as assuming everybody has an "instagram lifestyle" because it's so well-documented unlike "normal people lifestyles", people in the future will think everybody had white walls and flat screens at home, all women grew big butts, etc etc. Because something is aesthetically mainstream, it doesn't mean it's the norm.
I realny see your point. I was also thinking that back then people was just lying in dirt all day, but thanks to great people like you I understand more now. The most flustrating think for me is standard of modern apartaments. Now developers are building ugly apartment buildings with no green area and everything looks the same. Also flats are soooo expensive. But when you are looking at older buildings they often have beautifle shapes with small parks and recreations area. Few days ago I was looking at old amartment building with beautifil floral ornamentami on the front wall. Now, when everything must be quick, it's not possible to spend time for this details :( That is quite sad. Modern doesn't mean better. Sorry for my english guys! PS. Pozdrowienia Karolina i kocham twój kanał!
More housing must be accounted for due to population explosion. I think the average global population in the 1950s was somewhere between 2-3 billion. We were already at 7 billion in the 2000s. That's truly insane if you think about the global populations of past centuries. Human populations were better controlled because our medical technology/understanding wasn't as advanced as it is now. We weren't able to produce food on the insane scale we are able to now. There are many reasons why the population was able to increase beyond what was possible in the past. Regarding your point about apartments all looking the same, I can only imagine this is a cost cutting measure to address housing issues. The reason the model T was able to be affordable was assembly line production and no customization. But more people than ever before could now afford a reliable means of transportation, which is a big deal when lots of things are far away.
There used to be some pretty dismal housing around in older days too, it's just that it was all torn down because it was cramped, cold, dark, ramshackle and insanitary (not to mention a fire hazard), so not a lot of it remains to this day, unlike the pretty model houses for the wealthy middle and upper classes. (And if it does, it has been expensively renovated into prestigious abodes for wealthy urban professionals.) Which is another lesson about the past, that the things we see from the past today might not be the whole truth about what existed and how people's lives were like. A lot of the accounts of the past were also polished up to conform to an ideal or a standard which was not necessarily accurate (also depending on who wrote it). It's just as dangerous to idealise the past as it is to treat it as all bad, irrelevant and stupid.
This reminds me of reading a book in French class that was set at some point in the past in a very rural area, and I was wondering why the protagonist was being so dumb and also spending all this time pining after this guy. And then I remembered that the protagonist was 15 and realized "ah yes, this character is being dumb in exactly the way that all 15-year-olds are being dumb" - just because 15 was close to an acceptable age for marriage in that time and place doesn't mean that 15-year-olds are all that different now, especially when it comes to love
I get that way now every time because I'm mid twenties but I still love reading fantasy which main characters still tend to be like coming of age so around 16-20 (or younger depending on the books) and you're like "YOU'RE SO STUPID" but they're not, they're just young (and in some cases not even that much younger than me, just.... enough for me to want to shake them about sometimes).
Jeez, I'm SO happy we cannot marry this young these days. I'd have been married for 6 years by now with my ex that would've been fathering my children 😮💨 Nowadays we have birth control and divorce and late marriages! Back then I'd have been the Delilah to his Samson 😂
@@noneofurbulllllll nope. Don't remember what book it was, but pretty sure it wasn't that. They were living in the middle of the woods in Quebec, outside of a small town, and I think were pretty much completely isolated in the winter
Being 50 and having been raised spending at least half of each week in the care of my grandparents, I've been in the position of being able to correct a few things that people my kids' ages get told. Like "people only had a bath once a week!". Yes but every day we washed face, necks, ears, under arms and private areas. Feet were washed as often as needed but always more than once a week. Hair got away with being washed once a week because of the styles worn and head coverings, so no we weren't wandering around with clouds of flies buzzing round our heads. We've had deodorants a long time but before that it was washing as often as needed and then using scented talc. The stuff about "men never did any childcare". My dad was a babysitter before having children himself. When I was born he did as much nappy changing and baby bathing as my mother did (both were in full time employment). I know not all men did this but he was not a lone outlier either and there are lots of men these days that refuse to do any childcare in case it makes them girly, which would have made my ex army, boxing instructor, manual labourer dad have laughed his head off. People are always a mixture of ideas and regardless of societal norms, there are always going to be people ignoring those norms and other people imposing even stricter ones on themselves.
I was born in England and am old enough to remember a world in which almost no homes had showers, and people would typically have a bath once a week, but would “have a wash” at the sink every day for the rest of the week. The idea that someone has to have a shower or bath to get their whole body clean is a very modern one. All you need is a bit of water, soap, and a washcloth. I’ve met young people who have no idea what washcloths are actually for, and think they’re just for drying hands.😂
This reminds me of how I recently took a college course on Kansas History (where I live). Kansas since the 1930s has been seen as one of the most conservative and "backwards" of the American states but in its early days (in mid to late 19th century) it was considered one of the most progressive places in the country. In early Kansas there were major pushes for women's rights, African American rights, support for the impoverished, and preventing big corporations from exploiting people. The first woman mayor was elected here, women and people of color could become successful entrepreneurs and business owners, communities for former slaves from the south were established, the state often provided asylum to black people who were unfairly charged with crimes in the south and refused to extradite them when those states asked, and in general the people of Kansas were very proud of their history of fighting against slavery before and during the civil war. This isn't to say things were amazing, as there were definitely still racist and sexist people and not to mention the indigenous people were pushed out of the state and sometimes killed. But it's just so interesting as most Kansans don't know of their history and say things like "why do minorities keep saying they don't have rights? Don't they know that things are way better for them now than back then?" And I'm like, bruh, many Kansans of the past fought to make the state a better place for many minorities while today there are many Kansans fighting to make it more hostile. It's just so frustrating to watch sometimes.
I'm just coming out of a semester of a GE course that touched on that period of American colonial history, and it's almost hilarious how Free State Kansans were able to basically catch the nation's attention (as well as that of federal troops) simply by their unwavering fervor for abolition.
Re: domestic violence in the 1950s... My Grandfather, while he loved razzing my grandmother in all kinds of ludicrous ways all his life, never ever raised a hand to her. In fact, his tradition was, when he got home on Friday night, he would give her a break by cooking dinner (he was an excellent cook who always made the Thanksgiving turkey, and taught his son to cook as well) After dinner was cleared away, they would move the furniture and he would clean and wax the floor for the week and entertain the kids while she did the dishes...meanwhile my Grandmother had been a tomboy and the "son" her father never had. As a result she was super technically competent and did all the maintenance/repairs on their household technology....even now, in her mid 80s, she knows how to repair anything! When his job went on strike and then shuttered completely, she worked in tech in a local mill to support them while he found work. What is more? His own father, my great grandfather, had been badly injured during a work accident in the 40s and could not return to his manual labor job. The ultimate outcome was, HE became the house husband who cooked and cleaned, and his wife, who had been raised to have a lot of skill with textiles and fabrics, went to work in a texture mill and ultimately became manager of a whole floor. Her husband respected her and appreciated that he did not have to go back to a career that had already badly injured him twice. Later in life as a widow, she remarried and was happy to go back to being a homemaker, which she excelled at, but she had been a highly competent breadwinner through the 40s and 50s. I realize they might be somewhat exceptional (especially my great grandmother being Able to remain a working manager in the 50s) but they're wonderful examples that the 50s was not a time of universal, completely normalized m on f domestic violence. The 50s, for all it's many issues, was not a time when every man was a middle class white guy in a suburban ranch house, beating his wife and keeping her trapped in their home cooking and polishing the Formica counters. That vision of the 50s is impossible tunnel vision.
I agree especially on the image of the wife not working being quite false. Most of my ancestors were farmers. Everyone had to work on the fields. Yes the men did the most heavy work and the women were expected to also cook and do the household (that's the sexist part). But my grandma for example also did the bookkeeping and manged the finances of the whole farm... not the position of power you would expect the woman of the household to be in with that "backwards" mindset of the 50ies. Just because the media pushed that narrative of the housewife doesn't mean it was always true. Actually it was quite a new idea that a whole family could live just from the earnings of one person. That was never ever the case before that. Just for the very wealthy people. But in case of the very wealthy people - just like today - men didn't have to work either. Everybody else had to work a lot to survive. And looking back at the farming part: Most farms in the past also employed other people - both men and women - for work untill modern machinery took away their jobs.
This is an amazing story! There is something about the post war economy and women stepping back , which at the time they must have thought it the normal flexibility of balancing family with work. Which women had done for decades, generations. But something changed and the weight of keeping the economy going was placed more solely on men but now with less and shrinking participation and inclusion of women. ALSO Running a household also used to be respected. Like the fainting couch example + modern convenience food, everyone was told over and over again to aspire to do less work themselves. the value of cooking and managing the lives of the family was undermined by messaging everywhere. About how easy it should be, to do it all culture, to the lie of welfare queens, further then was the idea you can have only 1 a career or be home with your young kids. Trap after trap every one : disrespects the work of managing a household and caring for others. Well I did go on a bit. I'll post it, it all gets the wheels spinning.
@@misss7777 I think often of my ancestors the coal miners wives. They were WORKING at home believe me. Farming teaching, cooking, mending, crafting, keeping the parish people organized, mid-wifeing, gathering the news, book keeping, purchase planning,.....
@@bethqmount1160 Exactly! This is a JOB, unlike many people think. Women didn't sit at home doing nothing. They did so many things and made so many things that we BUY now.
Another thing everyone overlooks is, the 50s wife only applied to the west. And even there it was not the rule, maybe "the ideal" promoted everywhere, but families were diverse...
I adore this video. There's one historical artifact that will always remind me we're not that different from the past. The drawings on pieces of bark by a 6 year old Russian child named Onfim in the 12-1300s. He stops writing a Bible phrase, presumably from a tutor, and starts doodling monsters and knights. He writes greetings to other people, presumably other kids.
I’ve been fascinated by how humans don’t change through out history. From people looking at their phones on the bus, to people still ignoring each other with newspapers on the bus. People addicted to TV, to people waiting for the new monthly book issue that had exaggerated characters and cliffhangers like a Mexican telenovela. To ancient Egyptian brake up letters. And some Greek dude’s giant writing on a wall being translated to “this is big”. Because there’s a lot of ‘art’ in history that’s dicks and the equivalent of shit posts.
This is one of the main points I try to make to students when I teach. People in the past were just as smart as we are today, we just have access to more information (the internet, etc) and often prioritize different things. The decisions people made in the past were based on different worldviews and make sense in their contexts, if not always in our own. I would warn people, however, to avoid the "wisdom of the ancients" fallacy, wherein people think that because people (supposedly) did something a certain way for ages means that's the best way to do it.
Don't forget, its also true that just because this is the "new way" to do it doesn't make it better. I worked in a job where those doing a particular job had mostly done it that way for some 30-40 years. We tried diff methods but none worked as well. So in that case the old way really was the best way.
Honestly, as an older millenial, I remember the days before the internet became ubiquitous. Even in the 90s, information was so much harder to come across. Wanted to learn something - you'd ask an adult or hope the library had a book on it. That was about it. And if the book told you nonsense, that was about it. Now people who were older in the pre-internet society had some more options, large libraries in the city or bookstores or lectures etc. But I was a small town kid and I didn't have access to that. The luxury of having wikipedia at my fingertips at all times of the day is just so amazing. At my parents house we found a newspaper from the 1980s. And it had a column where people would write the newspaper with their questions. Like stuff you'd google today, factual questions. It was an absolutely fascinating concept that I never knew existed.
hmm more information and also vastly more misinformation. how about... 'they had lots of information, and got it through very different channels.' it's also worth considering that, based on our own history right up to today, 100 years from now a substantial chunk of our modern 'facts' will turn out to not actually be facts, and also that we will likely be making many of the same silly errors for the same silly reasons as we do today. and did in 1930. and did in 1730. and in 1130... because ego, fear, laziness, greed (and passion, joy, humour and a love of pretty things) aren't historical artifacts but part of being human, just as they were 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago or probably 20,000 years ago.
I just finished reading a great book ("village life in ancient egypt") that is just excerpts of writings we have from a certain village. I think the thing I was most impressed by was the history of collective action. Everyone in that town was working for the pharaoh and paid a regular amount of grain - and went on strike if they didn't receive it. Even had an investigation when it turns out that the representative had been using a measuring scoop that was 5% smaller than regulation, resulting in stiffed pay. But of course, all the day-to-day stuff is familiar too.
This is what I found when writing my dissertation on English witchcraft; We think that 17th century people, the ordinary village person, who accused eachother of witchcraft were clearly less advanced than we are mentally for believing in witches and magic, however in saying that one forgets about emotion - these people had been brought up in a world where witchcraft and the power of the devil was real, so when there was something happened that they didn't have an immediate answer for, they feared witchcraft. The point is this was not just a suspicion, but a genuine terror of an imminent, potentially fatal, happening, and people reacted by trying to find the easiest way to remove the 'witch' from their community, however that might have been done.
It seems not that different from the modern day version of "those immigrants are going to take your jobs, overrun your community, and commit crimes." It's factually not true, but people are looking for a reason for why the old plant closed down, why it's harder to make ends meet, and it's easier to point fingers than to make institutional changes.
Exactly. We're all just making do with the resources, people and Communities we have access to. This is the first time in history where we have an interconnected intercontinental community. There's a power in that which the Grannies and Granddads (and every other name they never noticed = GranX's?) could never dream of. Let's see what we can do to help bring some balance to a dark time - with the Grans help in the form of the knowledge and stories They left behind. - Cathy (&, accidently, Steve), Ottawa/Bytown/Pimisi
Also! Psychology is a really new science so we really didn't have a scientific understanding of mental illness until recently and no effective methods of treatment until very recently. So it's very easy to attribute mental illness as being caused by supernatural events, which some people still do nowadays tbh.
Another interesting perspective on this came from my English class when we read Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" (written in the 1950s I think?). I'm not sure how historically accurate this is, but it revealed that lots of people who were involved in the scare often used witchcraft accusations to exact revenge on people who had wronged them, so they could justifiably get rid of them. Coupled with the psychological pressure brought on by the Puritan era: insanely zealous religiosity mostly based on fear, learning to navigate a new continent (assuming we're talking about the Salem witch trials) in which your small community and the few people it contained were all you had, it adds a new layer of reasoning as to why they happened. This isn't to say that you or your dissertation are wrong, by the way. I do wholeheartedly agree with the notion that people were indeed genuinely scared of the influence of witchcraft, especially considering the extreme nature of the things they believed and that God was basically their only hope and comfort.
I think it has a lot to do with the pretty "western" idea of progress being some kind of continuous growing over time that leads us from A to B in a straight upwards line. From that point of view anything in the past must seem below us. Proof of ancient brilliance, like the mechanism of Antikythera, the existence of Teotihuacan or the great pyramids of Giza seem like unexplainable "anomalies" in this - in our - view of the world.
Our rulers want us believing their decisions, often harmful, are wonderfully progressive and useless to resist...acts of God. It's the latest version of Divine Right of Kings
I've loved Lewis' term "chronological snobbery" since I read it years ago, and getting into historical fashion made me love it even more! It's telling that someone in the mid-20th century saw the same dismissive attitude towards the past that we see now...like you said, humans are really just the same.
Yes! Trying to tell someone about history and constantly being interrupted with “No, that’s not true, they didn’t bathe😜 silly” I immediately feel torn between telling them about the actual fact; yelling at them, slap them and leave; or just ignore. And history teachers who were supposed to end these stereotypes just further perpetuate them💀 I guess it’s just a way for today’s society to feel superior, but I hate how arrogant it is. It just makes me so bitter :/
Yes, for GCSE I studied medicine in the UK from the Middle Ages to present, and in the Middle Ages, they had a document telling them not to overeat, overdrink and THEY BATHED!! In herbs as well, which is very good for you!
UGH, I know exactly what you mean. I tried to tell my friends that corsets were not death machines, and they were just like, "but in this movie it shows that they actually did suffocate women to the point of fainting." And I just wanted to say, "PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN IS NOT THE END ALL BE ALL OF HISTORICAL FACTS."
"Why are we feeling so superior about the things that we made worse?" this is such a beautiful quote I absolutly agree to it. Of course it is easier to point out problems from the past looking at it from a modern perspective. But as you said, we often tend to have a blind spot. I am quite curious about what people in 200 years are going to say and think about some things we do that will turn out to be a. extremely inpractical or b. damaging our health.
Modern person: Good thing we no longer have people like Boss Tweed or companies like Standard Oil. Those monopolies & trusts back in the day were horrible! Modern times: so we have Google, Facebook, and other Big Tech companies...
I so vividly remember a moment back in high school History class when we had bene learning about WWII and how many people and countries (including my own) turned away and didn't help Jewish refugee etc. And there was a girl piping up saying how horrible that was, how could people be so unfeeling, how she would have done differently. And the teacher snapped round and said "so, what are you doing for the refugees now".
I agree, but moreso it isn't ethical to judge historical figures based on the morals of modern society. Not only is Hindsight is 20/20, but like a previous poster commented "[most] kids aren't stupid, they are just inexperienced" or differently experienced. This applies to historical figures too. This is why studying history is so important.
I mean your classmate wasn’t wrong. it IS terrible that countries refused Jewish refugees, just like how it’s terrible when countries refuse refugees now.
I had a professor say that one day, the borders of our countries will be viewed as we once viewed the walls of concentration camps. I mean, why did people accept the idea of a concentration camp being okay? Why is it okay for people on "that side" of a border to starve while on "this side" to be healthy, have plenty, etc?
Yet still, the student, the history teacher, you, and all these commenters are missing the point. The Allies forced the Treaty of Versailles upon the German people after the Great War (World War I) which exacted hideous reparations on the German population and promised to keep them in poverty for generations. THAT and ONLY that is what forced the German people to embrace the Nazi Party, which offered relief from literal starvation. A more vindictive, immoral document has never been committed to paper, and the blood of ALL the people lost during World War II was the result of the Allied countries quest for economic vengeance upon a civilian population. Funny how our history teachers never tell us that.
as they say, "people have always been people", even if we go thousands of years in the past, people had the same feelings and thoughts we might be having right now, just in a different context. we should learn from them instead of automatically thinking we're better than them just because they lived a long time ago
i’ve found that so many historical misconceptions are just people taking art way too literally. paintings and stories are a reflection of culture but not necessarily of everyday life. if you read an old timey story and a woman is fainting 12 times a day it’s probably just the author trying to be dramatic
My great-aunt had an abusive alcoholic for a husband. They had a shotgun wedding right after WW2 and came from very religious families. Him hitting her was an outrage to her family. The issue was indeed that the law did nothing to protect her *and* that she wanted a divorce with was forbidden by the church. Some of her own aunts and uncles tried to presuade her to go back to her husband because marriage was for life. Thát was the big issue. In the end, she never got divorced and she and my grandmother (her sister) never forgave the family members that put so much pressure on an abuse victim.
The whole "everyone in medieval and renaissance times thought the earth was flat" thing came about during the 19th/20th century, because guess what? The Victorians liked to feel superior to their ancestors, just like we do. The Greeks viewed the earth as a sphere, and in the 3rd century, Eratosthenes' lowest calculated estimate of the earth's circumference had less than 1% error from what we know the actual circumference to be. And he did this without computers. You can find references to the earth spinning in medieval literature. And while there was a geocentric, earth-centered model of the solar system, it wasn't because they thought the earth was superior to everywhere else, it was because they thought it was inferior to what they saw in the night sky (remember that Satan's crotch is at the center of hell in the center of the earth in Dante's Inferno), so the heliocentric model was a promotion.
The geocentric model probably came from the fact that for ancient people Earth was the point of reference to everything else. You observed the sun and the stars moving, so naturally assumed they did and you were stationary. The actual geocentric model was constructed based on the assumption that all stellar bodies moved along circles as the ideal geometric form. Greek philosophers/scientists were big on the idea of the 'ideal form' at the time. Coincidentally, Earth being the center of the universe very nicely fitted into inherent human superiority complex as well. After all, we were the only intelligent species (that we knew of) and so obviously we had to be special. During the middle ages(?) there was a famous heretical monk that postulated there is an infinite number of worlds with an infinite number of peoples. In his view it made God even greater. Obviously, this did not sit well with the church doctrine at the time.
@@krinkrin5982 A couple historical mistakes in your comment. First, the geocentric model did put the Earth at the center, yes. The thing is, the center was not the most honorable point in the universe, but instead the lowest, the most physical and the furthest away from God. If anything, Earth was thought of as the cesspit of the universe. It was not adopted for religious reasons whatsoever, even though it happened to (superficially) resemble the Biblical cosmology. The 'heretical monk' you mentioned was Giordano Bruno, and he actually was executed for his heretical views, NOT for postulating an infinite number of worlds. A non-heretic thinker, Nicholas of Cusa, made the same hypothesis two centuries earlier, and he never faced any backlash whatsoever. More info about this down here ↓ historyforatheists.com/2017/03/the-great-myths-3-giordano-bruno-was-a-martyr-for-science/
@@Lewisfan1 Thank you for the corrections. Wasn't the geocentric model copied from the Greeks though? Did they also consider Earth to be the lowliest and least noble place in the universe?
F-ing finally someone is talking about this. The amount of times I saw people just believe blatant lies. In the future I'm sure people will say how crude and dumb we are.
"wow can you imagine? people back then just wore these really tight bras that held their breasts! And apparently the wires underneath would oftten stab people through the heart! People even fainted because their bra was too tight, broke their ribs even! Imagine doing any type of work while wearing a bra, I'd rather die!"
When I was a kid, we used to cough and sneeze into our hands. So I guess we were a bunch of dumbasses, then? We couldn't even tell Toronto from Toledo.
I never really grew up with the "ancestors=stupid" mentality because my parents would always tell me stories of their parents and grandparents, and it always struck me how talented and awesome they are. Like that one time my mom told me how my gentle, soft-spoken, and caring grandma who loved spending her time knitting, embroidering, and praying, grabbed a huge fish that was stuck in a tidal pool with her skirt, got unto a horse and rode home with it like a boss. Or how my mom's grandpa literally made a golden crown for a religious statue that he also carved himself (which is still being used and paraded to this day) from a piece of gold a friend had given him. Like, my cousins and I could only wish we were half as talented as them.
One of my ancestors on my mom's side is Wilhelm Maybach, one of the main geniuses behind the development of internal combustion engines and the cofounder of both Daimler and Maybach Motors. His work was integral to the world's first motorcycles and motorboats. On my dad's side there's a long lineage of Native American wilderness guides across Southern Quebec and the Adirondacks. There's a Wesleyan church in Long Lake NY that one of my great-great grandfathers and his brothers designed and built despite having almost no formal education of any sort. It's hard to believe that your ancestors were stupid when you've stood in a building they built over a century ago that's still used for worship every Sunday, and when luxury automobiles still bear a name you primarily associate with your great-grandmother.
I grew up hearing about how my Great Grandpa (a Slav) knew Real well German to the point that when he got injured in WW2 he was able to make them think he was German and they gave him medical care and released him... Only to go back to fight them again.
Oh yeah, my mom always tell me about my great great grandmother who was the hero for my country, she build school for kids but also used that as place to gather fighter. She always helping child birth for free and help the mother to take care for their baby. She also the only person who can cut the super big trees in the middle of cemetery without destroying any tombstone. Untill now her birthday still being celebrate in my district My family kinda sees me to be her succesor but i don't have any talent like her🤣
In my case, my mom's grandfather was very fond of poetry and literature. So much, that he went to his village's park almost every weekend to read poetry and say "bombas" with his fiends. He also had many other talents, he was a master with agriculture; he knew a lot of tricks and very clever ways to care for his crops. One story I find very funny about him is when his son (my mom's dad) hit her, and her grandfather hit him twice as hard. That being because in my mom's side of the family it's basically forbidden to hit children. But for real, he didn't even hesitate to hit his full-grown son lol.
As a Computer Science Nerd I can affirm that there are so many technologies left in the past that are (or would be) worth revisiting but get neglected simply because they're old! Ps: Can you give us tips on how to start studying Historical Fashion?!
@@nongshimrizzforce Oh and there's also a bunch of algorithms which time forgot because at the time of their creation they were deemed too memory expensive! We're just now slowly rediscovering them!
@@nongshimrizzforce I'll try to summarize what I said in the elaborate answer which RUclips forgot. Basically there's no singular book about this kind of stuff. You gotta be curious and dig around. There are some great stuff about retro tech on RUclips but reading about the works and life of the most famous CS people around is usually a good idea. Then I gave the example that I'm currently learning about old graphical user interfaces and old operating systems, as well as old keyboards, and what metaphors and functionalities we've lost that they had.
This reminds me of an assignment I had in 10th grade where we had to read an essay about the rac which was supposedly some past civilizations method of transportation that created lots of pollution and killed people and then we discussed it as a class. And everyone was bashing them and saying how stupid they were until the teacher said the rac is actually a car and everything in the essay was true about cars. Blew my mind and changed my life. I think about that assignment all the time. I always wonder what future people are going to think we were dumb for. Plastic? Fossil fuels? Chemotherapy?
Now that you say it.. most of chemotherapy might look soo dumb if we ever get a true cure for cancer omg Also antibiotics possibly? If we can find a way to selectively kill bad bacteria without messing with the good ones
It always baffles me when people say people (particularly women) from ye olden days would use incredibly toxic chemicals on themselves to be prettier cause nowadays detox laxative teas are the norm, we inject ourselves with chemicals to look prettier and more like the wealthy people, we put ourselves through incredibly invasive surgeries, sometimes in really dodgy circumstances, to have an impossible body shape and we actively buy lipsticks that hurt us to have bigger lips. Anyone from any other century would think we're insane.
Some might want those things. "You can make yourself look any way you want? How much does it cost?" Women have too long been primarily valued for their sex appeal and homemaking skills, relegating older women to glorified babysitting or sitting in a warm corner. Looking younger was just as appealing to women of the past as it is now. This, despite the number of powerful, intelligent, often ruthless, women of a certain age throughout history.
@@julietfischer5056 Botulinum Toxin is deadliest substance to humans known. It makes radioactive heavy metals or nerve gas look like candy. It's fatal at 70 - 150 nanograms. Theoretically you could wipe out humanity, with less than 1kg. And then they noticed how people who died from it, lost their wrinkles. So we gave it a funky new marketing name (Botox) and put it in the hands of beauty therapists.
@@Muritaipet- No wrinkles, and barely any facial expression, when used. We can't sneer at past ladies smearing white lead on their faces when modern women hold freaking botox parties.
I was born in the '50s. When I was a kid, boys were taught to NEVER hit a girl. Men who hit women were considered cowardly creeps. I suspect domestic abuse is worse today. Also, I just heard a claim on the radio today that women were arrested in the '60s for wearing pants. That's total nonsense. My grandmother wore slacks as long ago as I can remember, as did many women. Female film stars wore them in the '30s. If history that recent is distorted, imagine how wrong we get history from centuries ago.
I don't know, the thing today it's that we have TV and jornal, and internet and a lot of stuffs to post this kind of thing, the women can easily report a violence and the media like to share it. And I was taught like that and I never hit a woman even when they hit me making bleed.. but for sure, right now, I would defend my self, maybe not hitting her like she was a man, but hitting enough to not put me in dangerous.
I must say, as a history student I am always confronted with how smart and innovative people were in the past. My opinion is that we generally think of history and progress as a linear thing, which is totally wrong. We just like to think of ourselves as better, so that we don't feel responsable to keep improving ourselves
the weirdest part about looking at the people of the past and seeing all their shortcomings makes me understand how we can be flawed but because those flaws are the status quo we might live with them without ever realising they are there we all are stupid. that's why we should show some understanding and respect to our past so our children might show us the same one day
Yay for C.S. Lewis shoutouts that aren't just Narnia! Honestly, learning about Chronological Snobbery from him 20 years ago changed how I read books, watched movies...just so many things. I do think we can idealize/lionize the past in incredibly unhealthy ways but the opposite error--beliving everything modern is better--is just as damaging. What's better, and what I think he modeled, is a humble posture toward both the past and present. Fun Fact: Lewis was very modern in his early years. His first book is a wartime poetry collection called Spirits in Bondage. He was 19 when he wrote it and it is MODERN! I mean, T.S. Eliot modern. Very interesting glimpse at a man who would eventually take himself and his art FAR less seriously. And who would also use his love of the past and modern novelist instincts to write my favorite book (that should be a movie): 'Til We Have Faces. Fascinating to see the transformation.
Til We Have Faces is such an underrated gem! It has maybe the best written female character I know, it is also good example how to create strong female lead type of character and how to avoid Marysuisation of warrior princess. The funny thing is all other Lewis' female heros are rather bland... Almost like he put all his female chatacter creating potential into this one book. Also it talks about so much of modern problems... Nowadays discussing emotional and psychological trauma and various social problems is hot topic in books, and I feel like this book rocks at it.
His turn against idolizing modernity and progress was best displayed in his essay called "The Abolition of Man", and also in one book from his sci-fi series called "That hideous strength". He explores the conclusions that logically followed certain philosophical ideas from his day that he had previously held to. It's kind of horrifying and you can sort of see a lot of his predictions about what would happen if the ideology continued spreading have come true today. "That Hideous Strength" was really eery; the man could have written horror novels if he had wanted to.
@@a.w.4708 Wellllll.... I have a theory about that. He wrote it after marrying Joy Davidman and it's dedicated to her. She was a modernist and poet herself. I am pretty sure she altered his bachelor's perspective on women just by existing in his life, but I'm also certain she influenced all of the women in that book, including the protagonist. I don't see her letting him get away with another Susan. But you're right, the trauma in those books is so raw and given an amazing treatment.
As someone interested in the Solarpunk movement, I've seen several examples of how sometimes historical as well as non-Western traditional solutions can help sustainability more than high-tech solutions. These things can range from passive cooling/heating in architecture, to permaculture farming, to clothing etc.
Bro the west and colonialism RUINED indian indigenous knowledge. We are now slowly going back to making homes of clay and straw mixyure that stays up to 5 degrees cooler or warmer depending on the ratio
@@Sedgewise47 Yes, it's a niche science-fiction subgenre set in a sustainable, socially progressive and often post-capitalist future, and has a very activist focus (using fiction to help people imagine a better future) with its fans trying their hand in permaculture, tech-DIY, mutual aid etc. Its aesthetic often contain elements of arts&crafts, art-nouveau, lots of plants, non-western indigenous influences, and eco-village vibes.
@@Oorjitashahi Yeah it's absolutely abhorrent how much has been lost because of western colonialism, both material and cultural losses, and the eradication of entire peoples. Good that you mention India btw, one of the examples I saw was a low-electricity AC designed in India, with a combination of traditional ceramic structures, water, and modern engineering: /watch?v=nt2oyaP2m6Q
This reminds me of a school project I did where I compared the life spans of Egyptian pharaohs against life span of British kings. In my young stupid mind, I assumed the kings would of had longer life spans over the pharaohs because the kings were more modern timeline wise. But turns out the numbers were the other way around, and taught me to not assume that older meant worse.
This feeds into an uneasy relationship with modern medicine. "Look at all the awful things that science thought was perfectly acceptable only 50-100 years ago. Which of the things science says are perfectly acceptable today will horrify people 50-100 years in the future?" At the same time, I still do not presume to know medicine better than a doctor, so.
You're totally right. Medicine is always changing. There are medicines that used to be given out as standard treatments for things that now are very rarely used because medicines created more recently are more effective, less addictive, or have less side effects. Old antidepressants for example. Also, people seem to think modern medicine is basically done and dusted and we know everything. I've heard people say, 'Back in the old days, if you got diagnosed with x, there was nothing they could do for you' as if that doesn't happen now all the time. Cancer? Alzheimers? Neurology in general? There's a lot we don't understand. People think last century was so backwards because they cut out the affected part of the brain of someone with mental illness. Nowadays, we cure a lot of things by cutting out the affected body part. We don't know how to fix it. Hope you didn't need it! Also so many conditions are not cured, just treated/managed ie you take medicines for the rest of your life, with side effects, usually just to lessen the problem you're facing not stop it completely.
@@hamsterpouches Would just like to mention that surgery as a treatment for psychological disorders is making a bit of a comeback - though a lot more precise than it was in the olden days. A lot of people are hesitant to go down that avenue of research since no one wants a repeat of what happened with lobotomies, but it still has some promise. For instance, one procedure that involves slightly damaging part of a fear circuit that's overactive in people with severe OCD is sometimes used as a treatment of last resort in cases where the patient hasn't had success with other treatments, and meet other requirements regarding how bad their condition is.
When I learn about old medecine I'm like «actually they kinda had a point» For example the fact that some meds had weed, opium etc in it yes that can calm you just maybe there's too much opium in that
Also a lot of modern medicine still uses ‘old timey’ practices. There is a doctor exhibit showing a traveling doctors tool kit from the early 1900s at the Star of India museum. Most people walk in and say ‘I’m glad we don’t use those any more’; medical professionals know the precise name of each tool. The difference is now they are now ‘single use’, sterilized, and thrown out if someone so much as looks at it wrong (really nice high quality stainless steel tools too). Also, we still use leaches and maggots… there is a whole catalog for ordering medical insects. Imagining and sanitation are significantly better understood thankfully. We still use opioids, most medical professionals I’ve met have always thought pot should be legal because the science absolutely supports it’s medicinal benefits, it’s infamy was political not scientific. Many people take willow bark in aspirin form every day. Mold is still the most common antibiotic, we just call it penicillin now. The difference is we know exactly which chemicals are responsible for causing the effect we want (not always why it causes that effect), can isolate and sometimes synthesize them, and there have been studies into what is an effective dose and what is a lethal dose. Also a lot of modern medicine is about balancing the cost/benefit equation. We know xrays are incredibly dangerous, they killed the people who discovered them, but they are also an effective method of rooting out other more serious and immediate issues. Yes it may slightly increase your risk of cancer later to xray your broken arm, but if the doctor putting it back together can’t see what the problem is they will not be able to fix it as well and you will lose mobility now. Yes chemo and radiation is legitimately poisoning yourself in the hopes that it will kill the cancer before it kills/irreparably cripples you… but we know you will die very soon without that treatment; and there are people who make the choice not to take it everyday. By and large cutting someone open is a counter indicator for life, but surgery to fix your heart or remove a burst appendix might work and you’ll die now without it. Removing blood is not a great idea, but (when proper tests are ordered) 10 ml of blood that you can survive without can tell you all kinds of information: if you have an infection, if your organs are working properly, if you have cancer, etc. Anesthesia kills people every day, but surgery without it is torture. Our practices are barbaric, but by the time you *need* a doctor, something is already wrong - they didn’t create the problem they are just trying to fix it to the best of current understanding and ability. I hope in 100 yrs medical knowledge has advanced to the point that people look back on these treatments that are currently our only option and are grateful for the advances they have. Medical professionals all over the world are constantly trying to find new methods that are less invasive, better targeted, more precise methods that are still effective. Advances in computers and digital imaging options are insanely helpful in that regard. Being able to make a tiny cut, shove in a camera, and be able to see what you’re doing without having to cut open the entire area is way safer. Being able to concentrate and focus the beams of radiation so it mostly hits the area where the cancer cells are is way better than irradiating the entire room and hoping it hits the cancer. But most medical procedures are done because life or the quality of life without the procedure is less viable than the potential outcome if the risk pays off. One medical practice that is often considered barbaric is plastic surgery. That is a lot of risk and pain to undergo a minor cosmetic change… but I can’t really blame people who do it, if it is a risk they are willing to accept they should be able to; just like most people didn’t tight lace their corsets most people don’t get plastic surgery, but people have and will always be willing to endure pain for vanity. Hell tattoos and piercings are super common and shoving needles into ones flesh for purely cosmetic purposes is insane.
Our school took us to a fashion history museum. They told us that corsets were so tight that women couldn't breathe in them... Did they really think Victorian women were so stupid as to suffocate themselves??
Women couldn't breathe DEEPLY, so if they were shocked and gasped, they'd faint. But they could absolutely breathe. Heck, a well-designed and well-fitted corset is actually good for breath support. If it's not so tight as to cut off deep breathing, but it IS supportive of the diaphragm, it can be quite useful. A LOT of singers, through the ages, have relied on corsets for their breath support. Male and female, and regardless of fashion.
lol I always just thought that the whole “they had some weird body/hygiene issues” thing was more of an invention/access issue than a stupidity issue, even as a kid. I’m pretty sure most people would use modern hygienic practices/equipment if they knew or had any access to them. I mean, are we gonna blame ourselves for not saving cancer patients before finding the cure to cancer? Societal stuff is one thing, but I don’t understand how not having access to good heart medicine/surgery in the 50’s = they were stupid because they died of heart disease/issues more often. Same with something like poor work conditions in the 1500’s or something like that.
I think I know the origin of that pooping on the floor thing! I read a book about Versailles a few years ago, and there was an account of one courtier (ONE) who on one occasion (maybe more? The account mentioned a specific incident) if this lady walking down the hall and just dropping a deuce as she went, expecting her maid to clean it up. Pretty sure it was only ever the one person. It's the equivalent of people assuming everyone in the 1990's pooped in paper bags, lit them on fire, and put the on people's doorsteps because it was in one Adam Sandler movie.
I totally agree, a wonderful example is how the Aboriginal Australian people looked after the land before the colonisers arrived. They lived here for thousands of years with so much lost knowledge that we will never recover because the English decided that their methods were best even though the Aboriginals knew far more about the country than we even know today.
@@connorperrett9559 Yeah, the aboriginals did some pretty horrible things. But at least they didn't invade my country like the anglophones did, so they have that going for them.
I've observed this when it comes to the pyramids of Egypt as well. Some people today have such a difficult time accepting the fact that humans thousands of years back weren't actually stupid that they'd rather believe the pyramids were built with the help of aliens lmao Another aspect is how history is consumed through lens of sensationalism in the online world, I remember coming across the story of Princess Qajar and how 12 or 13 men committed sui/ci/de because they were rejected by her--the sensational part besides that being that she wouldn't be considered a beauty in our times. So I tried to do a bit of digging and find actual sources besides pop history articles, and turns out the whole story is most likely fake. Things like these make me roll my eyes when I come across sensationalist pop articles because more likely than not, whatever they are claiming either have weak sources or are straight up made up
About the pyramids (and other wonders on the African continent) - keep in mind the "West" resists the idea that Africans - ancient or otherwise - could have had that kind of intelligence.
@@MsZephyra Yup, agreed. This type of racist/biased thinking has been a thing for a long time now. The Fall of Civilizations channel here on RUclips (which is an awesome history channel btw!), mentioned in their Khmer Empire video about how early Europeans theorized that the great city of Angkor (in Cambodia) must have been built by the Greeks or Romans, even though that doesn't even make any sense considering Cambodia is literally all the way in South East Asia (ig because they thought how could non-white peoples create something so magnificent lol). Some people are so biased that they'd rather make up ridiculous theories instead of accepting actual facts 😆
The Princess Qajar thing was kinda sad because she was louded for her personality, charm and belief and yet her looks is what matters in historical tabloid for clicks
@@lulukulu5489 Yess she seemed to be a courageous intellectual woman who apparently even criticised her own family's rule of Persia..There are many cool women like her from all over the world and through out history, yet the few that are remembered almost always have their appearance scrutinised first and foremost, yet you rarely see this happen with men
@@bombombakudan2831 Yea, the princess and her family also seems very endeering and interesting once you research more too, Persia also has lots of interesting culture and belief, could just be me, but I think westerners have always been baffled by them in some way or another, ancient roman/greeks also called persian men feminine in the most degrading way possible just cause they wore pants 🤣
Great video overall, but... . "Is washing your hair with a complicated chemical formula truly better for you than just using some natural basic ingredients as our ancestors did?" I don't know, maybe? Just because it's a complicated chemical formula doesn't mean it's harmful. And the complicated formula may have some point, so yeah. Maybe. People in the past were not stupid, but we aren't either (well, let's say it varies greatly, even between different situations of the same person). We live in other conditions than our ancestors and stuff that worked for them just fine may not work for us, for example because we live in much bigger societies. I don't like the whole "artificial products vs natural products" stuff. What's even natural? Most of the fruits and vegetables we eat are not plants that just evolved under natural conditions, things like wheat, emmer or apples are all the product of hundreds or thousand of years of low-tech bio-engineering. And it's not like we just pull our chemicals from some strange other dimension. It's just broken down natural stuff. Like when we know that some plant helps with certain conditions, why not just looking for the actual substance in it that causes this helpful effect and using that substance in exactly the dosage it helps the most. And we can then even look if we find the same substance somewhere else where we can subtract it in an easier way. That doesn't mean every "chemical product" (yes, kinda stupid term, basically everything is chemical) is perfectly safe, just like not every "natural" thing is perfectly safe. It's always a case-to-case thing.
I would add the point that it's not "a chemical formula". This is not some scientist picking up from glass tubes and mixing them up as they observe the explosions come out in spectacular fashion. Usually it's something like "take the good old way to do things, and add a step or two to make them safer and more commercially flexible", or "do it instead in these steps which are simpler and cheaper", with the hardest part of it all having been done for you decades or even centuries ago. BTW, yeah, the use of the term "chemical" is weird. Institutions like the UN often use "novel entities"... which is also weird, and is meant more for things like CFCs which clearly have no precedent and are specifically exposed into the environment, not as food ingredients. "Artificial chemicals" or "synthetic chemicals" might sound right, but they still can imply things that exist in nature just fine. Apparently "naturally occurring chemicals" is used to make up for it, but wow that's a mouthful, and it only helps on one side - to talk about the others, people call them back "man-made chemicals" or "synthetic chemicals", even despite the fact that those categories SHOULD include naturally occurring chemicals.
Thank you for putting to words exactly why I felt that that particular comment she made was one of the weaker takes in this video. It's not like every scientist or engineer nowadays is all like: "hur dur I make bad [product] made with [chemicals/GMOs/etc.] because I like money". A decent proportion of them still have the knowledge and moral/ethical propensities to make safe AND effective products.
Yes, but i'd like to point out that sometimes the reason we replace natural materials for artificially ones is because they are cheaper and easier to produce in massive quantities, but the quality can be questionable, in some cases. We have to keep In mind that the logic of our times is to produce and consume more and faster.
If we want to be technically correct, then most solutions from previous ages had much more complicated chemical formulas. People falling for naturalistic fallacy usually don't understand that chemical composition of apple is far more complicated than of paracetamol pill. It is with modern science and engineering we actually get to know most fundamental stuff about things we are using.
You know what's kind of ironic? This idea that modernity is always better and everything/everyone in the past was stupid and bad is actually a very victorian idea. If you read almost anything on science or history from that time, you'll hear almost the exact same thing. It's also where alot of these history myths come from. Funny how that idea from the past carried over but others haven't.
The idea of own superiority is far older than Victorian times. Look at Ancient Rome and Greece for one. Only they mostly applied it to everyone outside of their culture. The same with ancient (and modern) Chinse. It might actually be a way for groups to 'immunize' against foreign influences. Wouldn't be surprised if some random tribe of Neanderthals met a tribe of Homo Sapiens and both thought the other were weird idiots.
The Victorians also destroyed a lot of extant buildings in our cities. Areas of Bradford (UK) got rebuilt several times in the Victorian era, and very little of Georgian Birmingham was left standing by the end of the Victorian era
I wouldn’t say it was just the Victorians - the enlightenment and neo classical movements generally saw the medieval period (a whole 1000 years of it) as the “dark ages”. Ironically, they thought the Greeks and the Romans (aka even further back) were smarter. Of course they just had technology that was then lost to future generations, as well as their proximity to other Mediterranean cultures. Its all chance really.
the experimental archaeology that ruth goodman does really showed me how smart people in the past were. they had problems that people have, and fixed them with what was available to them
Humans as animals really don't change. What changes are the circumstances we find ourselves in, and more often than not we are the ones causing that change.
Ruth is awesome! And experimental archaeology is really something anyone can use, to a degree - for me it has been an interesting way of exploring the kinds of experiences people in the past could have known; learning old embroidery techniques (plenty of styles & techniques fell out of favour, & others rose in popularity), looking into how old recipes were done (like Max Miller, Ann Reardon & Ruth- among many others - when they don’t use electric aids)- seeing how much it took to do things like make clothes (a ton of people in the FashionHistory community who make some/ all clothes by hand), or write with the methods of the past (Townsends did a whole little series on it). Research into things like period cleaning (again, Townsends did a great deep-diver into period laundry, & the Victorian Way talked about the methods in their era) Period transportation has been one of the more challenging areas, because- it isn’t that knowledge doesn’t exist about modes of transportation, but that there are details I don’t yet understand...
@@OcarinaSapphr- If you are interested in prehistory and early history then I recommend Primitive Technology. The guy is reconstructing plausible ancient techniques of building tools, creating building materials and finally erecting buildings using nothing but what he finds in the forest. His presentation is incredibly relaxing and he has a lot of information in the description for each video. For the more mechanically inclined there is Clickspring - a clockmaker/engraver who is slowly reconstructing the Antikythera mechanism using tools he personally makes in ways that the original maker might have used. He gives a lot of insight into the process and the analysis of the actual find. And then there is Scientists Against Myths, a group of Russian archeologists that explain how ancient monuments and artifacts might have been constructed using the tools and materials available at the time. They also make a lot of fun of popular conspiracy theories.
I volunteered at an LGBTQ library + archive in the pre-pandemic days, and seeing queer culture before Stonewall was eye-opening to me. There was one publication, Vagabond, that was selling a "His and His" towel set in 1965, alongside pins and rings to covertly signal to others that you were a "Vagabond Man." Queer culture was rich, and we had fun and joy even in dark times. Knowing that we found each other, supported each other and loved each other and had fun doing it is so heartening to realize, especially in the face of anti-gay and anti-trans rhetoric. There's always the risk that there may be dark times ahead, darker than what we've been through, but there's so much joy too.
This was one of the things that also pissed me off about the last Pirates movie. There were women astronomers by the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which is when that movie seems to be set. It was uncommon, yeah, but it wasn't unheard of. She would have been considered weird and unwomanly, maybe, but not a witch
Right? And having all the pirate men be soooo confused by her astronomy and knowledge of the “study of time” like… how does she think they got places, they literally used star constellations etc. Now days movie makers seem to think that the only way to have a good female character is to make her smarter than everyone… then they dumb down all the men and act like they are just bumbling idiots like no… that’s not how life is at all
By "Pirates movie" I assume you mean the latest "Pirates of the Caribbean" film? If so, you need to take everything in those moves with a massive mound of salt. Let's face it, they're not meant to be realistic in the slightest. The first movie started off with undead pirates and ghost ships. The whole series is ridiculous.
I remember reading a short science fiction story by H.G. Wells about a traveler who gets lost in the mountains and stumbles across a society where everyone is blind. At first I thought the story was written within the past couple decades because of how 'progressive' it sounded, but it's actually from 1904, and the author was born in 1866! At first he really pities them and is baffled by how they can live with such a "defect," and thinks that he'll be able to revolutionize their society because he's the only one who can see (and is therefore superior.) The plot of the story completely demolishes his assumptions, and tells us both that 'different' doesn't mean 'better' and that people who aren't the same as most others (because they're blind or deaf or whatever) have their own great, fulfilling lives that don't need to conform to the standards of other people who can see or hear. Realizing that this story was written by someone born in the mid 19th century really made me re-asses my own assumptions about people of the past tbh, I was kind of humbled.
It's called "The Country of the Blind" .. from the saying "In the country of the blind, the one eyed man is king" .. It is a thinly vailed critique of the "White Man's Burden" theory of 19th century "enlightened Liberalism" that was prevalent in Europe as justification for the colonial enslavement of Africa and Asia. The idea that it was the responsibility of the European white man to bring order and civilization to the savages of Africa and Asia (hence White man's burden) so as to uplift them. Many like H.G. Wells saw this for what it really was, an excuse to colonize and exploit these places in the name of uplifting them.
two historic things about clothing that we need to get back: community and longterm use (through passing to other people especially baby and children's clothes and keeping each item until its physically destroyed and can't be fixed anymore) and things made to fit (to fit different body sizes, to be accessible for those with disabilities, sensory sensitivities, plus with a level of personalisation that allows the wearer to feel like themselves in the clothes). The two things I always find in fashion history videos and that make me cry because of how worse things have become.
People who make their own clothes have never stopped doing those things! Outsourcing the production of daily necessities has greatly reduced appreciation for the effort that goes into them, and consequently encouraged "throwaway culture". Unfortunately humanity has difficulty comprehending that easier isn't always better. Add to that a marked tendency toward behavioral extremes and you get a lot of preventable stupidity.
I also want to see it become acceptable to wear darned or mended clothes. We've lost so many historical techniques for repairing fabric that got stained, torn, or worn thin, because people feel ashamed to have a patch over a tear or don't know how to embroider over a spot so they throw the clothes away. Many of my friends and coworkers can't even replace a button - I get asked to do it a lot!
@@marysue4729 yeah, well rich countries lost it. I was taught how to mend a teared sock and a loop on the stockings, because my generation is literally the first one in my country that can live without this knowledge. I still have a bit of that old "waste nothing, everything can be mended" mindset that, to be honest, has nothing to do woth eco-thinking, but everything with poverty.
@@damnhitsuzen I'm from Germany but I can relate to you since my grandparents were of the generation that survived the war and had to live on very few things. Especially my father grew up relatively poor even though my grandpa worked hard to make a good education for him and his brother possible so they could have it better. But this way the mindset of repairing things, using and buying good quality items that last long and not throwing stuff away that quickly has also been taught to me by my parents. I so think this mindset did last longer in the coutryside that in the cities, just like the detachment of where our food comes did arrive later in the more rural regions.
My grandmother grew up in a wonderful orphanage. Her sister was there also. The family took the two boys, as boys could work on the farm. My grandmother had the luxury of finishing high school. Also the orphanage made sure every girl had a career and a job, before they were turned out. (they could always come back if they needed help). She became a nurse and was able to help her family during the 1930's depression. Her sister became a teacher. Today at family reunions, you can tell which part of the family came from the brothers, and which from the girls. Because of that education, so long ago, the descendants have gone to college, done better financially and yet, the family all respect both "halves". I get that going to that orphanage, was a GOOD THING, and even back in 1917, everyone in the church that sponsored the orphanage KNEW that women with a skill would do better in life. It was NOT "well they can all get married and have families" They did both get married and have families, but their income was needed by those families when hardship hit the nation. And yes they kept in touch with their brothers and helped them when needed. IT WAS GREAT TO BE IN THE ORPHANAGE. It was called the "Home for Friendless Children", but it was "Time to break out of poverty through education, regular meals, and learning good manners."
This seems to be something baked into human culture... we did this back in the Renaissance by saying "oh, those people in the dark ages were so incredibly stupid, we are so much better now". And the myths that were made up are still believed today.
People are way worse about that now tho. Only the uneducated believe that. The Romans had birth control and air conditioning and running water, the Ancient Egyptians could do brain surgery successfully! We are blessed to have all the knowledge in the world at our fingertips. So there's no excuse for people to be so stupid and uneducated now. So what if you (a general you not you specifically) weren't taught this in your crappy school. I wasn't either, I learned it on my own. People are ONLY stupid because they CHOOSE to be stupid now. EVERYONE no matter how rich or how poor or what race or religion they are has access to the internet and therefore has no excuse. If someone CHOOSES to be an uneducated idiot than that's on them and they deserve to be mocked for it.
@@Laocoon283 Myths about "medieval times"/"dark ages"/"middle ages" - That they thought the earth was flat - That they had crazy medieval torture devices (these were invented centuries later) - That Chastity Belts were used to prevent women from having sex - That medieval people drank wine and beer because water was so polluted - That people did not live past 30 years old - That they had horrible hygiene etc
@@aliquida7132 well first off the term medieval encompassing like a 1000 year time span lol. So saying that they didn't have torture devices until a few centuries later doesn't even make sense and is also incorrect. I also never heard that they thought the earth was flat I don't know where you are getting that from. "Beer" has always been a safer option then water. Dating back to even before the ancient Egyptians. Whether or not they used it for that reason is irrelvant. The process of fermentation makes it safer to drink. That's just an indisputable fact. I have never heard someone seriously propose that people didnt live past 30. I have always heard people say it hyperbolically. The chastity belt I dont know anything about And without a doubt hygiene was less than what it is today. Especially among the poor. So your wrong on just about everyone of those.
You hear so many people say "stop romanticizing the past" well the same goes for the present imho. Was everything better in the old days? No but some thing where. Love this rant video so much. P.S. Loved meeting you in real life @ Brederode.
I once heard a friend say that maybe we were born in these days because our brains are better developed than people’s in the past. And besides that being utterly false, that just did not sit well with me. Like, how would it be possible for us to have all of the things we have today without building off our ancestors? We aren’t isolated parties. We are influenced by our past and the way we remember it. That’s one of the reasons why history is so important. We build our cultural identity through our history and you want to make sure you’re building a compassionate, ethical picture of these facts to point us in a more compassionate, ethical path for the future.
According to archeological studies on brain size, our brains actually shrunk in the last couple thousand years. Probably because we no longer need to process so much information to simply stay alive.
I Qs have actually dropped in the UK compared to victorian times, there was a study using reaction times published internationally, a metric that cannot be faked. We don't have bigger brains either. Kids sometimes lacked iodine and vitamins. That reduced intelligence.
@@rubymoca I think my goal was making fun of the claim that evolution is a linear process and we are obviously better than our ancestors. I never said it did.
I was reading a book on 1950's America, and the author started with an amazing rant. "`Leave It To Beaver' was a sitcom, not a documentary!" So much horrible stuff has been written with the assumption that "Leave It To Beaver" was an accurate depiction of everyday life in the 50s, when it is no more representative of the 50s than "The Simpsons" is about nuclear power plant operations.
My father was a medievalist and he used to always tell me that people in the past were exactly the same as people now, we're the same species, with the same desires, hopes, and dreams. We've just built on the knowledge of the past to have new technologies. That's it. And it's a lesson I think about all the time. I'm an architectural historian, and I'm always amazed that buildings built 100, 500, 1000+ years ago are still standing, and in some cases, still usable, and I've seen new constructions struggle to last 10 years. We aren't better now or smarter; we just have different technology and different cultural values.
@@mariagordanier3404 ancient kings, queens, emporers, pharaohs, whole empires, etc etc beg to differ - people have always been greedy. People have been pillaging and conquering foreign lands for goods, hoarding wealth, and being kinda shitty forever.
I’ve been thinking for awhile of what we do today that in 100 years people might look back on and think “that’s crazy, how did they not know this was dangerous”. I think it’s very egocentric to think we have it all figured out, and we won’t be thought of by future generations in the same light we think about the past.
Smoking, alcohol, obesity, stress, prioritising money/greed/capitalism, burning fossil fuels, yep plastic...the list goes on... I posted a similar comment. We can't be so arrogant to think that we've 'arrived'. It's a never ending path of development and change. Brand new social norms will be formed, possibly those that we can't even begin to imagine yet.
It is even worse because it's not that we don't know any better. We DO know better. There is plenty of evidence waring us of the danger of climate change and it will probably still exist in 100 years for people to look at and wonder why we didn't listen when it was that obvious. We are polluting the environment like no generation before us and people way further in the future will still suffer because because of this. I think people 200, 300 or 500 years in the future will look down on us and say how disgusting we were for using our oceans and skies as a garbage dumb and sadly they will be absolutely right with that. (Yeah, I know it's not that easy and a lot more complicated, systematic and we are not the first generation to do this but sadly we are the last generation who would be able to stop it and even more sadly I can't see that happening)
My first time here and I love this. I've realized that countries with strong traditions, [passed down through generations] and a vibrant culture rarely think their ancestors were generally "stupid"
me and my dad always do this thing where we'll say stuff like "imagine if we had an invention that could tell time without being connected to the internet" or "what if there was a food that grew with the wrapper right on it so you didn't need extra packaging" when we see new tech things that people act like is so "high tech" or just weird practices that are normal now. Or my favorite "what if there was a way to keep your extra food good for longer without freezing it" like people figured out pickling and fermentation and canning and smoking or curing meats SOO long ago and people act like when they make kombucha it's like this crazy new technological advance or something when people were doing it and already perfected it thousands of years ago. Just such a weird thing that everybody thinks we've advanced so much but they figured out so much stuff before modern science even existed! Like native indigenous land management practices that are based on thousands of years of observation and experience aren't used today because they aren't scientifically proven bc you can't do thousand year studies on stuff so instead we just ignore that entire realm of knowledge. same with ancient medicine like people were drinking willow bark tea when they had a headache long before someone invented aspirin
"Why do we act like people in the past were stupid?" - Probably for the same reason we think people from other countries and cultures are stupid - Due to ignorance.
A lot of it was due to the Victorians. They propagated the belief that all people in the past were stupid barbarians in order to make themselves feel superior. A lot of our mistaken beliefs come from that era.
there are too many people with the twisted belief that "if you disagree with me, you are stupid and/or evil" so, evidently, people in the past were stupid and people in the future will be stupid. they won't agree with me. and this is the best proof that we are the most stupid ones.
Someone once wrote, “The past is a different country.” It is, but strangely, it still seems socially acceptable to have prejudiced, condescending, and disrespectful or even hateful attitudes about the people who inhabited it, and to be woefully misinformed about them.
Also, as a fellow Eastern European, I do appreciate the shout-out to ''newly democratic countries''. Something a lot of Westerners forget and/or take for granted even. At the time when the former Soviet block (as my grandpa used to say) broke off, Western EU countries had 20+ years of experience ahead of them at a time of exponential technological growth. By the latter, I mean the tech boom of the 00's. So basically, you had EE countries that had about 10 or so years to catch up on democratic traditions and globalization to deal with.
Fun fact: Oligarchs and technocrats in the west hide behind the facade of "Democracy" in order to govern without much accountability to "the people". Most of it is hidden within vast governmental bureaucratic systems and pushed by lobbying groups from corporations, banks, and NGOs.
Yes, in the UK the life expectancy hasn't really changed much at all for over 100 years, when you take away infant mortality which skews the average hugely
A decent amount of people in the Neolithic were living to seventy if they survived childhood, so people who say that have no idea what they’re talking about.
"oh yeah, people were so stupid, how could they use lead base cosmetics that hurt them in the long run" he says as he smokes a cigarette from a packet tastefully decorated with pictures of what it may cause. And doesn't even have a fashionable white smooth skin out of that!
YES! This drives me crazy. Take any bad thing - woman killed by her family member, racist violence, etc, and you'll find articles about those same things happening every decade with commentary being a version of "How could this still be happening in our modern time? It must be an outlier by now!" And still people do it even when they have access to older media, assuming that e.g. equality is much better now. And then the next year the same thing will happen and the same shocked reactions will come, with nothing done to actually change things. Rodney King's beating happened in 1991, 30 years ago, and it was a huge news story that people followed the trial for. Is the LAPD less racist now, after that was all exposed? I doubt it.
Speaking as a leftist, I absolutely hate how narcissistic this and "the right side of history" arguments are. It just reeks of self importance. Imagine doing good things not because you believe in them, but _exclusively_ for the slim chance that people might remember your Twitter posts and pat you on the back after you're dead lmao.
I think nowadays the biggest damage is being done by the ''historical'' tv series. I remember when reading victorian diaries and letters, one of them(working class family) was mentioning that it was the wife that had control over the money, not the husband. He was for working, she was for keeping the family alive and knowing how to do it.... I am glad you actually touched that subject... and let's not fogert that we are getting less intelligent since the beginning of XX century :P
@@antonizajkowski9698 up to the early twentieth century it was customary for young ladies even from lower class families to take so called home economics classes - either at a finishing school, from a private tutor, their mothers, or via a correspondence course. They had to learn basic math and bookkeeping, cooking, cleaning, sewing, and similar basic skills somewhere, as their future husbands were too busy with securing the income to manage anything else. The ladies of the house were responsible for managing expenses and planning the daily life of their children and servants (yeah, even peasants had them), basically working from early morning to evening. Textbooks for such courses are widely available in the internet libraries.
Martin Luther's wife Katherine was the prime example of this very common division of roles. Luther worked and katherine ensured he actually had food to eat and clean clothes. She managed everything about his life outside the ministry and given his state of health probably gave him an extra 20 years of life he wouldnt have had. You assign the role to the person most suited for it by their skills. Luther had no idea of all the specificities of katherine's work and use of their money and he didnt need to. He trusted her completely with it.
This is one of the most INTELLIGENT persons I have ever seen on the Internet. I have been telling my friends and family for DECADES these things; i.e., just because it's in the past it doesn't mean it's stupid, but they're all so brainwashed and smug about how "advanced" we all are, JUST because we're living in THIS century and not back in the past. You see it in TV and movies all the freakin' time, even on shows that are supposed to be "scientifically accurate." They portray ancient peoples as "Ignorant savages," they IMMEDIATELY dismiss anything said by them that doesn't line up with the current worldview as "myth" and "superstition," and very few today question it. In fact, if you become TOO adamant about it, your doctor wants to prescribe you stronger meds AND get you to "talk" to someone! I'm not crazy, I just DO NOT believe all the BULLSHIT we've been taught all our lives.
![Why Are Body Parts Fashion? [RANT]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/cpdxKp8nDfc/mqdefault.jpg)
![Why Are Body Parts Fashion? [RANT]](/img/tr.png)
![Beauty Standards Are Bullsh*t. [RANT]](/img/1.gif)
[TW] hi! just letting you know, as I forgot to put it in the video, that I'm discussing the topic of domestic abuse in this one, in case some of you would rather skip watching. take care! 💕
Thank you!
You're the most Jewish looking person I've ever seen
Thanksn
A CN in the title would probably be most effective! 💕 (also hello meme mom, I was just rewatching all your old rant videos, you are a treasure)
Saying all of that out loud is the main reason I love you so much )
Greetings 🇺🇦
Not only stupid, but people in the past are usually depicted as stoic, morose or just plain bored. Nobody has any life to them.
As president of the Association of the Stoic, Morose and Bored, I can say there’s been no discernible drop off in membership in recent times.
I do wonder if part of that is due to the art we have from those periods. Sitting/standing modeling for a painting takes days. Its very hard to maintain a joyous expression for that long. (I worked as a life drawing model in college. Just 45 minutes of one pose was exhausting.)
It’s ridiculous how long I went as a Youth ™️ thinking that people back in the Olden Days didn’t really feel strong emotions or care about loved ones or feel passionate about things because of how I saw people described when I was taught about history. Things were cold and merciless and there was no room for tenderness in so many descriptions.
@@Cruznick06 tbh I think it's just that those creating historical fiction often get stuck on the facts. By which I mean whatever background research they did. They sort of wish to create a narrative of facts, and forget it's supposed to be fiction. A novel is still a novel even if it's set in the past.
Historical fiction is hard and time consuming to create, but detective stories and fantasy have their own difficulties too, and litterary fiction needs an outstanding use of language. Anyway what historical fiction needs is basic storytelling. And also the facts, I'm not saying it should all be fantasy, because that's a different genre. Just that creators need a better understanding of how to tell a captivating story.
@@albertbatfinder5240 as a member i have no friends and cant confirm
My favorite of cultural snobbism: the medieval was dirty and trash was everywhere. They built Gothic cathedrals and founded the first universities but they were too stupid to wash themselves or keep their streets clean. Meanwhile I find plastic trash even in the deepest woods and our oceans have small continents of trash floating around.
Amen! Compare the beauty of medieval buildings to modern brutalism.
Exactly. Have you watched Seaspiracy. An eye opener
The first university was actually built by a woman
In North Africa by a Muslim
Woman. It was not in Europe
@@linaaliomais6161
Nobody talked solely about europeans! 🤡
(And even then the first universities in europe also date back to 9th and 10th century. Aka the same time period)
I read a lot of biographies and I learned at a very young age "Holy crap, they were just us when the power's out."
THIS
The myth that enrages me is that, because childhood mortality was so high, parents didn't love or become attached to their children. One piece of 'evidence' is that they dressed baby/toddler boys and girls in the same clothes because they weren't seen as individuals until they were older. These were people who didn't have clothes bursting from their dressers. Of course you reused the baby clothes from kid to kid. As if we don't have hand-me-downs now. They dressed their little ones practically and that's where it ended.
There's tons of evidence that parents adored their children just as much then as they do now. One medieval priest wrote about how heart wrenching it was to watch parents grieve and cry over the loss of a little one. It broke his heart.
It's the same for the trope that men didn't value women. Hell, the Franklyn stove was invented purely because the tragedy of women's skirts going up in flames while cooking was intolerable. If a woman drown fetching water from the river, the town came together to build wells or come up with a safer system so such a thing never happened again.
A lot of the nightmarish children's stories were told to scare kids straight. To keep them SAFE.
They loved just as hard as we do now. They hurt from loss just as much as we do now. The crazy part is that they were strong enough to keep doing loving when the risk of loss was so much higher than it is now.
I lost my son a few years ago and I cannot even imagine the pain of a mother who lost three, four, or even all of her children. There are stories of women going insane from grief and never recovering, and that I understand very well.
Dehumanizing people is how we cope with our OWN pain when we hear about the horrors of the past. We soothe ourselves by telling the lie that, "This didn't hurt them as much as it would hurt us," so we can set that compassionate reflex aside and sleep better at night.
The bit when you said about boys and girls wearing dresses reminded me that I have an old photograph of my grandfather in a dress at 2 years of age so this was would have been 1909 or thereabouts. When I asked my mother about it she said boys wore dresses til about 3 years old and this was because it was far easier to change nappies and potty train given the type of clothing they wore back then. Whether this is true or not I don't know but seems plausible.
@@fionamacdonald1267 Whoah, I mean, it does sound pretty plausible. If it made things easier, then why not, right? lol Thanks for sharing, stories like this are interesting. It's like looking into a little window of the past.
I'm sorry about the loss of your son. I wish I could say something that could at least bring a little comfort, but I'm at a loss of what to say. I hope he is at least resting in peace wherever his spirit may have gone. ❤
Also, it is true, people will dehumanise others just to make themselves feel better or to try minimising the suffering of others. I'm sort of the opposite, I care too much, even about whether bugs feel pain or not. For me, every living thing matters, apart from myself, that is. I have trouble sleeping, due to guilt and shame and due to my emotions. I find it hard to put them aside or put my conscious aside. I wish I could...
@@ReptilianTeaDrinker I know right, I love history. I think there's some famous paintings that depict toddler boys in dresses too, I think Elizabethan ones If memory serves, but for the life of me I can't remember the artists or the paintings. Could well be later paintings not sure though.
But yes the windows to the past are amazing.
@@fionamacdonald1267 It's true. Ever changed a cloth diapers? I've changed many.
"Rulers invaded kingdoms for stupid reasons"
"People went to extreme lengths for 'beauty' "
"People harmed other people just for racial prejudice"
"Animals weren't treated well"
"Mental health wasn't taken seriously"
Sure, these things totally aren't happening now, are they?
Edit- So I changed no reason to stupid reasons. Hope everyone is happy now. And I _am_ being sarcastic. I thought everyone would get it. Especially by the 'invading kingdoms' and 'beauty' part.
I love this comment
The "invading kingdoms for no reason" thing is _particularly_ false. Everyone likes to imagine that every conflict had a designated good side and a designated evil side when really, those wars often erupted for complex political reasons.
People also like to believe that every war up to the 20th century was all because of religion and nothing else when that's blatantly untrue.
What you’re saying “Let’s deny racism”
@@meemaw2200 they are being sarcastic. These things happened in the past and they are still happening today is what they mean.
@@errortryagainlater4240 ah yes. My country was colonized for 350years because of "complicated political stuff". But why did it have to involve my country? We were just chilling trading and eating food
Edit:
Yall i know it IS complex. But nothing can justify what they did to my country. We are still impacted by it even after decades. Im just glad they didnt erase our culture
I’m an engineering major, but I had a professor this semester who took 5 minutes every week to go over a woman from STEM history. What blew my mind is how all of these women contributed major discoveries to time periods that we now write off as “when women couldn’t do science,” effectively erasing from history not only their brilliance, but their tenacity and drive to overcome the adversity they faced.
Oh my god I've just come across the same problem in biology! 😭 had no idea how much women really contributed to theories we take for granted today, but one of the professors at my uni is so passionate about naming the female scientists in eras I assumed women weren't even allowed to do science. I mean, the modern media doesn't even mention ANY of these women, I grew up thinking that even in the 1950s there were next to 0 women in science 😅 but there were SO MANY omg. Like not just the odd one or two, but entire labs
+++
I would love to hear some of these stories.
This goes for women in all fields! So many people act like all women were locked in their bedrooms and fed bread and water until about 1980 when they could suddenly do everything. Not only does that devalue the efforts of women of the past who worked their whole lives bit by bit so that we could be where we are 100+ years later, but it prevents us from seeing the privileges that especially white, wealthy women had in the past (early suffragists refusing to take a stance on slavery because they thought it would distract from people like THEM getting the vote, for example).
And of course, like Karolina said, where we are now isn't perfect by a long shot.
As a history student I love that you're interested in this! And I love your prof for doing that. Interdisciplinary thinking is great!
To add onto this, it was partly deliberately made difficult to see women's history not only because they were erased in their time and because of modern misconceptions about the past but also because of partly deliberate processes of erasure in the historical field. Women were simply not seen as a valid subject of history for a long time so we weren't studied and sources about us weren't preserved, which lead to us now having less sources about women to work with and less of a rich academic tradition for research about women which lends us less credibility in academia.
This is also where the phrase "well behaved women rarely make history" comes from- we have way too few sources on "regular, every day" women so we sometimes only get to see outliers who really made a name for themselves even though "regular" women probably did really interesting and cool things as well, and would be crucial for research.
Even now women's history is still seen a lot as just a niche gender perspective when it's like guys, women are people and we can include them in "regular history". But that's the result of a centuries long cycle of making women invisible in the time itself, and then afterwards in archives and academia.
I hope someone who reads this will find it interesting and it's not just common knowledge, I always get really excited to share.
On this subject, a Tumblr post I like points out that we're all like "why did they use things with lead if they knew it was bad for them" but still use things that release microplastics into our food and water
lead is still in lipsticks and on kids toys
funnier is that she pretends ethical consumption is humanly possible
asia makes basically all fabric and there's tons of slavery
Often that was there best option &/or they didn't know how dangerous it was &/or the workers had no choice in the matter qv "mad hatters" - they used mercury as part of the felting process...
Exactly! As per my comment, I anticipate that observers of the future will have the same critiques on 'our' smoking, alcohol, obesity, working/stress patterns etc
"This product is known by the state of California to cause cancer" 🙃
It's important to note that in both cases, it's because the average consumer had no power to change that. The corporations/people in control of the industry got rich off of using harmful materials and the average person couldn't do a thing about it
"Why are we feeling so superior about the things that we made worse." Wow! An important and beautiful sentiment.
We are filling the world full of plastic waste.
Of course people in the past didn’t poop on the floor. They weren’t wizards!
Ah JK Rowling. How the hell did it take her going full TERF whackjob for people to realize that she's just not that good at writing. Everything she didn't plagiarize from the Wizards of Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin has just been disastrous.
Of course they weren't wizards, they were _gay_ wizards who may or may not have been of color
@@toprak3479 you mean they were lifelong friends and roommates? 😉
@@singerofsongs468"Oh my God, they were roommatessss..."
gabriel ribeiro omg thank you I was about to say that
I hate how people will make up facts about history without any research and assume they are automatically correct because they feel superior about seeming smarter. TikTok is very guilty of this. Everyone on there acts like everything they say is fact.
That's our culture of 2022 now - everyone generally thinks their opinion is to be taken as fact.
@@gothempress Those same people also scream and shout when someone shares an opinion that differs from there. It's a collection of hypocrites. Whatever happened to having a calm discussion?
@@sweethistortea I 100% agree. Nothing makes me feel more like a boomer than trying to have an open and calm discussion on Twitter haha 😄
@@gothempress Twitter is a cesspool of entitlement and people acting like toddlers.
"OH MY GOSH, YOU LIKE WAFFLES! WHAT ABOUT PANCAKES! YOURE SO CLOSE MINDED."
Tiktok is full of teens, and teens have been stupid since the dawn of time. Now, if you're talking about adult people on Twitter and Facebook, well that's a problem.
As a teen I decided to find the oldest book I could find in my local library that was about humans harming the environment, and I found a very large book from the mid 1800's, which referenced earlier materials. The information and opinions represented could have been written yesterday. It changed my whole perspective on what we as a society call "progress."
That sounds amazing!
Can you tell me the name of the book ?
Reference please
I picked up one year of issues of a women's magazine from 1939 a few years ago. They could almost have been released last year... The travel articles, gossip about celebrities, recipes, and even the ads for make-up and period products, are very similar to the ones in the modern equivalent magazines.
I'm commenting to get a notification of you remember the name of the book :)
I have a degree in Archaeology, and this is something that bothers me so much! People in the past are so underestimated.
They were so so capable and clever, and throughout history humanity has consistently been inventive and curious, they made the best of what they had and our modern accomplishements are built upon their foundation!
My favourite part of history to study is the everyday people, the little parts of their lives we overlook. They weren't all stupid and misreable and stoic. They were funny, creative, ambitious, imaginative, playful, and petty. They were US.
100% dead on. The people who built Rome or any amazing cities were not braindead. The Lighthouse of Alexandria might be long gone, but you can bet it was breath taking to see.
They were kind of like us but they had a whole different life.
Today we talk about, movies, tv, music, books, music, etc.
We watch prank videos, makeup, or watch a video like this.
People back in the far past didn’t have thise experiences.
I think our different experiences would set us apart drastically.
Like if were able to meet them they would see us as the alien species.
@@medicisounds1384 agreed, they’re more human than us.
Reading old memoirs sometimes shows me that we havent changed that much from them...
Historical person: literally invents science
Modern person: "haha old timey people were stinky"
Exactly. My man Gregor Mendel, messing with pea plants and inventing genetics!
Sometimes they were stinky lol. One certain French king was very much a stinkbomb. No one took regular baths but kings were absolutely forbidden so it would have been more difficult not to reek. This one guy though had a real air about him.
@@galanie a modern person would probably stink horribly of all kinds of chemicals to a person from back then, it's all relative.
That meme template is tired and not funny
@@galanie People not bathing regularly is an example of a misconception that Karolina is talking about in this video. Perhaps in the past centuries, people didn't bathe regularly or every day. But I read an etiquette manual from the 19th Century (I think it was called "The habits of good society" from 1859) and in that book, they actually reccomend bathing after you rise from bed.
Also if you think about it, wouldn't the royalty have more access to clean water? I haven't heard anything about European kings that were forbidden to bathe (although feel free to tell me if there is a source about that).
I also think it's interesting how we tend to mock "silly old wife's tales" from the past but can still swallow entire fake news on social media or believe people on the internet with a blind eye regarding products or experiences.
I'm currently reading arabian nights and I can vouch that these stories deserve to be mocked.
One of the stories was that a woman was talking her husband in to doing something he didn't want to do until one of his buddies is like
oh yea whenever my wife does that I lock her in a room and beat her with a stick until her arms break and the guy is like
oh wow I never thought of that
and preceeds to follow his advice and beats his wife and that's the end of the story lmfao.
"I heard that jf children go down to the fields (that just so happen to be over a network of limestone caves just under the surface) at night, they get taken down to the underworld and never come back" - silly, hysterical, clearly fearmongering, blatant fear of the unknown, ultimately stupid, only said by dumbasses with no idea about the world
"The Jews are sending black people and Arabs to our country to replace the white population" - legitimate concern, fact based, narrative covers details to ensure message is conveyed, shows clear and present danger, saves lives, protects idiomatic local knowledge...
Oh whoops, I got the descriptions the wrong way round
Mhmm! Funny enough old wives tales tend to actually be true
@@ilenastarbreeze4978 YESSS EXACTLY
You know how much they're going to mock us in 50 years for the ivermectin shit?
i had a philosophy teacher who said something like “if you think modern western society doesn’t have cult ritual activity, go to a sports game”
Lol some people are willing to kill themselves for celebrities but we still think that we are superior than "savages" indigenous people.
That is hilarious. I have heard it said how lucky we are not to have to attend boring rituals all the time!
An Important Text for any Antropology (or Sociology) 101 class: The Classic Text "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" 🤣
Or a social justice protest
There's a quote in Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" that was an eye-opener of that sort for me. We all take part in cult rituals sometimes without even realising how weird they are viewed from a distance.
" 'Professor Langdon,' called a young man with curly hair in the back row, 'if Masonry is not a secret society, not a corporation, and not a religion, then what is it?'
'Well, if you were to ask a Mason, he would offer the following definition: Masonry is a system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols.'
'Sounds to me like a euphemism for "freaky cult." '
'Freaky, you say?'
'Hell yes!' the kid said, standing up. 'I heard what they do inside those secret buildings! Weird candlelight rituals with coffins, and nooses, and drinking wine out of skulls. Now that's freaky!'
Langdon scanned the class. 'Does that sound freaky to anyone else?'
'Yes!' they all chimed in.
Langdon feigned a sad sigh. 'Too bad. If that's too freaky for you, then I know you'll never want to join my cult.'
Silence settled over the room. The student from the Women's Center looked uneasy. 'You're in a cult?'
Langdon nodded and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. 'Don't tell anyone, but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh.'
The class looked horrified.
Langdon shrugged. 'And if any of you care to join me, come to the Harvard chapel on Sunday, kneel beneath the crucifix, and take Holy Communion.'
The classroom remained silent.
Langdon winked. 'Open your minds, my friends. We all fear what we do not understand.' "
An anthropologist pointed out that prehistoric humans were just as intelligent as modern humans, just the relevant knowledge they gained and problems they applied their critical thinking to were different in their worlds in the past.
What I wonder about bleak depictions of historical society, if life was all misery and strife then why did we evolve a sense of humor?
Maybe precisely because of that. There's no point in making jokes about things that are already funny.
Probably because of the slings & arrows of life. Humor can function as a coping mechanism...the saying "laugh, cry or die" makes it plain.
imagine how much further humanity could be along if all our scientific data was saved over the years and was able to be passed on
Speaking of prehistoric humans, almost every aspect of their life got worse after they started farming. Their life expectancy decreased, diseases like type 2 diabetes and anemia became more common, sexism became more common and, in tandem with animal domestication, we got diseases such as the measles and smallpox (and thanks to us living closer together, they spread rapidly). But, because we tend to assume that more recent=more progressive, that is almost never brought up outside of anthropology, which just shows that societies are capable of regressing.
Plus we forgot that the Roman Roads still serve as the basis of many modern Roads. Their engineers were that good.
"Peasants in medieval times worked constantly" As opposed to now, where people... work constantly?
Between workaholics, hussle culture, people working multiple jobs to survive, and things like sweatshops we've definitely turned this one around (sarcasm).
right, i see people saying they dont want 9-5 jobs but I rarely see one of those, all I see is 7-5, 8-6, 7-6 etc.. we have more access to doctors and health plans but we don't have time for going do the doctor, looking after our health and if we get sick and take a time off we're fired, we live for working too we just have more distractions
Yuuup. Everything got faster and more efficient but that saved time did not trickle down to the worker
you know what's even more ironic? The medieval peasants might have had to work most of the year to see the fruits of their labour, but the actual daily time spend on working would be, maybe around 3 to 5 hours (maybe even less), except for like, the time of the harvest where they had to work as quickly as possible, but even then the whole village would work together as a community and afterwards they would get 3 months of preparations for the next season, because you can't really do anything direct during the winter. Of course, it was still a very hard, physical work, which wasn't helped by hunger, diseases, wars and being treated like literal slaves by other social classes. It was the industrial revolution that caused the insane work hours, because suddenly one person could do much more work across a day and the society still haven't really healed from that yet, because 9 hours is still insane and it's not like people really stop working when they get back home and the last time the workday was lowered was about 70 years ago.
Peasants likely worked _less_ than we do now 🙃
just read Malcom Gladwell`s Outliers recently, and apparently, farmers in Europe actually didn`t work that much. once you plough the fields and sowe seeds, you just wait till it grows, then you work during harvest, but during winter, they just lay in bed and "hibernated" to conserve energy. (rice farmers in Asia, on the other hand, worked every day from dawn to dusk)
I had the "people in the past were just people, too" moment when I first read about the graffiti in Pompeii. It just says silly things like "I was here" or "I f*cked the barmaid" similar things that you can find in walls of High School bathrooms today. Even though it's been 2 thousand years, it's so funny that in a fundamental level people don't change.
Nihil novum sub sole.
Or like I was super surprised and really impressed when we studied a certain Latin intellectual, teacher, writer, named Quintilianus, because his theory about pedagogy and how children should be taught is so "modern" and just really amazing
A Viking tagged "Halfdan carved these runes" which was basically the same as "Halfdan was here" on marble in the Hagia Sophia in formally named Constantinople around the year 900.
It was basically the contemporary equivalent to modern internet memes.
Wow I think I just had the same moment reading your comment 😭
As my history teacher once said:"To us it seems like no other turn of events was possible, but for people in the past it was just a life they lived. Someone in the future will be berating us for our choices because they know better. But they do because of us."
The people of the past figured out everything for us. it's why we have electricity, it's why we have running water to hour homes. It's how we went from a biplane to space travel in under 70 years. The achievements we find in this time ( hopefully) will benefit people 300 years from now; all for them to call us stupid, and maybe a few to defend us like I or you do now.
We fail to consider that our grandchildren may live in a world not as good as ours but think their way of doing things is better. OR they will have regressed to barbarism.
@@JRobbySh Future generations mostlikely won't even live in our world, seeing how space agencies want to colonize other planets
Being a historian myself I have to say: YES! Really specifically hate the narrative of women with broader agencies in early modern times being viewed as "ahead of their time" when in fact we just shouldn't take our expectations and solely wanting to see them 'verified'.
Little rant of my own:
This entire video is just so accurate. My mother grew up in the Soviet Union during the 70's and 80's. Her mother was a person who would always save money. She never spent it on improving their tiny, tiny flat, or on buying another one, or on anything of the sort. She had enough money to make an investment and get them out of the poverty they were in, but she was saving it for a better day. In 1991, when the USSR fell apart, she lost most of that money. Obviously, it was a large regret, but my mother didn't berate her for that, because how would she know? Just apply the same logic from our own decisions; We never know what's a good investment or what's a good decision to make until we see the outcome.
I also had a classmate with whom I got into a heated debate with, because she claimed we did not need to teach history in school. This is the result of misinformation that comes from history class. There's two opposite extreme views; One that Karolina discussed in the video, about people thinking us modern folk are so much better, and one that we did not improve at all and are constantly repeating the same mistakes. Obviously, both of these extreme opinions are false; We need to acknowledge that while we do make many of the same mistakes and history does often repeat itself, we are improving in some aspects and have the potential to do so further if society is properly educated.
Lastly, it's so amusing to me to see a lot of people nowadays discovering things that have been in use for as old as time, and often marketing them as something out of this world. For some reason, using natural oils for the hair is something insane to some Westerners. Meanwhile, I live in an Arabic country where this is something a lot of people do, and I know for a fact the Middle East is not alone in this. This is just one example, there's hundreds out there. However, for some reason, when a Western Tiktok star discovers something like that, it's something amazing. But when societies who have been using it since the start of history share their knowledge, it's backwards or primitive. That doesn't seem fair.
Oh, and one more thing; Can we please go back to having high quality items produced that actually last for maybe a decade? I have a bunch of clothes from my mum that is two decades old and in perfect condition, it is very much doable. As Karolian said in the video.... Modern infrastructure is really not it.
That's all, this video triggered a rant that I felt I had to get out XD I love the video by the way-
Buying another flat? In 70s-80s Soviet Union? Sorry but you don't know what you're talking about :D
@@kurkosiaa Not really buying, I am aware, it was the wrong term to use, no need to be so rude about it. Renting it from the government, then, but the main point still stands :)
@@HolandaChiquita That's a very good point! I actually agree with all of what you said, it is great when cultures share too, but yes, crediting is also important!
No no, you make perfect sense! The rant I gave was not super thought through, so I didn't actually take that into consideration, you're right!
yes! potential is definitely the operant word
My history professor completely changed my perspective on the "middle ages". I used to hate the middle ages in school because all we learned about was the plague, that everybody believed "the earth is flat", witch hunts and blind religious fanaticism. That people didn't love their children and didn't have emotions at all. My perspective has completely changed now- there was a lot of science, people were curious about the world, people laughed and danced and grieved and loved their children so much. It's like people from the past aren't even depicted as human beings just like us, but like some kind of different species in media and history books at school. And while it's important to focus on some of the bad stuff that happened, history shouldn't just be reduced to "the past was terrible but everything is better now" as if our own modern world doesn't have it's own flaws.
Thinking that the Middle Ages was so backwards was propaganda in part in an organized effort to take womens social and economic power away. The maternal and child death rate went UP in the enlightenment as male doctors took over and punished women midwives (and the witch-hunts went up). The propaganda lasts still
Also I wish more people were like your prof! I remember thinking women didn’t belong in science for so long because womens contributions were erased.
I’m so glad. I’m writing a novel set in a fantasy world inspired by late 19th century China, England, and a smattering of other places. I have a character from a futuristic world who rolls her eyes at things like a gorgeous half-human half-snake lady existing, or that there’s elves and a simplistic, somewhat racist and misogynistic social structure similar to things she’s learned have been left behind in the past… but everyone is just people, there’s things she heard were bad that are actually just fine. Things are primarily different instead of necessarily worse. Her new friends are in a similar situation to her with surviving by freelancing and crime, and they protect her somewhat from being treated differently… though she’s very uncomfortable with it, it’s mostly because who wants to be stared at constantly, even if it’s because people think you seem cool?
@@prairieN yeah! I read an article about a female mathematician whose studies were supported by the Catholic Church itself back in the 18th century…
They were likely smarter as the consequences for not being so were more severe, as Edward Dutton would explain, we are well past peak smart, it's been downhill for a while now
"Why were people OK with..."
Simple answer is that they weren't OK with those things...which is why they found new a different ways to do things and therefore don't do them anymore.
People always try to excuse things like incest, racism etc with "it being okay back in the day" when there were always people against these things.
@@Jhud69 people trying to excuse incest nowdays? Did the whole situation with egyptian dynasties and Habsburgs taught them nothing?
@@Jhud69 or they get the reasons it was "okay" completely wrong.
For example, even decades before suffrage, common women still needed to work hard and sell things/go to workhouses to bring extra income for their family. But certain groups think that "trad" wives all through history did nothing except bake stuff and clean. And that gets preached as an "ideal" even though it's an archetype that literally never existed. A bit of an extreme example I know, but even "progressive" people tend to write off this image of women in the past and it's pretty annoying.
true! I went to a college that was founded in the 1830s by radical abolitionists, and the college was for anyone (race and gender) who wanted to study there. They originally built it as a work-study college so you could afford tuition at any budget.
I do find it funny how the “traditional” house model never really existed in history. Unless you were upper middle class or higher, both parents worked in some form or another
Not to mention it's actually privileged for the man to be working all day while the women were housewives (a choice most made voluntarily)
As an archaeologist I've often approached culture past and present with cultural relativism, and chronological snobbery is an excellent term that I will start using. Thank you for this rant!
Yes. I challenge anyone to grow up and live in a society with slavery...and claim that THEY would be the one, the very first person to stand up against it. "This is wrong! My advanced futuristic moral compass cannot stand by and allow this injustice!" 😒
I understand why you would approach the past through relativism but I don't think cultural relativism in regards to the present is a good thing... Some cultural practices are and were just horrible. We shouldn't excuse them...
@@guyver441 tbh they actually did. a good example was slavery in early medieval ireland, which became unacceptable and was basically eliminated, but then had a regression thanks to scandinavian settlements, with that being extinguished as a practice again a LOT quicker than it took in the americas/ caribbean more recently. on the flip side, our world today has slavery and almost nobody makes much of a fuss.
@@Sisi-ep3wn Then you shouldn't become an archeologist
@@elizabethb4168 What is your understanding of cultural relativism?
I remember being so mad at one of my teachers who said "Pre-20th century clothing were poorly made..." she backed this up with the idea that if more cloths were well made we would have more samples from that time. The next day I brought a photo of my great-grandmother and told her that the blouse she was wearing was resewn from her mothers wedding dress. The jacket that she was wearing was a hand me down from her cousin and the skirt was re-sewn from a fraying bed tapestry... The reason things did not make it into the 21st century was because they were used, reused, repurposed, resewn, re-cut until they were rags. PS my Great-Grandmother looks amazing in the outfit in this photo!
And the rags were then used to make paper, which was used to make books. So if you want to find out where all the historical clothes went, walk into an antique bookstore.
The fast fashion industry is incredibly wasteful and talk about poorly-made!
Anyone who truly thinks clothing made today is of better quality than before, is not very well educated.
"Pre-20th century clothing were poorly made..." as opposed to modern garments that disintegrate after one season 🙄
Frankly, clothes overall were somewhat better quality because they were made to fit the wearer and serve their specific needs! Factory cloth and clothing manufacturing led to poorer quality clothes since more could be made, so less specifically made clothes, with greater focus on fashion and replaceability came about.
The thing I hate the most is how people claim ancient civilizations had “aliens” or some kind of power because of the things they built. Like no they deserve credit for creating feats of engineering like the pyramids of Giza! People of the past had skills too people!
We still don’t know how the acropolis was built, even with modern computers a university team could not replicate the math necessary. We still don’t know how to recreate Roman concrete that can withstand (thrive in) saltwater. But yes clearly they were stupid, we’re better, and it was the aliens.
I watched the BBC's documentary with Ruth Goodman abt how castles and stairwells and fortresses were built in the old days. They used relative simple math, but relied heavily on symetry and stability, natural rules that that hold those structures in one piece centuries later.
Like the meme "just because white people didn't do it, doesn't mean it was aliens"
PLUMBING! I forget which civilization had it, thousands of years before Rome with thier aqueducts, but PLUMBING EXISTED waaaaaaaaay farther in the past than that. GOOD plumbing. That worked WELL.
And then, something happened to the civilization, it failed, and the plumbing (and the knowledge behind it) was lost to the ages, and had to be reinvented.
People joke about reinventing the wheel, but sometimes I wonder, "Just how many times was the wheel invented, before it stuck?" It's not JUST inventing a thing. It's spreading that knowledge to other civilizations, so that when your civilization fails, the others around you will carry on the knowledge you had.
Just because white people didn't do it doesn't mean aliens did.
I love the marrying age myth, like, I've seen incels be like "you're a 20 yo man without children? Your ancestors would laugh at you". I actually did research on my family tree and calculated the average marrying age to be like ~27
Last month my grandmother and I were talking about her mom and I asked how old she was when she gave birth to her. My grandma said she was 30 and I said "wow it was late for that time" and my grandmother looked at me really weird and said "what do you mean? No it wasn't. It was common, my dad and my mom were both working hard etc.." it's crazy all thay cliche that hear all the time
A lot of people also seem to think that a century ago a girl would typically get “married off” by her family as soon as she hit puberty and she would have no say about it, which in the context of western society is ridiculous. True, parents were generally a lot stricter with their daughters, but in practice that often meant marriage happened later, not earlier. My paternal grandparents met in 1920s New Zealand. They were both from Irish Catholic immigrant families. She was 16 but had already finished school and was working. They fell in love and wanted to get married but her family wouldn’t hear of it, not just because of her age but also because they didn’t approve of him as he was several years older and worked as a musician rather than having a “respectable” job. Back then she couldn’t get married until age 21 without her parents’ consent, so they just kept courting on the sly for the next 5 years and got married right after she turned 21. Their first child, my father, was born 6 months after.😅
Also a century ago was 1923…so people were dating like today more often than not.
“Why are we feeling so superior about things we made worse?”
- Karolina Żebrowska 2022
This shows that it is just so easy to selectively reconstruct history to justify the argument of our own "moral superiority". Thanks for the video! (:
Agree. Those people INVENTED algebra...pretty sure most people nowadays couldn't manage that.
@@guyver441 It's also a pretty sure thing that people nowadays couldn't be civil to each other long enough to come up with algebra, let alone the moral code that is part of Western society.
classism
@@guyver441 Most people back in those days could't *invent* algebra either, so there's that.
Modern society is different. Part of it is that modern people don't have to invent algebra.
This reminds me of two things:
1) “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” - Monty Python's Life of Brian. It was learning about the Roman Empire what opened my eyes about the concept that current humans are not necessarily smarter and the things we have now are not necessarily better than people and things of the past.
2) "Kids are not stupid, they are just inexperienced." Cinema Therapy. This one goes along with the chronological snobbery. People back then were not stupid, they just didn't have the experience/knowledge that we have nowadays.
I thoroughly enjoyed this TED talk
I love Cinema Therapy!
What puplic health and education? Rome had non of that and wine pre date rome by thousands of years
...I hate to break it to you but all the thing rome supposed to do were already in place 5000 years before rome mate.
A lot of the laws we have in Europe today come from the Romans. Depending on the country, some laws haven't been changed much at all.
Yes, several of those items on the list from a Monty Python movie about Rome did exist before the Roman Empire, BUT only In a few areas and not to the same extent.
The Roman Empire was huge compared to other civilizations at the time, covering several vastly different cultures. The difference is that Rome shared these great (and some other not so great) ideas from one culture to another.
For example: Roads. Having a road in and around a village is a given, but Rome built a VAST system of roads that made trade between areas much more reliable.
So yes, other civilizations had many if not most of the items on that list, but not to the extent of the Roman Empire.
My story of how fast perspective can change and wrong assumptions begin: I grew up in the 70s and 80s, when the focus of women's lib in the USA was on the law and the workplace (equal rights, equal pay, etc.) Watching the original Star Trek, where the women all wore miniskirts while the men wore pants, struck my generation as totally sexist. We assumed the women had been made to dress that way because sexism. Well, then I heard Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura) talking about those skirts in an interview. She said that in the original pilot, the women wore pants just like the men (you can see this in the 2-part episode "The Cage," which used portions of that original pilot in flashbacks). When that pilot was rejected and they were retooling the show, it was the WOMEN in the cast who asked to wear miniskirts instead! She said this was because 1) the focus of women's lib in those days (1960s) was on sexual liberation and autonomy-women being free to exist as sexual creatures just as much as men, and to wear whatever the hell they wanted to wear; and 2) the women in the cast, going on the assumption that this Star Trek future was a place of true equality, meant that women in that future would be accepted as such without judgement and leering, not being forced to either be sexless or "just like men." So they saw those skirts as a symbol of liberation and equality! It made perfect sense once she explained it. But in just one generation - really just 10-15 years - that context had been lost, assumptions had been made, and their symbol of liberation had become a symbol of sexism instead. Totally blew my mind.
OMG I love this.
It’s like makeup. In the 1920s, it was seen as a symbol of freedom and liberation and rebellion against Victorian values/norms. But in the 1960s, it was seen as a symbol of sexism and was something burned in the 1968 Miss America protests.
And alcohol. In the late 19th century first wave feminists joined the temperance movement and fought to ban alcohol because of women having few resources to leave abusive men who were alcoholics. But then when prohibition actually happened in 1920, the flappers came along and drank alcohol illegally as a sign of liberation and the blurring of gender lines.
"Would an average person willingly use dangerous chemicals while witnessing the short term effects first hand?"
Yes, everyday. People do this every day.
Example #2: Most fast food items
Those who do that do so because they think that the reward outweigh the damages. If you work in a dangerous site, it's usually because that's the only job you could find, or the only one that pays you enough to help your family, or any number of things that would make you willing to do so despite the downside. No one does this because they like it or, as the thesis of this video says, because they are too stupid to notice the effects.
@@jonjohns8145 Drinking to excess...or the use of soaps, perfumes (even botox, etc), ingesting foods with potentially (or even proven) dangerous chemicals. In many cases people choose to expose themselves to chemicals with long term ill effects because they LIKE IT in the short term.
Often it is very much a choice.
@@dogdonut3 You can't escape the use of chemicals, like soaps, for obvious reasons. Also, natural products contain chemicals too.
Nice comment
One of my favorite examples of historical people actually being smarter than us is that fact that most "new" and "sustainable" practices are literally just normal practices from the past. Like, prior to the invention of single use plastic and paper products, people were using reusable products all the time, creating things using what they had on hand, reusing materials, and taking good care of their existing items. People of the past were, in many ways, incredibly resourceful and ingenuitive, especially compared to us now.
yesssss
also, im so happy that so many people are trying to bring back old ways of doing stuff when they're the most secure/hygienic/ecofriendly ways, I hope this sticks around
But people in the past weren't smarter than us, either. That idea is just as flawed as the one Karolina is criticising in this video.
For instance, with your example, they weren't using more sustainable products because they knew better than us - they were doing it because those were the best resources they had. If they had plastic, they would probably have used that instead because that's exactly what ended up happening. Remember, plastic was invented in the big, wide, nebulous place known as 'the past' as well. It didn't pop into existence because people got stupider or less resourceful. It *was* the resourcefulness. It's just a shame that resources often come with faults (the same is true for some historic and sustainable resources, too, by the way. Just look at the dark side of the cotton industry both in the past and today!)
@@catherinepolshaw1444 I agree completely. I don't think that people of the past were generally smarter than people now or vise versa. I just wanted to illustrate a way in which practices of the past may have actually been "better" than certain modern practices. I think humans are flawed no matter what era they're in.
A great example of the cycle of problems: last century began with a devastating Depression caused in part by the fact it was built on a system where people had to keep buying to sustain it. Engineers not wanting to see it repeated, came up with a clever system called planned obsolescence. And because its easier to predict when a washing machine will give out than it is the fluxtuations of the market or how to stablize inflation, this is what we got.
All the "green" and organic farming ideas are what my gr grandparents did on their farm and what their parents did.
Younger generation thinks they invented earth friendly ideas, none of you have anything on my Grandma born in 1920 lived in poverty and the Great Depression to boot.
Everything was used until worn and then repurposed, nothing went to waste or was tossed out. She composted before it became popular.
And she would laugh at those in the grocery stores paying high priced for "organic fancy eggs" or free range eggs.
She would shake her head because it was just the same practise her parents did.
"A) Nothing in history is as simple as it's told, and B) if something I just learned sounds shocking and incredibly stupid in most cases it's just not true."
Nailed it!
Not just history, but also current world events.
Well, the crusades did happen, and witch burnings did, as well. I generally agree with the statement that people weren't that different back then and many of their irrational behaviours still exist these days. But history does include a lot of shocking and stupid events... as do modern times (like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Brexit or the election of Donald Trump).
@@Ambar42 You mean to tell me you left out the election of Joe Biden? That's another stupid event that happened.
@@crossroads8370 You mean because Trump tried to sabotage the election? True. He should have accepted the fair and democratic win of Biden. Instead he told alt-rights to revolt against the constitution and thus commited high treason.
Well, Hedy Lamarr WAS ignored and dismissed most of her life... to the degree that she only got recognition for her intellectual and technical brilliance posthumously... oh... wait... 😳
I feel lucky to have grown up in a multi-generational household with my grandmother who also grew up in a multi-generational household with HER grandmother who was born around 1890 in the “old country” Without those direct links to the past it’s easy to assume anyone born before the mid 1970s was just an NPC with no internal monologue or curiosity about the world.
This is one of my aspirations in life, to raise my kids in a multigenerational home. Grandparents belong with the family. They are our connection to the past and we need to keep them close.
I was born in the mid 70s and i now routinely get accused of this by some of the most ignorant and brainless people in human history, nearly all of whom were obviously born after 1994. It was bad with the ones born 1982-1994, but much worse with the ones since.
Of course i have something huge working against me. I was raised partly by grandparents who were born in the 1910s. I know people only 10 years younger than me, all of whose grandparents were born within three years of both of my parents, and whose great grandparents were young children the year my grandfather graduated from university. As a kid, at three years i used to sit on the lap of a healthy, happy great grandfather who was born in 1891, whose father at the age of three saw Abraham Lincoln at a campaign stop and remembered it the rest of his life. And my grandfather's grandmother, born in 1834, at the age of 86 finished building her dream house, which ended up being the house my mom was raised in and in which i spent a number of vacations.
My grandparents voted for Stevenson twice in the 50s; in the 2000s, they were able to clearly recall the issues in those races and give a cogent argument about where they stood and why. Today's millennials, some on the cusp of being grandparents themselves, largely consider any interest in that to be a sign of insanity and even fascist tendencies. Of course they don't know the candidates or the issues of that decade at all, but fancy that they do. Meanwhile, most of them wouldn't be able to name a single one of the candidates in the 68, 72, or 76 elections and about half wouldn't be able to do so for 80, 84 or 88 either. About a quarter would now have great difficulty naming even one candidate from 1992. But if i tell them that i know more than they do because i come from a more enlightened generation than theirs, most of them will immediately cut all contact. This is the nature and level of degeneration we're dealing with. Older generations had false optimism _despite_ the reality of their mediocrity. This generation has false optimism _because_ of their mediocrity. I.e. they know they're inferior, and by their new lexicon, (invented by them, for them, when they were still kids), being inferior _is_ superior. That's their story and their sticking to it.
And after 20+ years of feeding themselves this stream of garbage, they've started to believe their own propaganda.
@@no_rubberneckingMillennials know one candidate from 1992. They call him "Hillary's problematic husband."
@@NJGuy1973 Most do, but an alarmingly high number do not. Bear in mind that nearly half of them were not even born on the day of that election. And this tends to be people who are uninterested in the details of what happened before their own time. Yes, of course they know _of_ him. But if you don't mention the name and just say, Who was running that year, i think you may be surprised. I know I've been. I can name nearly all the main candidates from memory going back to 45 years before my birth, and i can name about two thirds of them prior to that and going back to 1900. Not because someone made me memorize it. Because i consider it a civic obligation to do my best on that. This is what's missing in most of those folks.
@@no_rubbernecking My point is that the only thing most Millennials know about Bill Clinton was that he got blown by an intern.
It's pretty much the same as assuming everybody has an "instagram lifestyle" because it's so well-documented unlike "normal people lifestyles", people in the future will think everybody had white walls and flat screens at home, all women grew big butts, etc etc. Because something is aesthetically mainstream, it doesn't mean it's the norm.
Good point!
I realny see your point. I was also thinking that back then people was just lying in dirt all day, but thanks to great people like you I understand more now. The most flustrating think for me is standard of modern apartaments. Now developers are building ugly apartment buildings with no green area and everything looks the same. Also flats are soooo expensive. But when you are looking at older buildings they often have beautifle shapes with small parks and recreations area. Few days ago I was looking at old amartment building with beautifil floral ornamentami on the front wall. Now, when everything must be quick, it's not possible to spend time for this details :( That is quite sad. Modern doesn't mean better. Sorry for my english guys! PS. Pozdrowienia Karolina i kocham twój kanał!
For not being your 1st language, your English is quite understandable...no apology necessary.
Well said. 🙌🙌
More housing must be accounted for due to population explosion. I think the average global population in the 1950s was somewhere between 2-3 billion. We were already at 7 billion in the 2000s. That's truly insane if you think about the global populations of past centuries.
Human populations were better controlled because our medical technology/understanding wasn't as advanced as it is now. We weren't able to produce food on the insane scale we are able to now. There are many reasons why the population was able to increase beyond what was possible in the past.
Regarding your point about apartments all looking the same, I can only imagine this is a cost cutting measure to address housing issues. The reason the model T was able to be affordable was assembly line production and no customization. But more people than ever before could now afford a reliable means of transportation, which is a big deal when lots of things are far away.
There used to be some pretty dismal housing around in older days too, it's just that it was all torn down because it was cramped, cold, dark, ramshackle and insanitary (not to mention a fire hazard), so not a lot of it remains to this day, unlike the pretty model houses for the wealthy middle and upper classes. (And if it does, it has been expensively renovated into prestigious abodes for wealthy urban professionals.)
Which is another lesson about the past, that the things we see from the past today might not be the whole truth about what existed and how people's lives were like. A lot of the accounts of the past were also polished up to conform to an ideal or a standard which was not necessarily accurate (also depending on who wrote it). It's just as dangerous to idealise the past as it is to treat it as all bad, irrelevant and stupid.
@@plutoh9958 COVID is the Earth's attempt at taking care of some of that over population!
This reminds me of reading a book in French class that was set at some point in the past in a very rural area, and I was wondering why the protagonist was being so dumb and also spending all this time pining after this guy. And then I remembered that the protagonist was 15 and realized "ah yes, this character is being dumb in exactly the way that all 15-year-olds are being dumb" - just because 15 was close to an acceptable age for marriage in that time and place doesn't mean that 15-year-olds are all that different now, especially when it comes to love
I get that way now every time because I'm mid twenties but I still love reading fantasy which main characters still tend to be like coming of age so around 16-20 (or younger depending on the books) and you're like "YOU'RE SO STUPID" but they're not, they're just young (and in some cases not even that much younger than me, just.... enough for me to want to shake them about sometimes).
I love this. When i remember Juliette from Shakespeare's play was like 12 i cRINgEeeee
Jeez, I'm SO happy we cannot marry this young these days. I'd have been married for 6 years by now with my ex that would've been fathering my children 😮💨 Nowadays we have birth control and divorce and late marriages! Back then I'd have been the Delilah to his Samson 😂
i just bet that this book was Madame Bovary by Flaubert xp
@@noneofurbulllllll nope. Don't remember what book it was, but pretty sure it wasn't that. They were living in the middle of the woods in Quebec, outside of a small town, and I think were pretty much completely isolated in the winter
Being 50 and having been raised spending at least half of each week in the care of my grandparents, I've been in the position of being able to correct a few things that people my kids' ages get told.
Like "people only had a bath once a week!". Yes but every day we washed face, necks, ears, under arms and private areas. Feet were washed as often as needed but always more than once a week. Hair got away with being washed once a week because of the styles worn and head coverings, so no we weren't wandering around with clouds of flies buzzing round our heads. We've had deodorants a long time but before that it was washing as often as needed and then using scented talc.
The stuff about "men never did any childcare". My dad was a babysitter before having children himself. When I was born he did as much nappy changing and baby bathing as my mother did (both were in full time employment). I know not all men did this but he was not a lone outlier either and there are lots of men these days that refuse to do any childcare in case it makes them girly, which would have made my ex army, boxing instructor, manual labourer dad have laughed his head off. People are always a mixture of ideas and regardless of societal norms, there are always going to be people ignoring those norms and other people imposing even stricter ones on themselves.
I was born in England and am old enough to remember a world in which almost no homes had showers, and people would typically have a bath once a week, but would “have a wash” at the sink every day for the rest of the week. The idea that someone has to have a shower or bath to get their whole body clean is a very modern one. All you need is a bit of water, soap, and a washcloth. I’ve met young people who have no idea what washcloths are actually for, and think they’re just for drying hands.😂
This reminds me of how I recently took a college course on Kansas History (where I live). Kansas since the 1930s has been seen as one of the most conservative and "backwards" of the American states but in its early days (in mid to late 19th century) it was considered one of the most progressive places in the country. In early Kansas there were major pushes for women's rights, African American rights, support for the impoverished, and preventing big corporations from exploiting people. The first woman mayor was elected here, women and people of color could become successful entrepreneurs and business owners, communities for former slaves from the south were established, the state often provided asylum to black people who were unfairly charged with crimes in the south and refused to extradite them when those states asked, and in general the people of Kansas were very proud of their history of fighting against slavery before and during the civil war. This isn't to say things were amazing, as there were definitely still racist and sexist people and not to mention the indigenous people were pushed out of the state and sometimes killed. But it's just so interesting as most Kansans don't know of their history and say things like "why do minorities keep saying they don't have rights? Don't they know that things are way better for them now than back then?" And I'm like, bruh, many Kansans of the past fought to make the state a better place for many minorities while today there are many Kansans fighting to make it more hostile. It's just so frustrating to watch sometimes.
I'm just coming out of a semester of a GE course that touched on that period of American colonial history, and it's almost hilarious how Free State Kansans were able to basically catch the nation's attention (as well as that of federal troops) simply by their unwavering fervor for abolition.
I mean the University of Kansas mascot is the Jayhawks named after a militia anti slavery group called the Jayhawkers.
@@Smellanie4121 Fucking based. Looks like I have a new favorite team.
Dude.... Wyoming is literally the equality state because it was basically started by women (overgeneralization obviously, but still,)
thanks for the info. i am indonesian but i lived in kansas for a year as an exchange student in high school
Re: domestic violence in the 1950s...
My Grandfather, while he loved razzing my grandmother in all kinds of ludicrous ways all his life, never ever raised a hand to her.
In fact, his tradition was, when he got home on Friday night, he would give her a break by cooking dinner (he was an excellent cook who always made the Thanksgiving turkey, and taught his son to cook as well)
After dinner was cleared away, they would move the furniture
and he would clean and wax the floor for the week and entertain the kids while she did the dishes...meanwhile my Grandmother had been a tomboy and the "son" her father never had. As a result she was super technically competent and did all the maintenance/repairs on their household technology....even now, in her mid 80s, she knows how to repair anything!
When his job went on strike and then shuttered completely, she worked in tech in a local mill to support them while he found work.
What is more? His own father, my great grandfather, had been badly injured during a work accident in the 40s and could not return to his manual labor job. The ultimate outcome was, HE became the house husband who cooked and cleaned, and his wife, who had been raised to have a lot of skill with textiles and fabrics, went to work in a texture mill and ultimately became manager of a whole floor.
Her husband respected her and appreciated that he did not have to go back to a career that had already badly injured him twice.
Later in life as a widow, she remarried and was happy to go back to being a homemaker, which she excelled at, but she had been a highly competent breadwinner through the 40s and 50s.
I realize they might be somewhat exceptional (especially my great grandmother being Able to remain a working manager in the 50s) but they're wonderful examples that the 50s was not a time of universal, completely normalized m on f domestic violence.
The 50s, for all it's many issues, was not a time when every man was a middle class white guy in a suburban ranch house, beating his wife and keeping her trapped in their home cooking and polishing the Formica counters.
That vision of the 50s is impossible tunnel vision.
I agree especially on the image of the wife not working being quite false. Most of my ancestors were farmers. Everyone had to work on the fields. Yes the men did the most heavy work and the women were expected to also cook and do the household (that's the sexist part). But my grandma for example also did the bookkeeping and manged the finances of the whole farm... not the position of power you would expect the woman of the household to be in with that "backwards" mindset of the 50ies. Just because the media pushed that narrative of the housewife doesn't mean it was always true. Actually it was quite a new idea that a whole family could live just from the earnings of one person. That was never ever the case before that. Just for the very wealthy people. But in case of the very wealthy people - just like today - men didn't have to work either. Everybody else had to work a lot to survive.
And looking back at the farming part: Most farms in the past also employed other people - both men and women - for work untill modern machinery took away their jobs.
This is an amazing story!
There is something about the post war economy and women stepping back , which at the time they must have thought it the normal flexibility of balancing family with work. Which women had done for decades, generations. But something changed and the weight of keeping the economy going was placed more solely on men but now with less and shrinking participation and inclusion of women.
ALSO
Running a household also used to be respected. Like the fainting couch example + modern convenience food, everyone was told over and over again to aspire to do less work themselves. the value of cooking and managing the lives of the family was undermined by messaging everywhere. About how easy it should be, to do it all culture, to the lie of welfare queens, further then was the idea you can have only 1 a career or be home with your young kids. Trap after trap every one : disrespects the work of managing a household and caring for others.
Well I did go on a bit. I'll post it, it all gets the wheels spinning.
@@misss7777 I think often of my ancestors the coal miners wives. They were WORKING at home believe me. Farming teaching, cooking, mending, crafting, keeping the parish people organized, mid-wifeing, gathering the news, book keeping, purchase planning,.....
@@bethqmount1160 Exactly! This is a JOB, unlike many people think.
Women didn't sit at home doing nothing. They did so many things and made so many things that we BUY now.
Another thing everyone overlooks is, the 50s wife only applied to the west. And even there it was not the rule, maybe "the ideal" promoted everywhere, but families were diverse...
I adore this video.
There's one historical artifact that will always remind me we're not that different from the past. The drawings on pieces of bark by a 6 year old Russian child named Onfim in the 12-1300s. He stops writing a Bible phrase, presumably from a tutor, and starts doodling monsters and knights. He writes greetings to other people, presumably other kids.
one victorian book apparently trolled the reader by saying to turn to a page then adding on that page "you are a fool"
Yes! Love his drawings!!!
I’ve been fascinated by how humans don’t change through out history. From people looking at their phones on the bus, to people still ignoring each other with newspapers on the bus. People addicted to TV, to people waiting for the new monthly book issue that had exaggerated characters and cliffhangers like a Mexican telenovela.
To ancient Egyptian brake up letters. And some Greek dude’s giant writing on a wall being translated to “this is big”. Because there’s a lot of ‘art’ in history that’s dicks and the equivalent of shit posts.
This is one of the main points I try to make to students when I teach. People in the past were just as smart as we are today, we just have access to more information (the internet, etc) and often prioritize different things. The decisions people made in the past were based on different worldviews and make sense in their contexts, if not always in our own. I would warn people, however, to avoid the "wisdom of the ancients" fallacy, wherein people think that because people (supposedly) did something a certain way for ages means that's the best way to do it.
Don't forget, its also true that just because this is the "new way" to do it doesn't make it better. I worked in a job where those doing a particular job had mostly done it that way for some 30-40 years. We tried diff methods but none worked as well. So in that case the old way really was the best way.
Honestly, as an older millenial, I remember the days before the internet became ubiquitous. Even in the 90s, information was so much harder to come across. Wanted to learn something - you'd ask an adult or hope the library had a book on it. That was about it. And if the book told you nonsense, that was about it. Now people who were older in the pre-internet society had some more options, large libraries in the city or bookstores or lectures etc. But I was a small town kid and I didn't have access to that. The luxury of having wikipedia at my fingertips at all times of the day is just so amazing.
At my parents house we found a newspaper from the 1980s. And it had a column where people would write the newspaper with their questions. Like stuff you'd google today, factual questions. It was an absolutely fascinating concept that I never knew existed.
appeal to tradition fallacy
hmm more information and also vastly more misinformation. how about... 'they had lots of information, and got it through very different channels.' it's also worth considering that, based on our own history right up to today, 100 years from now a substantial chunk of our modern 'facts' will turn out to not actually be facts, and also that we will likely be making many of the same silly errors for the same silly reasons as we do today. and did in 1930. and did in 1730. and in 1130... because ego, fear, laziness, greed (and passion, joy, humour and a love of pretty things) aren't historical artifacts but part of being human, just as they were 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago or probably 20,000 years ago.
Your last point is super important. There's a reason we change the way we do things usually.
I just finished reading a great book ("village life in ancient egypt") that is just excerpts of writings we have from a certain village. I think the thing I was most impressed by was the history of collective action. Everyone in that town was working for the pharaoh and paid a regular amount of grain - and went on strike if they didn't receive it. Even had an investigation when it turns out that the representative had been using a measuring scoop that was 5% smaller than regulation, resulting in stiffed pay. But of course, all the day-to-day stuff is familiar too.
This sounds AMAZING.
This is what I found when writing my dissertation on English witchcraft; We think that 17th century people, the ordinary village person, who accused eachother of witchcraft were clearly less advanced than we are mentally for believing in witches and magic, however in saying that one forgets about emotion - these people had been brought up in a world where witchcraft and the power of the devil was real, so when there was something happened that they didn't have an immediate answer for, they feared witchcraft. The point is this was not just a suspicion, but a genuine terror of an imminent, potentially fatal, happening, and people reacted by trying to find the easiest way to remove the 'witch' from their community, however that might have been done.
It seems not that different from the modern day version of "those immigrants are going to take your jobs, overrun your community, and commit crimes."
It's factually not true, but people are looking for a reason for why the old plant closed down, why it's harder to make ends meet, and it's easier to point fingers than to make institutional changes.
Exactly. We're all just making do with the resources, people and Communities we have access to. This is the first time in history where we have an interconnected intercontinental community. There's a power in that which the Grannies and Granddads (and every other name they never noticed = GranX's?) could never dream of. Let's see what we can do to help bring some balance to a dark time - with the Grans help in the form of the knowledge and stories They left behind.
- Cathy (&, accidently, Steve), Ottawa/Bytown/Pimisi
Also! Psychology is a really new science so we really didn't have a scientific understanding of mental illness until recently and no effective methods of treatment until very recently. So it's very easy to attribute mental illness as being caused by supernatural events, which some people still do nowadays tbh.
also, look how prevalent qanon and other conspiracy theories are. we modern people are no less susceptible to accusation of witchcraft.
Another interesting perspective on this came from my English class when we read Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" (written in the 1950s I think?). I'm not sure how historically accurate this is, but it revealed that lots of people who were involved in the scare often used witchcraft accusations to exact revenge on people who had wronged them, so they could justifiably get rid of them. Coupled with the psychological pressure brought on by the Puritan era: insanely zealous religiosity mostly based on fear, learning to navigate a new continent (assuming we're talking about the Salem witch trials) in which your small community and the few people it contained were all you had, it adds a new layer of reasoning as to why they happened.
This isn't to say that you or your dissertation are wrong, by the way. I do wholeheartedly agree with the notion that people were indeed genuinely scared of the influence of witchcraft, especially considering the extreme nature of the things they believed and that God was basically their only hope and comfort.
I think it has a lot to do with the pretty "western" idea of progress being some kind of continuous growing over time that leads us from A to B in a straight upwards line. From that point of view anything in the past must seem below us. Proof of ancient brilliance, like the mechanism of Antikythera, the existence of Teotihuacan or the great pyramids of Giza seem like unexplainable "anomalies" in this - in our - view of the world.
Our rulers want us believing their decisions, often harmful, are wonderfully progressive and useless to resist...acts of God. It's the latest version of Divine Right of Kings
@@matthewclark9522 based and anti-antiChristpilled
Or Aliens
Really not a western idea....that's a ridiculous assumption. We don't know yet how technology progresses....it could be linear in some aspects or not
Only conspiracionists refuse any explanation and evidence that we already know how the egyptians created the pyramids and how they got their knowledge
I've loved Lewis' term "chronological snobbery" since I read it years ago, and getting into historical fashion made me love it even more! It's telling that someone in the mid-20th century saw the same dismissive attitude towards the past that we see now...like you said, humans are really just the same.
boomers started it, a postmodernist term
rise of youth culture e.g. we know better than all of history
Lewis was a special level of awesome.
Yes! Trying to tell someone about history and constantly being interrupted with “No, that’s not true, they didn’t bathe😜 silly” I immediately feel torn between telling them about the actual fact; yelling at them, slap them and leave; or just ignore. And history teachers who were supposed to end these stereotypes just further perpetuate them💀 I guess it’s just a way for today’s society to feel superior, but I hate how arrogant it is. It just makes me so bitter :/
Yes, for GCSE I studied medicine in the UK from the Middle Ages to present, and in the Middle Ages, they had a document telling them not to overeat, overdrink and THEY BATHED!! In herbs as well, which is very good for you!
When literally racism and misogyny and bigotry are still rampant today.
@@anniehindley2866 Oh! That’s so interesting! Is there any way I can find the document?
If they were *THAT* stupid then we wouldn't be here to begin with.
UGH, I know exactly what you mean. I tried to tell my friends that corsets were not death machines, and they were just like, "but in this movie it shows that they actually did suffocate women to the point of fainting." And I just wanted to say, "PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN IS NOT THE END ALL BE ALL OF HISTORICAL FACTS."
"Why are we feeling so superior about the things that we made worse?"
this is such a beautiful quote I absolutly agree to it.
Of course it is easier to point out problems from the past looking at it from a modern perspective. But as you said, we often tend to have a blind spot. I am quite curious about what people in 200 years are going to say and think about some things we do that will turn out to be a. extremely inpractical or b. damaging our health.
Modern person: Good thing we no longer have people like Boss Tweed or companies like Standard Oil. Those monopolies & trusts back in the day were horrible!
Modern times: so we have Google, Facebook, and other Big Tech companies...
Google, whose business is based in divulging your personal data to thousands of parties every time you visit a page with an ad..
I so vividly remember a moment back in high school History class when we had bene learning about WWII and how many people and countries (including my own) turned away and didn't help Jewish refugee etc. And there was a girl piping up saying how horrible that was, how could people be so unfeeling, how she would have done differently. And the teacher snapped round and said "so, what are you doing for the refugees now".
I agree, but moreso it isn't ethical to judge historical figures based on the morals of modern society.
Not only is Hindsight is 20/20, but like a previous poster commented "[most] kids aren't stupid, they are just inexperienced" or differently experienced. This applies to historical figures too.
This is why studying history is so important.
The reply of your history teacher is actually really good. I'll try to remember it :3
I mean your classmate wasn’t wrong. it IS terrible that countries refused Jewish refugees, just like how it’s terrible when countries refuse refugees now.
I had a professor say that one day, the borders of our countries will be viewed as we once viewed the walls of concentration camps. I mean, why did people accept the idea of a concentration camp being okay? Why is it okay for people on "that side" of a border to starve while on "this side" to be healthy, have plenty, etc?
Yet still, the student, the history teacher, you, and all these commenters are missing the point. The Allies forced the Treaty of Versailles upon the German people after the Great War (World War I) which exacted hideous reparations on the German population and promised to keep them in poverty for generations. THAT and ONLY that is what forced the German people to embrace the Nazi Party, which offered relief from literal starvation. A more vindictive, immoral document has never been committed to paper, and the blood of ALL the people lost during World War II was the result of the Allied countries quest for economic vengeance upon a civilian population. Funny how our history teachers never tell us that.
as they say, "people have always been people", even if we go thousands of years in the past, people had the same feelings and thoughts we might be having right now, just in a different context. we should learn from them instead of automatically thinking we're better than them just because they lived a long time ago
i’ve found that so many historical misconceptions are just people taking art way too literally. paintings and stories are a reflection of culture but not necessarily of everyday life. if you read an old timey story and a woman is fainting 12 times a day it’s probably just the author trying to be dramatic
Lol that is equivalent to saying that everyone in early 21st century have big hips because of Kim Kardashian photos.
People 200 years from now will watch action movies and think cars from our time exploded when you shot them with bullets.
My great-aunt had an abusive alcoholic for a husband. They had a shotgun wedding right after WW2 and came from very religious families. Him hitting her was an outrage to her family. The issue was indeed that the law did nothing to protect her *and* that she wanted a divorce with was forbidden by the church. Some of her own aunts and uncles tried to presuade her to go back to her husband because marriage was for life. Thát was the big issue. In the end, she never got divorced and she and my grandmother (her sister) never forgave the family members that put so much pressure on an abuse victim.
The whole "everyone in medieval and renaissance times thought the earth was flat" thing came about during the 19th/20th century, because guess what? The Victorians liked to feel superior to their ancestors, just like we do. The Greeks viewed the earth as a sphere, and in the 3rd century, Eratosthenes' lowest calculated estimate of the earth's circumference had less than 1% error from what we know the actual circumference to be. And he did this without computers. You can find references to the earth spinning in medieval literature. And while there was a geocentric, earth-centered model of the solar system, it wasn't because they thought the earth was superior to everywhere else, it was because they thought it was inferior to what they saw in the night sky (remember that Satan's crotch is at the center of hell in the center of the earth in Dante's Inferno), so the heliocentric model was a promotion.
The geocentric model probably came from the fact that for ancient people Earth was the point of reference to everything else. You observed the sun and the stars moving, so naturally assumed they did and you were stationary. The actual geocentric model was constructed based on the assumption that all stellar bodies moved along circles as the ideal geometric form. Greek philosophers/scientists were big on the idea of the 'ideal form' at the time.
Coincidentally, Earth being the center of the universe very nicely fitted into inherent human superiority complex as well. After all, we were the only intelligent species (that we knew of) and so obviously we had to be special. During the middle ages(?) there was a famous heretical monk that postulated there is an infinite number of worlds with an infinite number of peoples. In his view it made God even greater. Obviously, this did not sit well with the church doctrine at the time.
thank you for mentioning Erastothenes, I like to imagine that he's spinning in his grave very fast at the mention of Flatearthers lol
@@krinkrin5982
A couple historical mistakes in your comment. First, the geocentric model did put the Earth at the center, yes. The thing is, the center was not the most honorable point in the universe, but instead the lowest, the most physical and the furthest away from God. If anything, Earth was thought of as the cesspit of the universe. It was not adopted for religious reasons whatsoever, even though it happened to (superficially) resemble the Biblical cosmology.
The 'heretical monk' you mentioned was Giordano Bruno, and he actually was executed for his heretical views, NOT for postulating an infinite number of worlds. A non-heretic thinker, Nicholas of Cusa, made the same hypothesis two centuries earlier, and he never faced any backlash whatsoever.
More info about this down here ↓
historyforatheists.com/2017/03/the-great-myths-3-giordano-bruno-was-a-martyr-for-science/
@@Lewisfan1 Thank you for the corrections. Wasn't the geocentric model copied from the Greeks though? Did they also consider Earth to be the lowliest and least noble place in the universe?
F-ing finally someone is talking about this. The amount of times I saw people just believe blatant lies. In the future I'm sure people will say how crude and dumb we are.
"wow can you imagine? people back then just wore these really tight bras that held their breasts! And apparently the wires underneath would oftten stab people through the heart! People even fainted because their bra was too tight, broke their ribs even! Imagine doing any type of work while wearing a bra, I'd rather die!"
@@spntageous5249 such barbaric people. Thankfully we invented the magnetic tata holder so we don't suffer
When I was a kid, we used to cough and sneeze into our hands. So I guess we were a bunch of dumbasses, then? We couldn't even tell Toronto from Toledo.
We are XD
They would be right.
I never really grew up with the "ancestors=stupid" mentality because my parents would always tell me stories of their parents and grandparents, and it always struck me how talented and awesome they are.
Like that one time my mom told me how my gentle, soft-spoken, and caring grandma who loved spending her time knitting, embroidering, and praying, grabbed a huge fish that was stuck in a tidal pool with her skirt, got unto a horse and rode home with it like a boss. Or how my mom's grandpa literally made a golden crown for a religious statue that he also carved himself (which is still being used and paraded to this day) from a piece of gold a friend had given him. Like, my cousins and I could only wish we were half as talented as them.
One of my ancestors on my mom's side is Wilhelm Maybach, one of the main geniuses behind the development of internal combustion engines and the cofounder of both Daimler and Maybach Motors. His work was integral to the world's first motorcycles and motorboats. On my dad's side there's a long lineage of Native American wilderness guides across Southern Quebec and the Adirondacks. There's a Wesleyan church in Long Lake NY that one of my great-great grandfathers and his brothers designed and built despite having almost no formal education of any sort.
It's hard to believe that your ancestors were stupid when you've stood in a building they built over a century ago that's still used for worship every Sunday, and when luxury automobiles still bear a name you primarily associate with your great-grandmother.
I grew up hearing about how my Great Grandpa (a Slav) knew Real well German to the point that when he got injured in WW2 he was able to make them think he was German and they gave him medical care and released him... Only to go back to fight them again.
Ingratitude is the mortal sin of our society.
Oh yeah, my mom always tell me about my great great grandmother who was the hero for my country, she build school for kids but also used that as place to gather fighter. She always helping child birth for free and help the mother to take care for their baby. She also the only person who can cut the super big trees in the middle of cemetery without destroying any tombstone.
Untill now her birthday still being celebrate in my district
My family kinda sees me to be her succesor but i don't have any talent like her🤣
In my case, my mom's grandfather was very fond of poetry and literature. So much, that he went to his village's park almost every weekend to read poetry and say "bombas" with his fiends. He also had many other talents, he was a master with agriculture; he knew a lot of tricks and very clever ways to care for his crops. One story I find very funny about him is when his son (my mom's dad) hit her, and her grandfather hit him twice as hard. That being because in my mom's side of the family it's basically forbidden to hit children. But for real, he didn't even hesitate to hit his full-grown son lol.
As a Computer Science Nerd I can affirm that there are so many technologies left in the past that are (or would be) worth revisiting but get neglected simply because they're old!
Ps: Can you give us tips on how to start studying Historical Fashion?!
I love old tech!! Do you have any book recs talking about this?
@@nongshimrizzforce Oh and there's also a bunch of algorithms which time forgot because at the time of their creation they were deemed too memory expensive! We're just now slowly rediscovering them!
@@nongshimrizzforce So I just typed this really elaborate answer and RUclips didn't send it 🤦🤦🤦. I'm dead 💀.
@@nongshimrizzforce
I'll try to summarize what I said in the elaborate answer which RUclips forgot.
Basically there's no singular book about this kind of stuff. You gotta be curious and dig around. There are some great stuff about retro tech on RUclips but reading about the works and life of the most famous CS people around is usually a good idea. Then I gave the example that I'm currently learning about old graphical user interfaces and old operating systems, as well as old keyboards, and what metaphors and functionalities we've lost that they had.
@@3333218 hey, thanks! i really appreciate that :))
This reminds me of an assignment I had in 10th grade where we had to read an essay about the rac which was supposedly some past civilizations method of transportation that created lots of pollution and killed people and then we discussed it as a class. And everyone was bashing them and saying how stupid they were until the teacher said the rac is actually a car and everything in the essay was true about cars. Blew my mind and changed my life. I think about that assignment all the time. I always wonder what future people are going to think we were dumb for. Plastic? Fossil fuels? Chemotherapy?
Now that you say it.. most of chemotherapy might look soo dumb if we ever get a true cure for cancer omg
Also antibiotics possibly? If we can find a way to selectively kill bad bacteria without messing with the good ones
100%! ☝️
We had a similar assignment about the Nacirema people and their funny morning rituals :)
@@PsychoKat90 i did that one too
Chemotherapy in 200 years: "They fought cancer giving you more cancer!"
It always baffles me when people say people (particularly women) from ye olden days would use incredibly toxic chemicals on themselves to be prettier cause nowadays detox laxative teas are the norm, we inject ourselves with chemicals to look prettier and more like the wealthy people, we put ourselves through incredibly invasive surgeries, sometimes in really dodgy circumstances, to have an impossible body shape and we actively buy lipsticks that hurt us to have bigger lips. Anyone from any other century would think we're insane.
Some might want those things. "You can make yourself look any way you want? How much does it cost?" Women have too long been primarily valued for their sex appeal and homemaking skills, relegating older women to glorified babysitting or sitting in a warm corner. Looking younger was just as appealing to women of the past as it is now. This, despite the number of powerful, intelligent, often ruthless, women of a certain age throughout history.
@@julietfischer5056 Botulinum Toxin is deadliest substance to humans known. It makes radioactive heavy metals or nerve gas look like candy. It's fatal at 70 - 150 nanograms. Theoretically you could wipe out humanity, with less than 1kg.
And then they noticed how people who died from it, lost their wrinkles.
So we gave it a funky new marketing name (Botox) and put it in the hands of beauty therapists.
@@Muritaipet- No wrinkles, and barely any facial expression, when used.
We can't sneer at past ladies smearing white lead on their faces when modern women hold freaking botox parties.
I was born in the '50s. When I was a kid, boys were taught to NEVER hit a girl. Men who hit women were considered cowardly creeps. I suspect domestic abuse is worse today. Also, I just heard a claim on the radio today that women were arrested in the '60s for wearing pants. That's total nonsense. My grandmother wore slacks as long ago as I can remember, as did many women. Female film stars wore them in the '30s. If history that recent is distorted, imagine how wrong we get history from centuries ago.
Pretty much today women hit men and it's considered "empowerment"
@@HipHopLuv123 yeah it's really unfair and I'm a girl myself.
Some traditionalists were quite vocally critical of women wearing slacks. But arrested? Not at all
I don't know, the thing today it's that we have TV and jornal, and internet and a lot of stuffs to post this kind of thing, the women can easily report a violence and the media like to share it. And I was taught like that and I never hit a woman even when they hit me making bleed.. but for sure, right now, I would defend my self, maybe not hitting her like she was a man, but hitting enough to not put me in dangerous.
@@HipHopLuv123 no. Pretty much today EVERYONE abuses EVERYONE. stop spreading propaganda.
Branding someone a witch for reading math reminds me a lot of how some people these days will brand you as other things if you disagree with them lol
I must say, as a history student I am always confronted with how smart and innovative people were in the past. My opinion is that we generally think of history and progress as a linear thing, which is totally wrong. We just like to think of ourselves as better, so that we don't feel responsable to keep improving ourselves
Oh hi, fellow history student :)
the weirdest part about looking at the people of the past and seeing all their shortcomings makes me understand how we can be flawed but because those flaws are the status quo we might live with them without ever realising they are there
we all are stupid. that's why we should show some understanding and respect to our past so our children might show us the same one day
Love this take on it!
Yay for C.S. Lewis shoutouts that aren't just Narnia! Honestly, learning about Chronological Snobbery from him 20 years ago changed how I read books, watched movies...just so many things. I do think we can idealize/lionize the past in incredibly unhealthy ways but the opposite error--beliving everything modern is better--is just as damaging. What's better, and what I think he modeled, is a humble posture toward both the past and present.
Fun Fact: Lewis was very modern in his early years. His first book is a wartime poetry collection called Spirits in Bondage. He was 19 when he wrote it and it is MODERN! I mean, T.S. Eliot modern. Very interesting glimpse at a man who would eventually take himself and his art FAR less seriously. And who would also use his love of the past and modern novelist instincts to write my favorite book (that should be a movie): 'Til We Have Faces. Fascinating to see the transformation.
Til We Have Faces is such an underrated gem! It has maybe the best written female character I know, it is also good example how to create strong female lead type of character and how to avoid Marysuisation of warrior princess.
The funny thing is all other Lewis' female heros are rather bland... Almost like he put all his female chatacter creating potential into this one book.
Also it talks about so much of modern problems... Nowadays discussing emotional and psychological trauma and various social problems is hot topic in books, and I feel like this book rocks at it.
His turn against idolizing modernity and progress was best displayed in his essay called "The Abolition of Man", and also in one book from his sci-fi series called "That hideous strength". He explores the conclusions that logically followed certain philosophical ideas from his day that he had previously held to. It's kind of horrifying and you can sort of see a lot of his predictions about what would happen if the ideology continued spreading have come true today. "That Hideous Strength" was really eery; the man could have written horror novels if he had wanted to.
@@a.w.4708 Wellllll.... I have a theory about that. He wrote it after marrying Joy Davidman and it's dedicated to her. She was a modernist and poet herself. I am pretty sure she altered his bachelor's perspective on women just by existing in his life, but I'm also certain she influenced all of the women in that book, including the protagonist. I don't see her letting him get away with another Susan. But you're right, the trauma in those books is so raw and given an amazing treatment.
@@emmagrace6396 Oh, he was great at scary stuff. Truly. Peralandra's opening and the final, uh, boss fight is pure horror.
I couldn't agree more. Definitely one of the top historical figures I'd like to have dinner with.
As someone interested in the Solarpunk movement, I've seen several examples of how sometimes historical as well as non-Western traditional solutions can help sustainability more than high-tech solutions. These things can range from passive cooling/heating in architecture, to permaculture farming, to clothing etc.
yep, I've encountered this repeatedly too.
🤔 “Solarpunk”?(!)…That actually a “thing”??
(😯Wow! Learn something new every day….)
Bro the west and colonialism RUINED indian indigenous knowledge. We are now slowly going back to making homes of clay and straw mixyure that stays up to 5 degrees cooler or warmer depending on the ratio
@@Sedgewise47 Yes, it's a niche science-fiction subgenre set in a sustainable, socially progressive and often post-capitalist future, and has a very activist focus (using fiction to help people imagine a better future) with its fans trying their hand in permaculture, tech-DIY, mutual aid etc.
Its aesthetic often contain elements of arts&crafts, art-nouveau, lots of plants, non-western indigenous influences, and eco-village vibes.
@@Oorjitashahi Yeah it's absolutely abhorrent how much has been lost because of western colonialism, both material and cultural losses, and the eradication of entire peoples. Good that you mention India btw, one of the examples I saw was a low-electricity AC designed in India, with a combination of traditional ceramic structures, water, and modern engineering: /watch?v=nt2oyaP2m6Q
This reminds me of a school project I did where I compared the life spans of Egyptian pharaohs against life span of British kings. In my young stupid mind, I assumed the kings would of had longer life spans over the pharaohs because the kings were more modern timeline wise. But turns out the numbers were the other way around, and taught me to not assume that older meant worse.
This feeds into an uneasy relationship with modern medicine. "Look at all the awful things that science thought was perfectly acceptable only 50-100 years ago. Which of the things science says are perfectly acceptable today will horrify people 50-100 years in the future?"
At the same time, I still do not presume to know medicine better than a doctor, so.
You're totally right. Medicine is always changing. There are medicines that used to be given out as standard treatments for things that now are very rarely used because medicines created more recently are more effective, less addictive, or have less side effects. Old antidepressants for example.
Also, people seem to think modern medicine is basically done and dusted and we know everything. I've heard people say, 'Back in the old days, if you got diagnosed with x, there was nothing they could do for you' as if that doesn't happen now all the time. Cancer? Alzheimers? Neurology in general? There's a lot we don't understand.
People think last century was so backwards because they cut out the affected part of the brain of someone with mental illness. Nowadays, we cure a lot of things by cutting out the affected body part. We don't know how to fix it. Hope you didn't need it! Also so many conditions are not cured, just treated/managed ie you take medicines for the rest of your life, with side effects, usually just to lessen the problem you're facing not stop it completely.
@@hamsterpouches Would just like to mention that surgery as a treatment for psychological disorders is making a bit of a comeback - though a lot more precise than it was in the olden days. A lot of people are hesitant to go down that avenue of research since no one wants a repeat of what happened with lobotomies, but it still has some promise. For instance, one procedure that involves slightly damaging part of a fear circuit that's overactive in people with severe OCD is sometimes used as a treatment of last resort in cases where the patient hasn't had success with other treatments, and meet other requirements regarding how bad their condition is.
When I learn about old medecine I'm like «actually they kinda had a point» For example the fact that some meds had weed, opium etc in it yes that can calm you just maybe there's too much opium in that
@@Amy_the_Lizard I didn't know that! Does sound a lot more precise. Thanks for sharing
Also a lot of modern medicine still uses ‘old timey’ practices. There is a doctor exhibit showing a traveling doctors tool kit from the early 1900s at the Star of India museum. Most people walk in and say ‘I’m glad we don’t use those any more’; medical professionals know the precise name of each tool. The difference is now they are now ‘single use’, sterilized, and thrown out if someone so much as looks at it wrong (really nice high quality stainless steel tools too). Also, we still use leaches and maggots… there is a whole catalog for ordering medical insects. Imagining and sanitation are significantly better understood thankfully.
We still use opioids, most medical professionals I’ve met have always thought pot should be legal because the science absolutely supports it’s medicinal benefits, it’s infamy was political not scientific. Many people take willow bark in aspirin form every day. Mold is still the most common antibiotic, we just call it penicillin now. The difference is we know exactly which chemicals are responsible for causing the effect we want (not always why it causes that effect), can isolate and sometimes synthesize them, and there have been studies into what is an effective dose and what is a lethal dose.
Also a lot of modern medicine is about balancing the cost/benefit equation. We know xrays are incredibly dangerous, they killed the people who discovered them, but they are also an effective method of rooting out other more serious and immediate issues. Yes it may slightly increase your risk of cancer later to xray your broken arm, but if the doctor putting it back together can’t see what the problem is they will not be able to fix it as well and you will lose mobility now. Yes chemo and radiation is legitimately poisoning yourself in the hopes that it will kill the cancer before it kills/irreparably cripples you… but we know you will die very soon without that treatment; and there are people who make the choice not to take it everyday. By and large cutting someone open is a counter indicator for life, but surgery to fix your heart or remove a burst appendix might work and you’ll die now without it. Removing blood is not a great idea, but (when proper tests are ordered) 10 ml of blood that you can survive without can tell you all kinds of information: if you have an infection, if your organs are working properly, if you have cancer, etc. Anesthesia kills people every day, but surgery without it is torture.
Our practices are barbaric, but by the time you *need* a doctor, something is already wrong - they didn’t create the problem they are just trying to fix it to the best of current understanding and ability. I hope in 100 yrs medical knowledge has advanced to the point that people look back on these treatments that are currently our only option and are grateful for the advances they have. Medical professionals all over the world are constantly trying to find new methods that are less invasive, better targeted, more precise methods that are still effective. Advances in computers and digital imaging options are insanely helpful in that regard. Being able to make a tiny cut, shove in a camera, and be able to see what you’re doing without having to cut open the entire area is way safer. Being able to concentrate and focus the beams of radiation so it mostly hits the area where the cancer cells are is way better than irradiating the entire room and hoping it hits the cancer. But most medical procedures are done because life or the quality of life without the procedure is less viable than the potential outcome if the risk pays off.
One medical practice that is often considered barbaric is plastic surgery. That is a lot of risk and pain to undergo a minor cosmetic change… but I can’t really blame people who do it, if it is a risk they are willing to accept they should be able to; just like most people didn’t tight lace their corsets most people don’t get plastic surgery, but people have and will always be willing to endure pain for vanity. Hell tattoos and piercings are super common and shoving needles into ones flesh for purely cosmetic purposes is insane.
Our school took us to a fashion history museum. They told us that corsets were so tight that women couldn't breathe in them... Did they really think Victorian women were so stupid as to suffocate themselves??
Yeah sure. After all they just sat around eating bon-bons! /s
People still think women are that stupid
Women couldn't breathe DEEPLY, so if they were shocked and gasped, they'd faint. But they could absolutely breathe.
Heck, a well-designed and well-fitted corset is actually good for breath support. If it's not so tight as to cut off deep breathing, but it IS supportive of the diaphragm, it can be quite useful. A LOT of singers, through the ages, have relied on corsets for their breath support. Male and female, and regardless of fashion.
Right? Like omg the POWER of misinformation.
@@AuntLoopy123 I've been in light opera productions that have used corsets, and I can support this statement. With my diaphragm.
lol I always just thought that the whole “they had some weird body/hygiene issues” thing was more of an invention/access issue than a stupidity issue, even as a kid. I’m pretty sure most people would use modern hygienic practices/equipment if they knew or had any access to them.
I mean, are we gonna blame ourselves for not saving cancer patients before finding the cure to cancer?
Societal stuff is one thing, but I don’t understand how not having access to good heart medicine/surgery in the 50’s = they were stupid because they died of heart disease/issues more often. Same with something like poor work conditions in the 1500’s or something like that.
I think I know the origin of that pooping on the floor thing!
I read a book about Versailles a few years ago, and there was an account of one courtier (ONE) who on one occasion (maybe more? The account mentioned a specific incident) if this lady walking down the hall and just dropping a deuce as she went, expecting her maid to clean it up.
Pretty sure it was only ever the one person. It's the equivalent of people assuming everyone in the 1990's pooped in paper bags, lit them on fire, and put the on people's doorsteps because it was in one Adam Sandler movie.
I'm dying 😂 if that whole idea was just down to one person talking shit about their rich boss, that's kind of amazing.
I totally agree, a wonderful example is how the Aboriginal Australian people looked after the land before the colonisers arrived. They lived here for thousands of years with so much lost knowledge that we will never recover because the English decided that their methods were best even though the Aboriginals knew far more about the country than we even know today.
Gene flow reveals that they wiped out another population group that likely came from Indonesia.
They literally turned most of Australia into a desert and wiped out the megafauna by using fires to hunt lol
@@blacktigerpaw1
Modern day "noble savage" mythmaking is very common.
@@connorperrett9559 Yeah, the aboriginals did some pretty horrible things. But at least they didn't invade my country like the anglophones did, so they have that going for them.
@@blacktigerpaw1 Like the Bantu people who spread all over Southern Africa just a couple of centuries before the arrival of the Europeans.
I've observed this when it comes to the pyramids of Egypt as well. Some people today have such a difficult time accepting the fact that humans thousands of years back weren't actually stupid that they'd rather believe the pyramids were built with the help of aliens lmao
Another aspect is how history is consumed through lens of sensationalism in the online world, I remember coming across the story of Princess Qajar and how 12 or 13 men committed sui/ci/de because they were rejected by her--the sensational part besides that being that she wouldn't be considered a beauty in our times. So I tried to do a bit of digging and find actual sources besides pop history articles, and turns out the whole story is most likely fake. Things like these make me roll my eyes when I come across sensationalist pop articles because more likely than not, whatever they are claiming either have weak sources or are straight up made up
About the pyramids (and other wonders on the African continent) - keep in mind the "West" resists the idea that Africans - ancient or otherwise - could have had that kind of intelligence.
@@MsZephyra Yup, agreed. This type of racist/biased thinking has been a thing for a long time now. The Fall of Civilizations channel here on RUclips (which is an awesome history channel btw!), mentioned in their Khmer Empire video about how early Europeans theorized that the great city of Angkor (in Cambodia) must have been built by the Greeks or Romans, even though that doesn't even make any sense considering Cambodia is literally all the way in South East Asia (ig because they thought how could non-white peoples create something so magnificent lol). Some people are so biased that they'd rather make up ridiculous theories instead of accepting actual facts 😆
The Princess Qajar thing was kinda sad because she was louded for her personality, charm and belief and yet her looks is what matters in historical tabloid for clicks
@@lulukulu5489 Yess she seemed to be a courageous intellectual woman who apparently even criticised her own family's rule of Persia..There are many cool women like her from all over the world and through out history, yet the few that are remembered almost always have their appearance scrutinised first and foremost, yet you rarely see this happen with men
@@bombombakudan2831 Yea, the princess and her family also seems very endeering and interesting once you research more too, Persia also has lots of interesting culture and belief, could just be me, but I think westerners have always been baffled by them in some way or another, ancient roman/greeks also called persian men feminine in the most degrading way possible just cause they wore pants 🤣
Great video overall, but... .
"Is washing your hair with a complicated chemical formula truly better for you than just using some natural basic ingredients as our ancestors did?"
I don't know, maybe? Just because it's a complicated chemical formula doesn't mean it's harmful. And the complicated formula may have some point, so yeah. Maybe. People in the past were not stupid, but we aren't either (well, let's say it varies greatly, even between different situations of the same person). We live in other conditions than our ancestors and stuff that worked for them just fine may not work for us, for example because we live in much bigger societies. I don't like the whole "artificial products vs natural products" stuff. What's even natural? Most of the fruits and vegetables we eat are not plants that just evolved under natural conditions, things like wheat, emmer or apples are all the product of hundreds or thousand of years of low-tech bio-engineering. And it's not like we just pull our chemicals from some strange other dimension. It's just broken down natural stuff. Like when we know that some plant helps with certain conditions, why not just looking for the actual substance in it that causes this helpful effect and using that substance in exactly the dosage it helps the most. And we can then even look if we find the same substance somewhere else where we can subtract it in an easier way. That doesn't mean every "chemical product" (yes, kinda stupid term, basically everything is chemical) is perfectly safe, just like not every "natural" thing is perfectly safe. It's always a case-to-case thing.
I would add the point that it's not "a chemical formula". This is not some scientist picking up from glass tubes and mixing them up as they observe the explosions come out in spectacular fashion. Usually it's something like "take the good old way to do things, and add a step or two to make them safer and more commercially flexible", or "do it instead in these steps which are simpler and cheaper", with the hardest part of it all having been done for you decades or even centuries ago.
BTW, yeah, the use of the term "chemical" is weird. Institutions like the UN often use "novel entities"... which is also weird, and is meant more for things like CFCs which clearly have no precedent and are specifically exposed into the environment, not as food ingredients. "Artificial chemicals" or "synthetic chemicals" might sound right, but they still can imply things that exist in nature just fine. Apparently "naturally occurring chemicals" is used to make up for it, but wow that's a mouthful, and it only helps on one side - to talk about the others, people call them back "man-made chemicals" or "synthetic chemicals", even despite the fact that those categories SHOULD include naturally occurring chemicals.
Thank you for putting to words exactly why I felt that that particular comment she made was one of the weaker takes in this video. It's not like every scientist or engineer nowadays is all like: "hur dur I make bad [product] made with [chemicals/GMOs/etc.] because I like money". A decent proportion of them still have the knowledge and moral/ethical propensities to make safe AND effective products.
Yes, but i'd like to point out that sometimes the reason we replace natural materials for artificially ones is because they are cheaper and easier to produce in massive quantities, but the quality can be questionable, in some cases. We have to keep In mind that the logic of our times is to produce and consume more and faster.
If we want to be technically correct, then most solutions from previous ages had much more complicated chemical formulas. People falling for naturalistic fallacy usually don't understand that chemical composition of apple is far more complicated than of paracetamol pill. It is with modern science and engineering we actually get to know most fundamental stuff about things we are using.
You know what's kind of ironic? This idea that modernity is always better and everything/everyone in the past was stupid and bad is actually a very victorian idea. If you read almost anything on science or history from that time, you'll hear almost the exact same thing. It's also where alot of these history myths come from. Funny how that idea from the past carried over but others haven't.
The idea of own superiority is far older than Victorian times. Look at Ancient Rome and Greece for one. Only they mostly applied it to everyone outside of their culture. The same with ancient (and modern) Chinse. It might actually be a way for groups to 'immunize' against foreign influences. Wouldn't be surprised if some random tribe of Neanderthals met a tribe of Homo Sapiens and both thought the other were weird idiots.
So ironic!
The Victorians also destroyed a lot of extant buildings in our cities. Areas of Bradford (UK) got rebuilt several times in the Victorian era, and very little of Georgian Birmingham was left standing by the end of the Victorian era
I wouldn’t say it was just the Victorians - the enlightenment and neo classical movements generally saw the medieval period (a whole 1000 years of it) as the “dark ages”. Ironically, they thought the Greeks and the Romans (aka even further back) were smarter. Of course they just had technology that was then lost to future generations, as well as their proximity to other Mediterranean cultures. Its all chance really.
@@kaseridonrivers9324 yes and also the modernist movement last century
the experimental archaeology that ruth goodman does really showed me how smart people in the past were. they had problems that people have, and fixed them with what was available to them
Humans as animals really don't change. What changes are the circumstances we find ourselves in, and more often than not we are the ones causing that change.
Thank you for pointing me at another person with potentially highly interesting things to show/talk about.
modern people panic if social media goes down for one hour
Ruth is awesome!
And experimental archaeology is really something anyone can use, to a degree - for me it has been an interesting way of exploring the kinds of experiences people in the past could have known; learning old embroidery techniques (plenty of styles & techniques fell out of favour, & others rose in popularity), looking into how old recipes were done (like Max Miller, Ann Reardon & Ruth- among many others - when they don’t use electric aids)- seeing how much it took to do things like make clothes (a ton of people in the FashionHistory community who make some/ all clothes by hand), or write with the methods of the past (Townsends did a whole little series on it).
Research into things like period cleaning (again, Townsends did a great deep-diver into period laundry, & the Victorian Way talked about the methods in their era)
Period transportation has been one of the more challenging areas, because- it isn’t that knowledge doesn’t exist about modes of transportation, but that there are details I don’t yet understand...
@@OcarinaSapphr- If you are interested in prehistory and early history then I recommend Primitive Technology. The guy is reconstructing plausible ancient techniques of building tools, creating building materials and finally erecting buildings using nothing but what he finds in the forest. His presentation is incredibly relaxing and he has a lot of information in the description for each video.
For the more mechanically inclined there is Clickspring - a clockmaker/engraver who is slowly reconstructing the Antikythera mechanism using tools he personally makes in ways that the original maker might have used. He gives a lot of insight into the process and the analysis of the actual find.
And then there is Scientists Against Myths, a group of Russian archeologists that explain how ancient monuments and artifacts might have been constructed using the tools and materials available at the time. They also make a lot of fun of popular conspiracy theories.
I volunteered at an LGBTQ library + archive in the pre-pandemic days, and seeing queer culture before Stonewall was eye-opening to me. There was one publication, Vagabond, that was selling a "His and His" towel set in 1965, alongside pins and rings to covertly signal to others that you were a "Vagabond Man." Queer culture was rich, and we had fun and joy even in dark times. Knowing that we found each other, supported each other and loved each other and had fun doing it is so heartening to realize, especially in the face of anti-gay and anti-trans rhetoric. There's always the risk that there may be dark times ahead, darker than what we've been through, but there's so much joy too.
I don't known if you're familiar with Kaz Rowe content but she has a lot of material about LGBTQ+ history, it's really interesting.
@@eeEEee7991 I started watching one of Kaz’s videos but got distracted by something - I’ll definitely watch more!
This was one of the things that also pissed me off about the last Pirates movie. There were women astronomers by the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which is when that movie seems to be set. It was uncommon, yeah, but it wasn't unheard of. She would have been considered weird and unwomanly, maybe, but not a witch
Ikr I hated that in the film
Right? And having all the pirate men be soooo confused by her astronomy and knowledge of the “study of time” like… how does she think they got places, they literally used star constellations etc.
Now days movie makers seem to think that the only way to have a good female character is to make her smarter than everyone… then they dumb down all the men and act like they are just bumbling idiots like no… that’s not how life is at all
By "Pirates movie" I assume you mean the latest "Pirates of the Caribbean" film? If so, you need to take everything in those moves with a massive mound of salt. Let's face it, they're not meant to be realistic in the slightest. The first movie started off with undead pirates and ghost ships. The whole series is ridiculous.
Okay but unlike nearly every “Thank you for coming to my TED Talk” joke, this actually SHOULD be a TED Talk.
I remember reading a short science fiction story by H.G. Wells about a traveler who gets lost in the mountains and stumbles across a society where everyone is blind. At first I thought the story was written within the past couple decades because of how 'progressive' it sounded, but it's actually from 1904, and the author was born in 1866! At first he really pities them and is baffled by how they can live with such a "defect," and thinks that he'll be able to revolutionize their society because he's the only one who can see (and is therefore superior.) The plot of the story completely demolishes his assumptions, and tells us both that 'different' doesn't mean 'better' and that people who aren't the same as most others (because they're blind or deaf or whatever) have their own great, fulfilling lives that don't need to conform to the standards of other people who can see or hear. Realizing that this story was written by someone born in the mid 19th century really made me re-asses my own assumptions about people of the past tbh, I was kind of humbled.
whats the name of the story? where can i find it?
@@rianefalcao6330 I want to know too
Drop the title op
@@rianefalcao6330 The story is called "The Country of the Blind". I'm sure it's available on Project Gutenberg.
It's called "The Country of the Blind" .. from the saying "In the country of the blind, the one eyed man is king" .. It is a thinly vailed critique of the "White Man's Burden" theory of 19th century "enlightened Liberalism" that was prevalent in Europe as justification for the colonial enslavement of Africa and Asia. The idea that it was the responsibility of the European white man to bring order and civilization to the savages of Africa and Asia (hence White man's burden) so as to uplift them. Many like H.G. Wells saw this for what it really was, an excuse to colonize and exploit these places in the name of uplifting them.
two historic things about clothing that we need to get back: community and longterm use (through passing to other people especially baby and children's clothes and keeping each item until its physically destroyed and can't be fixed anymore) and things made to fit (to fit different body sizes, to be accessible for those with disabilities, sensory sensitivities, plus with a level of personalisation that allows the wearer to feel like themselves in the clothes). The two things I always find in fashion history videos and that make me cry because of how worse things have become.
People who make their own clothes have never stopped doing those things! Outsourcing the production of daily necessities has greatly reduced appreciation for the effort that goes into them, and consequently encouraged "throwaway culture". Unfortunately humanity has difficulty comprehending that easier isn't always better. Add to that a marked tendency toward behavioral extremes and you get a lot of preventable stupidity.
I also want to see it become acceptable to wear darned or mended clothes. We've lost so many historical techniques for repairing fabric that got stained, torn, or worn thin, because people feel ashamed to have a patch over a tear or don't know how to embroider over a spot so they throw the clothes away. Many of my friends and coworkers can't even replace a button - I get asked to do it a lot!
@@marysue4729 yeah, well rich countries lost it.
I was taught how to mend a teared sock and a loop on the stockings, because my generation is literally the first one in my country that can live without this knowledge.
I still have a bit of that old "waste nothing, everything can be mended" mindset that, to be honest, has nothing to do woth eco-thinking, but everything with poverty.
@@damnhitsuzen I'm from Germany but I can relate to you since my grandparents were of the generation that survived the war and had to live on very few things. Especially my father grew up relatively poor even though my grandpa worked hard to make a good education for him and his brother possible so they could have it better. But this way the mindset of repairing things, using and buying good quality items that last long and not throwing stuff away that quickly has also been taught to me by my parents. I so think this mindset did last longer in the coutryside that in the cities, just like the detachment of where our food comes did arrive later in the more rural regions.
wait...isn't that something everyone does? O.O
My grandmother grew up in a wonderful orphanage. Her sister was there also. The family took the two boys, as boys could work on the farm. My grandmother had the luxury of finishing high school. Also the orphanage made sure every girl had a career and a job, before they were turned out. (they could always come back if they needed help). She became a nurse and was able to help her family during the 1930's depression. Her sister became a teacher. Today at family reunions, you can tell which part of the family came from the brothers, and which from the girls. Because of that education, so long ago, the descendants have gone to college, done better financially and yet, the family all respect both "halves". I get that going to that orphanage, was a GOOD THING, and even back in 1917, everyone in the church that sponsored the orphanage KNEW that women with a skill would do better in life. It was NOT "well they can all get married and have families" They did both get married and have families, but their income was needed by those families when hardship hit the nation. And yes they kept in touch with their brothers and helped them when needed. IT WAS GREAT TO BE IN THE ORPHANAGE. It was called the "Home for Friendless Children", but it was "Time to break out of poverty through education, regular meals, and learning good manners."
This seems to be something baked into human culture... we did this back in the Renaissance by saying "oh, those people in the dark ages were so incredibly stupid, we are so much better now". And the myths that were made up are still believed today.
People are way worse about that now tho. Only the uneducated believe that. The Romans had birth control and air conditioning and running water, the Ancient Egyptians could do brain surgery successfully! We are blessed to have all the knowledge in the world at our fingertips. So there's no excuse for people to be so stupid and uneducated now. So what if you (a general you not you specifically) weren't taught this in your crappy school. I wasn't either, I learned it on my own. People are ONLY stupid because they CHOOSE to be stupid now. EVERYONE no matter how rich or how poor or what race or religion they are has access to the internet and therefore has no excuse. If someone CHOOSES to be an uneducated idiot than that's on them and they deserve to be mocked for it.
Like what?
@@Laocoon283
Myths about "medieval times"/"dark ages"/"middle ages"
- That they thought the earth was flat
- That they had crazy medieval torture devices (these were invented centuries later)
- That Chastity Belts were used to prevent women from having sex
- That medieval people drank wine and beer because water was so polluted
- That people did not live past 30 years old
- That they had horrible hygiene
etc
@@aliquida7132 well first off the term medieval encompassing like a 1000 year time span lol. So saying that they didn't have torture devices until a few centuries later doesn't even make sense and is also incorrect.
I also never heard that they thought the earth was flat I don't know where you are getting that from.
"Beer" has always been a safer option then water. Dating back to even before the ancient Egyptians. Whether or not they used it for that reason is irrelvant. The process of fermentation makes it safer to drink. That's just an indisputable fact.
I have never heard someone seriously propose that people didnt live past 30. I have always heard people say it hyperbolically.
The chastity belt I dont know anything about
And without a doubt hygiene was less than what it is today. Especially among the poor.
So your wrong on just about everyone of those.
You understand you were wrong or no?
You hear so many people say "stop romanticizing the past" well the same goes for the present imho.
Was everything better in the old days? No but some thing where. Love this rant video so much.
P.S. Loved meeting you in real life @ Brederode.
Some things were better, some things were worse. Simple.
Why shouldn't we romanticize the present? It's really all we have! The past is done and the future is uncertain, so why not live now?
@@DopaminedotSeek3rcolonthree Because it's not perfect.
@@QueenShireen Nothing is. The past wasn't, and the future won't be either, but we also don't live there, do we?
@@DopaminedotSeek3rcolonthree Still, just because we live in this time doesn't mean we should think it's perfect or the best time to live.
I once heard a friend say that maybe we were born in these days because our brains are better developed than people’s in the past. And besides that being utterly false, that just did not sit well with me. Like, how would it be possible for us to have all of the things we have today without building off our ancestors? We aren’t isolated parties. We are influenced by our past and the way we remember it. That’s one of the reasons why history is so important. We build our cultural identity through our history and you want to make sure you’re building a compassionate, ethical picture of these facts to point us in a more compassionate, ethical path for the future.
According to archeological studies on brain size, our brains actually shrunk in the last couple thousand years. Probably because we no longer need to process so much information to simply stay alive.
I Qs have actually dropped in the UK compared to victorian times, there was a study using reaction times published internationally, a metric that cannot be faked. We don't have bigger brains either. Kids sometimes lacked iodine and vitamins. That reduced intelligence.
@@krinkrin5982 varies by population and nutrition
@@krinkrin5982 That's a wild conclusion considering that brain size really doesn't correlate with intelligence.
@@rubymoca I think my goal was making fun of the claim that evolution is a linear process and we are obviously better than our ancestors. I never said it did.
I was reading a book on 1950's America, and the author started with an amazing rant. "`Leave It To Beaver' was a sitcom, not a documentary!" So much horrible stuff has been written with the assumption that "Leave It To Beaver" was an accurate depiction of everyday life in the 50s, when it is no more representative of the 50s than "The Simpsons" is about nuclear power plant operations.
My father was a medievalist and he used to always tell me that people in the past were exactly the same as people now, we're the same species, with the same desires, hopes, and dreams. We've just built on the knowledge of the past to have new technologies. That's it. And it's a lesson I think about all the time. I'm an architectural historian, and I'm always amazed that buildings built 100, 500, 1000+ years ago are still standing, and in some cases, still usable, and I've seen new constructions struggle to last 10 years. We aren't better now or smarter; we just have different technology and different cultural values.
We are greedier as far as I can tell
@@mariagordanier3404 ancient kings, queens, emporers, pharaohs, whole empires, etc etc beg to differ - people have always been greedy. People have been pillaging and conquering foreign lands for goods, hoarding wealth, and being kinda shitty forever.
I’ve been thinking for awhile of what we do today that in 100 years people might look back on and think “that’s crazy, how did they not know this was dangerous”. I think it’s very egocentric to think we have it all figured out, and we won’t be thought of by future generations in the same light we think about the past.
My guess is plastic
Smoking, alcohol, obesity, stress, prioritising money/greed/capitalism, burning fossil fuels, yep plastic...the list goes on... I posted a similar comment. We can't be so arrogant to think that we've 'arrived'. It's a never ending path of development and change. Brand new social norms will be formed, possibly those that we can't even begin to imagine yet.
It is even worse because it's not that we don't know any better. We DO know better. There is plenty of evidence waring us of the danger of climate change and it will probably still exist in 100 years for people to look at and wonder why we didn't listen when it was that obvious. We are polluting the environment like no generation before us and people way further in the future will still suffer because because of this.
I think people 200, 300 or 500 years in the future will look down on us and say how disgusting we were for using our oceans and skies as a garbage dumb and sadly they will be absolutely right with that.
(Yeah, I know it's not that easy and a lot more complicated, systematic and we are not the first generation to do this but sadly we are the last generation who would be able to stop it and even more sadly I can't see that happening)
car centric development, letting children breathe in exhaust fumes, rolling coal, giant trucks and SUVs with massive blind spots in front of the hoods
The younger generations will blame us for pollution and environmental destruction just like how a lot of people blame boomers today.
My first time here and I love this. I've realized that countries with strong traditions, [passed down through generations] and a vibrant culture rarely think their ancestors were generally "stupid"
me and my dad always do this thing where we'll say stuff like "imagine if we had an invention that could tell time without being connected to the internet" or "what if there was a food that grew with the wrapper right on it so you didn't need extra packaging" when we see new tech things that people act like is so "high tech" or just weird practices that are normal now. Or my favorite "what if there was a way to keep your extra food good for longer without freezing it" like people figured out pickling and fermentation and canning and smoking or curing meats SOO long ago and people act like when they make kombucha it's like this crazy new technological advance or something when people were doing it and already perfected it thousands of years ago.
Just such a weird thing that everybody thinks we've advanced so much but they figured out so much stuff before modern science even existed!
Like native indigenous land management practices that are based on thousands of years of observation and experience aren't used today because they aren't scientifically proven bc you can't do thousand year studies on stuff so instead we just ignore that entire realm of knowledge. same with ancient medicine like people were drinking willow bark tea when they had a headache long before someone invented aspirin
That sounds like a fun game.
"Why do we act like people in the past were stupid?" - Probably for the same reason we think people from other countries and cultures are stupid - Due to ignorance.
Truth.
A lot of it was due to the Victorians. They propagated the belief that all people in the past were stupid barbarians in order to make themselves feel superior. A lot of our mistaken beliefs come from that era.
there are too many people with the twisted belief that "if you disagree with me, you are stupid and/or evil"
so, evidently, people in the past were stupid and people in the future will be stupid. they won't agree with me.
and this is the best proof that we are the most stupid ones.
Someone once wrote, “The past is a different country.” It is, but strangely, it still seems socially acceptable to have prejudiced, condescending, and disrespectful or even hateful attitudes about the people who inhabited it, and to be woefully misinformed about them.
Also, as a fellow Eastern European, I do appreciate the shout-out to ''newly democratic countries''. Something a lot of Westerners forget and/or take for granted even. At the time when the former Soviet block (as my grandpa used to say) broke off, Western EU countries had 20+ years of experience ahead of them at a time of exponential technological growth. By the latter, I mean the tech boom of the 00's. So basically, you had EE countries that had about 10 or so years to catch up on democratic traditions and globalization to deal with.
Fun fact: Oligarchs and technocrats in the west hide behind the facade of "Democracy" in order to govern without much accountability to "the people". Most of it is hidden within vast governmental bureaucratic systems and pushed by lobbying groups from corporations, banks, and NGOs.
Another misconception that drives me crazy is that ''people in the past died at age 30'' or something along those lines.
Yes, in the UK the life expectancy hasn't really changed much at all for over 100 years, when you take away infant mortality which skews the average hugely
A decent amount of people in the Neolithic were living to seventy if they survived childhood, so people who say that have no idea what they’re talking about.
Where did you find that information?
"oh yeah, people were so stupid, how could they use lead base cosmetics that hurt them in the long run" he says as he smokes a cigarette from a packet tastefully decorated with pictures of what it may cause. And doesn't even have a fashionable white smooth skin out of that!
LOL. Don't forget he drove off in a polluting car, probs.
"This shouldn't be happening! IT's ThE cUrReNt YeAr!"
I've been calling it the "calendar fallacy," but "chronological snobbery" is my new favorite.
thats appeal to incredulity
YES! This drives me crazy. Take any bad thing - woman killed by her family member, racist violence, etc, and you'll find articles about those same things happening every decade with commentary being a version of "How could this still be happening in our modern time? It must be an outlier by now!" And still people do it even when they have access to older media, assuming that e.g. equality is much better now. And then the next year the same thing will happen and the same shocked reactions will come, with nothing done to actually change things. Rodney King's beating happened in 1991, 30 years ago, and it was a huge news story that people followed the trial for. Is the LAPD less racist now, after that was all exposed? I doubt it.
Speaking as a leftist, I absolutely hate how narcissistic this and "the right side of history" arguments are. It just reeks of self importance. Imagine doing good things not because you believe in them, but _exclusively_ for the slim chance that people might remember your Twitter posts and pat you on the back after you're dead lmao.
I think nowadays the biggest damage is being done by the ''historical'' tv series. I remember when reading victorian diaries and letters, one of them(working class family) was mentioning that it was the wife that had control over the money, not the husband. He was for working, she was for keeping the family alive and knowing how to do it....
I am glad you actually touched that subject... and let's not fogert that we are getting less intelligent since the beginning of XX century :P
Sounds pretty fair deal
Where did you read those?
@@antonizajkowski9698 up to the early twentieth century it was customary for young ladies even from lower class families to take so called home economics classes - either at a finishing school, from a private tutor, their mothers, or via a correspondence course. They had to learn basic math and bookkeeping, cooking, cleaning, sewing, and similar basic skills somewhere, as their future husbands were too busy with securing the income to manage anything else. The ladies of the house were responsible for managing expenses and planning the daily life of their children and servants (yeah, even peasants had them), basically working from early morning to evening. Textbooks for such courses are widely available in the internet libraries.
@@pawiooka yeah uhh.. i was asking for specific sites with the diaries etc. or maybe they read it in a published book?
Martin Luther's wife Katherine was the prime example of this very common division of roles. Luther worked and katherine ensured he actually had food to eat and clean clothes. She managed everything about his life outside the ministry and given his state of health probably gave him an extra 20 years of life he wouldnt have had. You assign the role to the person most suited for it by their skills. Luther had no idea of all the specificities of katherine's work and use of their money and he didnt need to. He trusted her completely with it.
This is one of the most INTELLIGENT persons I have ever seen on the Internet. I have been telling my friends and family for DECADES these things; i.e., just because it's in the past it doesn't mean it's stupid, but they're all so brainwashed and smug about how "advanced" we all are, JUST because we're living in THIS century and not back in the past. You see it in TV and movies all the freakin' time, even on shows that are supposed to be "scientifically accurate." They portray ancient peoples as "Ignorant savages," they IMMEDIATELY dismiss anything said by them that doesn't line up with the current worldview as "myth" and "superstition," and very few today question it. In fact, if you become TOO adamant about it, your doctor wants to prescribe you stronger meds AND get you to "talk" to someone!
I'm not crazy, I just DO NOT believe all the BULLSHIT we've been taught all our lives.