To put my life into perspective, I sometimes try to guess at what is new and what is ancient. By which i mean, what have humans been doing as long as they've been walking upright and what are the modern constructs that we usually take for granted.
For example, showers are probably pretty new. Bathing as we have it now might be a recent invention, but washing with fresh water could be very old. Soap, in fact, might be very old (one theory is that it formed when ashes from human immolation mixed with the human fat-- the two primary ingredients of soap being lye and lipids). So bathing might be open to debate, but i suspect that cleanliness, or the image of it, is as old as being human. By which i mean, the football star being interviewed on TV, or someone on the subway who has a detailed shave: these crafted styles could have been pulled off a thousand years ago, regardless of whether the person was actually clean (as in, free of bacteria and sanitized).
I imagine living in a medieval fief and, walking downtown, running into soap-box acts put on by dapper men with handle-bar mustaches, arresting me with eloquent serenades about their wares. Some aspects of our culture are clearly recent (short-wave radio), while others i can only wonder about.
It is an exercise in second-guessing: what do we assume is unique to our enlightened, modern way of life? It is not unlike what we assume is unique to being human (versus, say, being a dog). Certainly, we should expect that, as long as there have been 'humans', there has been a belief that we are modern and contemporary. Every age knows that they are the latest, greatest race to grace the face of the earth. So they act accordingly. They use all the extant vocabulary, they practice the most avant-garde fashions, and they view their historical predecessors as, perhaps, less developed. But, unless you make the case for evolution over millenia, we must assume that our ancestors were as witty and insightful as we are. Which is the piece i actively remind myself of: when i read about feudal kingdoms or ancient nomadic tribes, i have to drill down to the individual, who, without databases, sattelite-navigation, and soap, is stilll quick on his feet and could probably haggle me into a corner. Who, even caked in three months of dirt and road-worn, could wear a scarf and bowler just like the best derbyshire gentlman.
2 comments:
It's great to see the Company of Hedonists put out a new posting! It's a lovely little essay, thoughtful and gracefully written. I think you're absolutely right, once you presumably get to the point in human development when people were self-aware. That is, I assume that there was some back point where people grunted and survived by bare instinct, and then somehow a sense of self arose.
I read a lot of British and American novels, and you've articulated something that I've been somehow aware of when I read older novels, Jane Austen and George Eliot, say. In these, people in the early 19th century are just like us, with all the human cares, follies, prejudices, etc., and they are, for themselves, thoroughly modern. Or you can go back to Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales, some centuries earlier. (Go back much further in British lit and you're in the Dark Ages, which are much less transparent to us.)
I'm not sure where it all leads, but it's very interesting to contemplate. I hope you keep writing!
As far as being quick-witted, think-on-your feet type people goes, I am confident that we are on the decline there. One only has to read about Scopes and Darrow, and on backwards to Roman and Greek orators, to see that we have devalued intelligent delivery.
For the record, clean != free of bacteria. No human could ever hope to be free of bacteria. They inhabit every square millimeter of the surface of our body and large parts of the insides, as well, and we depend on them for our health.
Even though it's just a technological innovation, knowledge of faraway people and places is likely new, and significant to how we do things. I've heard the argument that the American electoral college exists in a large part because when the consitution was written, it was assumed that most of the populace would have no way of knowing anything about presidential candidates. So the states chose electors who were presumably very cosmopolitan, and who could understand the candidates.
Now we think we know everything happening all over the world! Hey look, Dubyai's building an island shaped like a palm tree! China censors the internet. The so-called president is a mass murderer. And I suspect this changes our relationship to local events. Numbs us a little to the councilman on the graft, or the next field that gets subdivided, or the next street person that the police murder.
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