I am not dismissing medicine. But the existence of medicine now does not mean life centuries ago was a horrifying existence struggling to survive as popular culture suggests. There are still primitive people now, whose existence is far closer to that subsistence stereotype than medieval Europeans were. They are overwhelmingly happy and healthy. They eat better than we do, are healthier than we are, and work less than we do. If they had modern medicine, it is hard to argue they wouldn't be better off than us in every way.
But they don’t have modern medicine, and they don’t have the means to deal with droughts, or other natural disasters. Indigenous tribes who have contact with society are overwhelmingly unhappy with some of the highest suicide rates in the world. The ones who don’t have contact don’t have their happiness measured in any meaningful or comparable way... because they don’t have contact.
Additionally, if they are in any kind of environment where they have to do manual labor for food, they work way more than most Americans do. Standing around for 40 hours a week making coffees for people is a walk in the park compared to tilling a field with a hoe.
People like the indigenous Kitava have no such problems. Because they are not living as an underclass minority in another culture. They have contact with modern people, but they choose to live traditionally.
>Additionally, if they are in any kind of environment where they have to do manual labor for food
That would be every kind of environment...
>they work way more than most Americans do.
They do not. Again, see the Kitava. They barely have a concept of work.
>Standing around for 40 hours a week making coffees for people is a walk in the park compared to tilling a field with a hoe
Tilling a field with a hoe is a completely unnecessary act. Your cultural bias makes you assume this is some universal penance that must be paid in order to extract food from the soil. It is not.
>Yes, we've covered that haven't we? In the very post you just replied to, in order to add absolutely nothing to the discussion?
I’m pointing out that it’s a massive caveat. It’s like claiming they built a plane and other than it not being able to fly, it’s just as good as the ones we have. A society without modern medicine is significantly worse off.
>That would be any kind of environment
No, you should learn about the industrial scale farming that feeds most of the planet
>They barely have a concept of work
Oh? What happens when nobody wants to hunt then? Work is what members of a society do to keep it going. If they aren’t smart enough to recognize it, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
>Tilling a field with a hoe is a completely unnecessary...
Let me stop you there. Hunter gatherer approaches do not scale. Growing food is entirely necessary to prevent 50 and 100 year storms/droughts from causing mass suffering and starvation.
It’s not cultural bias. It’s foresight to plan for the future and actually feed everyone rather than killing babies and old people during hard times.
No they didn't. We have books on farming that are 2000 years old, people have read them even. Just because movies show dirty peasants hoeing fields doesn't mean that was reality.
If we're talking the middle ages in Europe, then 90% of folk farmed as serfs or peasants. When they weren't dead from frequent droughts or plagues. "No they didn't" isn't an argument.
The myth is that 90% were involved in food production in any way. Butchers and millers and brewers and bakers are part of that 90%, they were not doing anything in any fields. But that myth is based on England under Roman rule, where vast quantities of food were grown by slaves and shipped to Rome. After the fall of Rome, people returned to farming for the local population, and so needed fewer farmers. The period is even characterized by the three orders: those who fight, those who work and those who pray. These were societies that had enough food production that a major portion of the population could spend their time praying instead of doing anything productive. And the "those who work" includes carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, etc. not just farmers.
And that's not what is in dispute anyways. Hoeing fields is. Farmer does not equal hoeing fields. Tillage was done as little as necessary, and was done mainly using horses or oxen pulling plows and cultivators. A hoe was used seldom, and mainly in the vegetable garden. As I said, we have actual period texts on how to farm. All the way back to Rome, Greece and ancient China. None of them describe the modern hollywood portrayal of mentally handicapped peasants spending their lives hitting the ground with sticks.
We also have records of actual farm manors and how much labor each farmer was required to provide for the lord every year. They worked less than us, and had 8 weeks a year without work which they spent playing sports and games in the village green. We have skeletons that show they were taller than us, which indicates better nutrition. But because the late 1700s and early 1800s saw massive numbers of people move to cities and suffer terrible malnutrition and poverty, everyone just assumes things were even worse before that. All available evidence says otherwise. Things have always been bad in cities, especially due to disease, but rural life appears to have been pretty decent and was the majority of the population. Localized famines were rare enough to be major historical events mentioned all across Europe.
Would you please read the site guidelines and not post like this to HN? It's against the rules, no matter how wrong or provocative another comment may be.
More generally, please don't do flamewars or post in the flamewar style to this site.
