So, I like history. All kinds of history; American history, world history, biblical history, ancient history, evolutionary history, and especially military history.
I have a couple of six-foot bookshelves stuffed full of books. However, these days I also subscribe to Audible. Audiobooks are a great use of my hour commute time. Podcasts are another popular way to consume information or entertainment. I subscribe to a dozen podcasts. Why are these audible transmission modes so popular?
According to some social anthropologists, human beings have evolved to consume information audibly.
Storytelling has been the principle way to transfer knowledge from individual to individual, individual to group, and on down to future generations since the invention of language. Writing, in general, and books in particular, are only a few thousand years old. Reading from the written page requires a bunch of things to happen at once. Read the letters, turn them into silently spoken words, then sentences, and ultimately, to form a story.
Listening to a story is different. You are just listening to those spoken words and turning them into a mental image in your head. Simple stuff. I just hope with all the changing ways to get your information, books will still remain viable and relevant. I love the smell of a hardback book. That aroma of paper as I leaf through the pages is good for my soul.
I’m bringing this up because in this age of information overload, we are bombarded with all these different mediums vying for our attention. We have become targets of mass media corporations. We are not really consumers of a product, we are the product. I should say, our attention is the product. We are selling our attention whether we understand that or not. Most of the time, we are giving it away.
Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, etc. are ‘free’ as they don’t charge you to use their platform. Here’s a hint, if you're not paying to use their product, you are the product. They are selling your profile, likes, clicks, shares and data to someone else. I am guilty here as well. I can burn up a few hours on social media without a thought. I will look up and say, “Wow, where did those two hours go?”
I’m not writing this piece on the ills of social media. There are thousands of well written accounts on the subject. What I’m saying is we need to understand what we are consuming, and understand what we are missing in this consumption. The information we consume today is a constant stream of digital junk food, fast food and leftovers. So what are we leaving out? The healthy stuff. The vegetables and fiber. We need more of a balanced mental diet. We need to start taking in healthy portions of history.
Now some of you might say, hey I love all the war movies and Downton Abbey, but that’s not what I’m talking about. As much as I enjoy Saving Private Ryan, and Band of Brothers, movies are only a tiny slice, of a small part, of a much bigger picture. They can also whitewash some of the more ugly parts of history. No, I’m talking about understanding where we are as a species, and where we came from.
What do you know about history? I’m talking about knowing what your life would be like fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, and maybe a thousand years ago. I’m talking about knowing what an absolutely spectacular world we actually live in. Compared to just a few decades, let alone a few centuries ago, we are living in an age of abundance, health, wealth, and peace. Most people think the world right now sucks. Seriously, people think they have it rough.
People, especially young people, have been trained to look at the world through a certain lens. They see nothing but injustice, racism, patriarchy, greed and suffering. They take in a steady diet of ‘news’ from late-night comedians, Slate, Salon, and Vice. They are being told that we are constantly at the precipice of some great calamity. They are being told that they alone can, and should, solve all the world’s problems. To do that, all they need to do is change everything.
Change it to what? They’re not sure, but by God, they’re going to do something. Look no further than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to see this principle at work. The solution filled world she creates in her mind has the answers to all America’s woes. However, it can only exist there, in her mind. The real world is far too complex, because it’s filled with people, and people do what they want. It’s also filled with nature that is always trying to kill you.
So, how bad do we have it right now? Really? Compared to what? That would be a good starting point.
Compared to the rest of the world? No other nation on this planet offers the opportunity to move from abject poverty to wealth and success like America. Zero. If you immigrate here legally, without two nickels to rub together, you can work hard, save and scrimp, and you will soon be out of poverty and experience at least the beginnings of the American dream. Your children can get a scholarship to university and become doctors, engineers and even politicians, if they have the stomach for it. Those who live below the poverty line in America would be considered working class in most places on the globe. We are probably one of the only nations where obesity is a huge health problem among our poorest citizens.
Many people complain about how unfair everything is right now. Jeff Bezos has billions, and I have student loans and work at Subway. Boo flippin’ hoo. I didn’t tell you to take out student loans for a degree in gender studies, philosophy, or Art History. Why do you want the guy working at the tire shop to pay off your student loans? Sure, there is racism, sexism, and greed, but it’s so much better than it was just within my lifetime. Real hate crimes are so rare in a country of 340 million people, there is a growing trend of inventing your own hate crimes, just to get attention.
How about fifty years ago, was that any better?
I know a little something about this, I was a child fifty years ago, but I lived through the late 60s and 70s. I remember the smog, acid rain, and whale hunting. I remember the people fleeing the big cities to get away from the riots, and crime. I remember the gas shortages, Vietnam, Watergate, the crappy cars, and crappy houses they built in the 70s. Women were just starting to make inroads in business, colleges, and society. Minorities were still feeling the sting of racism, and in many places, violence and abuse were a real threat. Although the progress made through the civil rights era was unmistakable, people of color were not truly equal. Not by a long shot, but things were getting better. Homosexuality was really not accepted anywhere.
In the late 60s and 70s, you worked hard, usually in the manufacturing sector, paid your bills, and taxes. You drank beer with your buddies at bowling league on Saturday night, and went to church on Sunday. Poor people were actually poor. Malnutrition, bad teeth, and violent crime was a real threat if you were living under the poverty line. However, life with money did not mean you were free from suffering. Even if you were a millionaire, if you had a heart attack, you died. If you had cancer, you died. Your life expectancy was 66.
What about 100 years ago? If you were a young man walking around 100 years ago in America, that meant you made it through World War One. Congratulations, seriously, that was an accomplishment. WWI was the first full scale modern war. No one understood that when the war kicked off in 1914.
There were still cavalry troops with lances and sabers in 1914. They were trained to do what cavalry troops had done for thousands of years: Follow up an attack on the enemy in retreat, and slaughter them. Well, when you send your cavalry to attack a retreating enemy in 1914, and that enemy has those new-fangled machine guns, your cavalry was going to be shot to ribbons. They learned that lesson the hard way.
Think of the WWI trench-warfare. Huge armies with millions of men dug into the earth a few hundred to a few dozen yards apart, fighting for years. The modern technologies of massed artillery fire, machine guns, barbed wire, poison gas, airplanes, and later tanks, were all new to the battlefield. It took time and experience to know how to fight with them, and defend against them. That experience was gained through the slaughter of 15-19 million young men. If you were a man, 40 or younger in Europe during WWI, you were sent to the front to fight or die. How’s that patriarchy working out for you?
Think about being a soldier on the Western Front for a second. You’re living in a trench for months at a time. Driving rain or oppressive heat, you’re in that trench. The stench of thousands of decaying corpses just a few yards away must have been revolting. There were no toilets. When there was action, you would be in the front lines for weeks, crapping in the same trenches you were living in.
Let’s say you lived through the war. Hooray! You made it! Now you can get back to your life. However, just as the war comes to a close, there is another killer waiting for you; the Spanish Influenza of 1918.
This time, death was not selective. Although it killed more children and old people, it was gender neutral. It killed 50-100 million people world wide. Six percent of the earth’s population died in one year. Around 675,000 died from that flu in the United States alone. People didn’t go outside their houses. Kids didn’t go outside to play. People just got sick, and then died.
Just a few more tidbits from a hundred years ago: 85% of men over the age of14 were in the labor force. Today, it’s 69% of men over 16. The average worker worked 55 hours per week. The chances of being killed on the job was thirty times more than it is today. Most women didn’t work, and those who did, were often teachers. They worked for less money than their male counterparts. Your life expectancy was 53 for men, 54 for women.
What about a thousand years ago, living in 1019, the Middle Ages? What would that be like? To sum it up, it would suck, that’s what it would be like.
In those times, no matter where you were on the planet, you were either nobility, a peasant, or slave. There was no middle class. If you were a peasant, you farmed daylight till dark to eke out a living and pay your taxes to your feudal master, King, Emperor, Sultan, or whoever was in charge of your land. You didn’t actually own your land, the King, or person in charge did.
If you were a man, you worked, all day, every day, sunup to sundown. Unless your King or Emperor declared war on the king in the neighboring land. Then you went off to fight or die. You hoped you would be victorious, so the enemy peasants wouldn’t come to steal your wife and sell your children as slaves. If you were a woman, you gathered firewood, cooked, tended to the children, and hoped your husband wouldn’t die in some fool war. Even in the rare times of peace, if your ox died, or you broke your leg, there was a good chance you would starve to death. Life expectancy was around 30, so at least your suffering didn’t last long.
What I’m getting at is we don’t know how good we have it. Mainly because we are not being taught these things in schools. History classes today are about how evil we were in the past, especially if you are American.
Yes, most of our founders owned slaves, and we screwed over the Native Americans time after time, when we weren’t outright killing them. Look, all these things are true. However, we are teaching our kids to look at the past through our ultra-modern lens. A great way to think about this is; you imagine you would have been one of the ‘good guys’ in the past, but there is a much greater chance that you would have been one of the ‘bad guys’ because almost everyone was.
America did not invent slavery. It’s been around since Neanderthals were painting Mammoths on their cave walls. So, were Jefferson and the gang guilty of founding our nation with slavery still a going concern in the southern states? Yes. If they hadn’t compromised with those supporting the abolishment of slavery in the northern colonies, we would have never become a nation. It was a terrible compromise at the time, but the northern states thought slavery would eventually be abolished, just as it had been in England.
In a strange turn of history, Eli Whitney and the Cotton Engine (Gin) would breathe new life, and profits, back into slavery to keep it alive for another few decades. It would take half a million dead Americans to abolish slavery, but Americans did it. The blood and carnage of the Civil War was the price America had to pay for that compromise at Philadelphia in 1776.
The Native Americans had it even worse. As stupid as it sounds, to a young and ever expanding nation, “The Indians” were always in their way. It started off with Pilgrims saying, “Hey, we just want to get along with you Natives, so please don’t kill us or burn down our little settlements.” In a few generations, it was the Natives who were asking, “Hey, I know you guys have a lot more guns and people, and at this point we just want to live, so can you stop murdering us?”
Today there is also a dangerous narrative out there, I call it the ‘Disney-talking-raccoon’ narrative. The last few generations have been taught about the Native Americans through movies, not history lessons. In those cartoons and movies, life before the pre-white invasion of the Americas was glorious for the Native peoples. They all lived in harmony with nature, and each other. There was no greed, racism, rape, murder, or violence. All those bad things were brought over with Columbus, or in the cargo hold of the Mayflower. This is completely untrue.
People are tribal. All people. We have evolved over the last ten thousand years to thrive in small groups of a few dozen to a few hundred. This was just as true for the Native Americans as it still is today in Northern Waziristan. There is an old Bedouin saying, passed down through millenia. Me, against my brothers. Me and my brothers against my cousins. Me and my brothers and my cousins against the world.” That mindset is universally true. If you don’t believe me, just check out your Facebook feed. You’re either a “True American patriot” trying to save America, or a “Progressive” trying to save democracy ... Back to the Indians...
The Native American tribes were killing, stealing, and enslaving their fellow Native kinsmen long before Columbus set sail. The histories of the Native people are filled with raiding within tribes and between tribes.
Much of the beautiful imagery we have of Native Americans today, especially the Plains Indians, are from the post-Columbus era. Native American hunters, riding swiftly on their painted horses, flinging arrows into stampeding buffalo herds. This way of life for the Great Plains Indians was only a recent discovery. Before Cortez lost a few bands of horses he brought to the American Southwest, the Native Americans on the Great Plains were struggling to survive.
When those wild horse herds grew and drifted north, they completely changed the way of life for all the native tribes.
Before the horse, you were on foot. You could only move as fast as the slowest member of the tribe. You had to carry everything of value on your back, everywhere you went. You had to stalk you game. If the buffalo’s migration path moved a hundred miles from year to year, you had to find them, on foot, or starve. The “invention” of the horse was truly life changing. You could ride fifty miles in a day. You could scout for game, see where your rival tribes were camped, make war on non-horse tribes, and maybe even more importantly, you had leisure time.
You could make semi-permanent camps, ride out to find your food, and fight your enemies far away from your home. You could afford to keep your elders around, and gain from their knowledge. You could have more children, take more wives, and enjoy some time laying around and contemplating life. Small bands of tribes became mighty nations ruling huge swathes of the West. However, those tribes who didn’t adopt that nomadic, horse centered way of life, were killed, captured, or driven off the plains by those who did. The horse was a game changer. Just read up on the history of the Comanche.
It’s sort of tragic, when we hear the word “Indian” we think of a people living a certain way of life. One that would not have been possible without those horses who wandered away from the Spanish Conquistadors.
Again, what I’m trying to say is we are stuck in a binary way of thinking these days. Good versus bad. Anyone who doesn’t think like I do, isn’t just wrong, they’re a terrible person. They need to be stopped, or even punched in the face. This is craziness. We simply can’t look at a situation without understanding how we got here. What forces drove us, or guided us to this point? Has anything like this happened before? Are there any lessons we can learn from history that might save us a tragedy or two?
I guess it comes down to we are all just human beings and we are all ego-centric. Our world is what matters to us. What happened in the past doesn’t matter, unless I can figure out how to blame the past for my failures. Many think the world is stacked against them. On both the Left and the Right. Each side has their Boogieman.
Boogiemen are always a bit more tricky than what they appear to be on the surface. Each Boogieman, no matter how crazy their story, has a bit of truth nestled inside. They all have a history. We should learn it, and know it. That way we can understand how they got there, and how we got here… .
