“The past is a foreign country — they do things differently there,” wrote novelist L.P. Hartley.
My wife has been building a library of books by local poets. Someone gave her some boxfuls. One oddball inclusion she handed to me: Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800, by Fernand Braudel, 1967. Looked pretty dry, but I dipped in.
It’s basically a history of what might be called living standards, focusing particularly on those four centuries, which the author feels set the stage for today’s world. A theme that resonates for me; the progress we’ve achieved being a key element in my own book, The Case for Rational Optimism.
Braudel explodes any sappy nostalgia for past times — depicting just how miserable life was, for the great mass of humanity. Even the wealthiest didn’t have it so good; today’s average Joe shouldn’t want to trade places. The book brings home how much of modernity we take for granted.
Like heating. The past was cold — indoors as well as outdoors. Yes, they had fire. But how to use it to heat an indoor space was a big challenge. You could sit by the fireplace and burn your face while your butt freezes. To heat a room typically brought with it a great deal of smoke; not to mention carcinogens which actually killed a lot of people. And even at royal banquets, liquids in goblets would sometimes freeze.
The good old days. Let’s not mention air-conditioning.
And here’s something you wouldn’t think about: chairs. Yes, chairs. Not a joke. Didn’t have them for most of civilizational history! The king might sit on a throne, but that was precisely to put him above peons (and mostly everybody was peons). They did quite a lot of squatting. At best, maybe sat on benches or stools. Not chairs — those were a long time coming.
Sooner in Europe than in the East. The book suggests a biological reason: anatomical differences made Westerners less comfortable squatting.
I’ve often passed through New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal. Used to have plenty of seating, whole areas devoted to chairs, for waiting travelers. But the last time I was there, with a couple hours till departure, chairs were conspicuous for their scarcity. I actually hunted through several levels of the terminal without finding one available. Extremely annoying.
I wondered at an explanation. Then it hit me: homeless people. The P.A. poobahs must have decided (despite inconvenience to actual passengers) to remove seating to discourage the homeless from hanging out in the (heated/air conditioned) terminal — street people belong on the streets.
We’ve made a lot of progress, materially. Humanly, maybe not so much.