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I mean I think there’s a lot of bias in how people perceive history and the things that they’re valuing over other things. It’s almost always a bias in favor of more technological devices, more official freedoms and more official equality with almost everything else taking a distant second or even third even if, as a practical matter, you’d be freer, happier, healthier, and safer in earlier eras.
There’s a lot to dislike about modern life. The panopticon, street crime, the number of people who have control over your ability to live your own life, the mental and physical health crises that plague us, debts that most people owe for decades now, and the costs of health care for most Americans.
So to me there is a bit of a trade off depending on the era. Obesity and mental health reaching the crisis point in the twenty first century— I would absolutely dare argue that other than crisis care, we were much healthier a century ago when the fattest man alive was 300 something pounds and this was rare enough that he was in a circus. A century ago, millions of kids in America were not depressed, and suicide wasn’t common.
Likewise with street crime. In most cities crime used to be well controlled. I don’t think there was ever an era in which unaccompanied women could safely walk the streets at midnight, but there were eras where crime was low enough that you could walk the streets or let kids play outside without too much fear of theft or violence. There were no open street markets for drugs, no open air homeless encampments within the cities, and no need to plan to avoid human feces.
As far as freedom, we have freedom in name only a lot of times. The amount of control other people have over your life (in part enabled by the panopticon that rats you out all the time) would be mind boggling to someone living in an absolute monarchy in the 1800s. Louis XVI of France couldn’t require your boss to spy on you and fire you if you ever said anything anti-regime. Even if he could, most people in France were farmers and thus self employed. Joe Biden tried to get people fired for refusing an injection. Through liability, the government can force your boss to fire people over Facebook posts (lest not doing so is proof of a hostile work environment). Likewise the control over what can and can’t be done on your own land or with your own house is pretty high. The government can tell you whether you can raise food or animals on your land, require you to get approval to expand your house or build permanent structures, require inspections at every step of the process. I don’t think you could have done that a century ago.
As far as health...We were a hell of a lot sicker a hundred years ago. Why would I say that? Well...life expectancy is a fairly crude measure of population health, but you can guess that sick people die sooner and in a world without antibiotics you have things like the President's son dying of blood poisoning from an infected blister.
You would have a much better argument if you were talking about a time when cheap antibiotics and something like modern medical care were available for most people...fifty years ago, not a hundred.
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Uh, street crime is what the panopticon is for. People who live in bad neighborhoods know that surveillance works. While there can be other concerns with the panopticon, the entire raison d'etre of the thing is to get rid of that problem. If it's not being used to at least accomplish that, then you've got a hell of a raw deal with your local politicians.
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Those debts are usually mortgages to pay for an enormous, luxurious home of the kind that only the richest had access to a century ago. If you want to have ten people sharing a bedroom in a small hut, you can still get that at an affordable price point. Finding a small windowless room in a tenement in NYC to house your family will be a bit more difficult because of regulations, but you could probably find a studio apartment to squeeze them into, if that is what you want.
Again, health care of the kind that was available to the average person a hundred years ago is still accessible: just don't go to the doctor. Even for those who could afford one, a doctor couldn't do anything much of the time. There were no antibiotics, there were no vaccines for polio, smallpox and other debilitating illnesses that have been eradicated in the West (if not the world), there was no organ transplantation, cancer care was exclusively palliative, and medical imaging technology was limited to X-ray machines that gave you a huge dose of radiation.
Life expectancy and infant mortality are two objective measures of health. Both have improved dramatically since the 19th and early 20th century.
How do you know? Did you ask them? Because no one else did.
Mental health care is a luxury for which demand only exists after physical ailments have been largely dealt with. There was no mental health care to speak of a century ago. The closest is some rich people going to psychoanalysts. The world back then was awful in a way that is hard to comprehend for a person in a developed country in the 21st century. Many people were horribly traumatized and depressed by modern standards, it's just that no one cared. Veterans returning from the trenches of the First World War with PTSD were told to suck it up, if they weren't shot for being cowards. Asking if a two-year-old was depressed in this kind of environment would have been laughable.
I am in fact very glad that my neighbour isn't allowed to open a pig farm next to my house in a residential area and that he needs to get a permit and a professional crew to build his house rather than improvising something on his own that could collapse and bury me in the rubble. If you want to see what a world without building codes would look like, you can look at the aftermath of the recent earthquake in Turkey. Regulations weren't followed, buildings collapsed, sixty thousand people died.
Just as a simple sanity check, all the arguments you're making comparing people in 1900 to people today, would apply just as much to people in 1800 to 1900, and 1700 to 1800, and 1600 to 1700, no? If life was so much worse a hundred years ago, shouldn't it be even worse than that the further back you go? At what point, shouldn't the misery become unsurvivable? And yet people clearly survived, and even thrived to the point of producing rich cultures of beauty that we enjoy to this day. Do you not see a contradiction here?
Psychology mostly didn't exist a century ago, but given that Psychology is fake as fuck, it's unclear to me why that is supposed to be a problem. I see absolutely zero reason to believe that the "common factors" giving rise to the Dodo Bird Verdict should be supposed to have been a recent discovery, and not achievable through previous religious and spiritual traditions the world over.
We can't cure most serious mental illness now, and for all the criticisms of Bedlam, it is not obvious to me that our current method of allowing the mentally-ill to kill themselves on the streets with meth and heroin is in any way an improvement
Based on your personal experience, presumably? I mean, we have writing and records from quite a ways back, stories, songs, plays, art, personal journals; why speculate, when we could look at their thoughts directly? None of these depict an unmitigated hellscape. On the contrary, most people seem to have been reasonably happy and healthy, even in times of considerable duress. Heck, why not compare suicide rates? That's an objective measure, right? Or maybe marriage rates, given the overwhelming correlation between long-term marriage and a whole host of positive outcomes? Or average numbers of close friends?
What you're doing here is comparing every bad thing you can imagine about the past against every good thing you can imagine about the present. Shockingly, this results in the present being the apparent best of all possible worlds. Your explanation ignores the concept of the hedonic treadmill, the way peoples psychology adjusts itself to both prosperity and hardship, such that the former does not simply satisfy, and the later does not simply crush. People are more complicated than that.
It gets worse the further back you go, yes. There are ups and downs, but there is a secular trend of living standards getting better throughout the past few millennia. However, this improvement is not linear. Things were getting better slowly for most of history before the rate of improvement increased in the past couple of centuries. The period after WWII is the second half of the chessboard.
Mental health care includes applied psychology, i.e. counselling, therapy (CBT is supposedly an evidence-based intervention; I haven't really looked into it very much), etc., but it also includes psychiatry, a field that has seen immense progress in the past century. When the first antipsychotics were introduced shortly after World War II, they were seen as miracle drugs. Newer antipsychotics have only improved treatment since then. I don't know if we can cure most serious mental illnesses, but we can certainly treat many effectively and enable the patients to live a more-or-less normal life. Contrast this with a hundred years ago, when the only option for someone with schizophrenia was being confined to a lunatic asylum.
I know a substantial portion of homeless drug addicts are mentally ill, but I'm not sure if a substantial portion of people with severe mental illness are homeless drug addicts. Presumably these are only the most severe cases, or people who haven't been treated at all due to lack of access to health care in the US. Poor health care and mass overdoses, along with the drug markets and homeless camps mentioned in the original comment I was replying to, are a primarily American phenomenon and they could be solved if the political will existed. But I guess you could argue that the fact that politicians have accepted this is part of the supposed social decline.
The "rich cultures" were created by an elite minority who lived in relative luxury. The vast majority of people until relatively recently were illiterate farmers and pastoralists.
Even so, the stories I have read do in fact depict the many horrors the plebs were subjected to. Ever read Dickens? And if we go further back in history, you have stories featuring abusive feudal lords, marauding armies, and so on. The horrors of everyday life – lack of sanitation and running water, entire families sharing a single tiny bedroom, mothers dying in childbirth – don't get mentioned very much because they were unremarkable.
The honest answer is "because I tried and I couldn't find good data on historical suicide rates, and my post was already getting long". If you have the data, please do post it. It should be noted when comparing suicide rates that culture is a major factor. There is significant variation between developed countries today that is not explained by objective economic circumstances.
The correlation is only recorded in modern times, as far as I know. There could well be a confounder, e.g. people with higher conscientiousness or people who are already doing well mentally also have a higher chance of having a successful marriage. In a time when people didn't have to work for a marriage because society made sure that everyone got married, there would have been no such correlation.
My interpretation of the hedonic treadmill is that people will eventually adapt to an objectively higher or lower standard of living, such that the difference eventually won't be as great as might be expected, but it would still exist. I do sincerely believe that people in the past were often horribly traumatized by modern standards, and no one cared because it was so widespread and nothing could be done about it anyway.
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Proves too much. Using your 'hedonic threadmill' and 'unsurvivable misery' argument, you can't discriminate between a cherrypicked absolute worst society of the past (say, glorifying human sacrifice, slavery and war) and your personal favourites.
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I'd say worseness plateaus at some point. The difference in the standard of life in 1000 AC and 1000 BC would be indistinguishable to me, probably. But I'm no historian.
You can argue of whether going as far back as pre-agriculture would be a drop or a rise relative to agriculture, but either way I prefer the modern era.
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How narrowly/broadly are you defining "crisis care" here, before I take you up on that offer of arguing?
Edit: Also on the subject of crime, 1923 is not exactly a year I would choose for "crime was well controlled" in cities in the US.
Yeah, but I imagine the difference is that crime was more...bounded, I guess? I imagine that you only had to worry about being near crime if you wanted to go drinking or maybe if you worked in a bank--whereas these days, you can be the most straight-edge guy and still suffer from more random criminality. I imagine many posters here would trade all the modern-day gangsters and drug dealers for the old-timey Italian, Irish, and Jewish mobs.
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But the statement "people had it better off in time and place X" doesn't mean "I will be better off in time and place X."
Even if I agree that the general social situation of some era is better off than the general social situation of the present day, the biggest issue with going to the past is the lack of family and connection there. I'll be coming in as an isolated individual without much in the way of useful resources and skills to that era, so I think the modal outcome of me showing up in most eras is going to be miserable.
Again, if the question was different, say, "What historical era would you like to live as a member of the highest class, in a tightly-knit community with strong family support?" then my answer would change. But the base question of what historical era I want to live out the rest of my life in is going to be close to "almost no where and no when."
It doesn't hurt that I feel pretty well off in the modern era. To me, one of the only advantages of living as a stranger in the past is that I would be guaranteed that an AI apocalypse/nuclear armageddon/etc. wouldn't happen within my life time.
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This is possible in Hong Kong. I was speaking to a woman recently who has lived in HK for a year and not even been catcalled when dressed to go out, let alone felt unsafe at night, even in a dark alleyway.
Also, it's not clear what times or places you are talking about in your post, but the 1800s was a period of an awful lot of surveillance for most people, just not by the government. What proportion of people were even free from the eyes of others (including, in many cases, their parents) when they slept at night? Would you trade staying in the same room as the rest of your family for 19th century French political freedom?
And while you could say some things without the consequences that they'd have today, there were other restrictions in Bourbon France, such as the crime of outrage à la morale religieuse. Another example is that, early on, in the Deuxième Terreur Blanche, saying the wrong thing about Napoleon could get you lynched.
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