The Old Days Sucked, Hard

Sometimes we long for a simpler time. Intellectuals, especially, have a tendency to glorify the past and denigrate the present. Jean-Jacques Rousseau exalted the “noble savage,” saying, “Man is born free, everywhere he is in chains.”

Let’s get one thing straight: The old days sucked, hard. Before the modern era, life expectancy ranged from 20 to 35 years. One in four women died in childbirth. People had to work 12 hours of hard labor just to survive. They lived in squalor and filth. Extended families and farm animals lived together in a single room. Pests and rodents were everywhere. Famine and pandemics wiped out entire societies. The Black Plague killed off half of Europe. The Potato Famine reduced Ireland’s population by 25 percent. Even the rich had it rough by today’s standards. The best chamber pot is no match for a warm, clean bathroom.

I like sappy pics of baby pandas as much as the next guy, but let’s not kid ourselves about the nature of nature. A tipi provides scant protection against a tornado. The Aztecs were willing to kill their own children to appease the nature gods. Isabelle Dinoire needed a face transplant because her pet Labrador chewed it off. In Castaway, the only way for Tom Hanks to end the maddening pain of a simple toothache is to bash it out with a rock. Was anyone really surprised when the “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray barb?—the dumb fucker based his whole career on taunting wild animals—or when Sigfried and Roy were attacked by one of their own tigers? Even the best-trained dog is going to snap at people occasionally. Replace “dog” with 600-pound carnivore—and throw in flashing lights, smoke, and a cheering crowd—and that “snap” becomes a public mauling.

Nature kicks its own ass on a regular basis. Even before the appearance of Man, 99 percent of all species went extinct. Tectonic plates shift. Asteroids smack into the planet. Ice sheets cover the Earth for thousands of years. Geological history includes several mass extinctions where more than 50 percent of species disappeared in a short time. The Permo-Triassic extinction nearly wiped out all life on Earth. Even humans had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago. The Earth itself is destined to burn up in 5 billion years.

Human beings have never, and will never, live in harmony with nature. It is a myth that Native Americans did so. They littered and had garbage dumps. Some tribes burned entire forests to increase their future yield. They hunted many birds into extinction and severely reduced populations of fish, elk, and other wildlife. According to University of Utah archaeologist Jack M. Broughton, wildlife returned to “fabulous abundances” in California only after European diseases decimated Indian hunting populations starting in the 1500s.

The litmus test is a rat infestation. With the critters squeaking and scurrying about, do you live in harmony with your new housemates or call the exterminator? Exactly. Life in the old days was a constant trial of pain, hunger, misery, ignorance, fear, and loss. It was “a brief and brutish life at bare subsistence, devoid of hope or promise.”

Primitive societies were not all spiritual and lovey-dovey. As Ludwig von Mises notes, “All history, evidence, and observation of the lives of primitive peoples is directly contrary to this view…The solitary peasant of remote valleys shows none of that noble harmonious development of body, mind, and feeling which the romantics ascribe to him.”

Ernest Becker sums it up nicely:

The peasant’s equanimity is usually immersed in a style of life that has elements of real madness…an undercurrent of constant hate and bitterness expressed in feuding, bullying, bickering, and family quarrels, the petty mentality, the self-deprecation, the superstition, the obsessive control of daily life by a strict authoritarianism, and so on. As the title of a recent essay by Joseph Lopreato has it: “How would you like to be a peasant?”

The civilized world is fucking great. In 2006, a group of 80 nomads wandered out of the rainforest in Colombia. The Nukak- Makú basically came out of the Stone Age. Juan Forerio described their adjustment in a camp set up by Colombians:

Are they sad? “No!” cried a Nukak named Pia-pe, to howls of laughter. In fact, the Nukak said they could not be happier. Used to long marches in search of food, they are amazed that strangers would bring them sustenance…One young Nukak mother…said she was happy just to stay still. “When you walk in the jungle,” she said, “your feet hurt a lot.”

Yeah, no shit! You should try this stuff called Chapstick. It’s awesome! Helmut Schoeck:

The myth of the golden age, when social harmony prevailed because each man had about as little as the next one, the warm and generous community spirit of simple societies, was indeed for the most part just a myth, and social scientists should have known better than to fashion out of it a set of utopian standards with which to criticize their own societies.