All in all, I think that the human experience has not fundamentally changed in thousands of years and is unlikely to fundamentally change in the near future.
How many of your immediate family members had died by the time you were 18? (Parents, siblings, children.)
How many people do you know personally who have starved to death? What is your estimated chance that you will starve to death in the next ten years?
How many hours a day do you spend outside?
How many hours a day do you spend on manual labor?
How many people have you met over the course of your life?
Now, I agree that human nature appears to only have shifted a small amount in the last thousands of years, and so most things look the same on the inside; worrying about how to pay for rent is probably not all that different psychologically from worrying about whether you’ll survive the winter. I also agree that relatively few parts of human experience look totally new- there were obese urban paper-pushers in the Roman Empire, for example. But it seems that if you invert the number of urban desk-jobbers and farmers, you get a fundamentally different society and ‘human experience’, and that seems to be a somewhat fair comparison of now and Rome.
I wonder whether some of the inferential distance here is around what is understood by ‘the human experience’.
Materially, the human experience has changed quite profoundly, along the lines Vaniver points out (dramatic improvements in life expectancy, food supply, mechanisation, transport and travel, and so on).
Subjectively, though, the human experience has not changed much at all: the experience of love, loss, fear, ambition, in/security, friendship, community, excitement and so on seems to have been pretty much the same for humans living now as it was for humans living as far back as we have written records, and almost certainly well before that. Certainly when I read historical accounts I’m often struck with how similar the people seem to me and people I know, even when they are living in very different circumstances. This, I’m guessing, is what katydee is getting at.
So the human subjective experience of, say, having an immediate family member die has not changed fundamentally, but the rate at which humans have that experience that has changed fundamentally.
(Reflecting on this makes me feel very, very glad indeed to live now rather than at any time in the past. For instance, Darwin seems to have been as besotted by his kids as I am by mine, and I expect I’d be just as upset as he was were one of my children to die of scarlet fever, but it’s extremely unlikely to happen to me—or indeed anyone I know—because it’s almost always very easy to treat now. This has knock-on effects too: I get nervous and worried whenever my kids get ill, but nothing like as nervous and worried as he did, because I know that the chances that they’ll die are so much lower.)
I suspect this latter change in the human experience is what is meant by most of the people saying that it has changed.
the experience of love, loss, fear, ambition, in/security, friendship, community, excitement and so on seems to have been pretty much the same for humans living now as it was for humans living as far back as we have written records, and almost certainly well before that.
Kaj_Sotala has already discussed most of these, but I wanted to focus on friendship. Ancient friendships seem to have had as a major component mutual defense against violence. As violence decreases, that aspect of friendship decreases- I’ve never had a friend come to my aid in combat, because I’ve never been attacked, and never come to someone else’s aid, because I’ve never had the opportunity.
As well, modern friendships seem to be categorically different from most ancient friendships. Instant messaging with someone who is a close match to your personality and interests who lives across the globe feels rather different than physically interacting with the person who lives next door to you, who isn’t particularly close to your personality or interests. Modern childhood friendships are much more likely to be age-segregated than they were in the past, and so on.
My adrenaline system seems to work as well and in the same way as someone from a thousand years ago- but I’ve had far less cause to activate mine, and so while I’m mostly okay with calling the hardware ‘pretty much the same’ I have a hard time calling the experience ‘pretty much the same.’
Subjectively, though, the human experience has not changed much at all: the experience of love, loss, fear, ambition, in/security, friendship, community, excitement and so on
In e.g. the Middle Ages, the average person might have spent their whole lives on the countryside in a small community where everyone knew everyone, people rarely heard any news from the outside world, there were relatively strict sexual morals and never very much to do on one’s limited spare time, and most people inherited the profession of their parents and basically knew their place in the world from birth.
Compare this to someone living in a large modern liberal city, whose daily commute might already involve traveling a longer distance than the middle age peasant would travel in their whole life and who also has the option of traveling around the world, who may be in daily contact with more people than the peasant knew in their whole life, who has never known for certain what he would do in her life and has already changed careers three times, who may sleep with different people every night, etc. etc.
I would claim that these people would have vastly different experiences, even in terms of love, loss, fear, friendship, community, and so on. Yes, there are some elements which are the same, but the overall experience is still different enough that the peasant would have been literally incapable of imagining the modern urbanite’s life.
Yes, there are some elements which are the same, but the overall experience is still different enough that the peasant would have been literally incapable of imagining the modern urbanite’s life.
I think the reverse is also true- modern Western societies are so individualistic that I imagine most moderns can’t imagine what it was like to be in some of the communities or hierarchies of the past.
How many of your immediate family members had died by the time you were 18? (Parents, siblings, children.)
How many people do you know personally who have starved to death? What is your estimated chance that you will starve to death in the next ten years?
How many hours a day do you spend outside?
How many hours a day do you spend on manual labor?
How many people have you met over the course of your life?
Now, I agree that human nature appears to only have shifted a small amount in the last thousands of years, and so most things look the same on the inside; worrying about how to pay for rent is probably not all that different psychologically from worrying about whether you’ll survive the winter. I also agree that relatively few parts of human experience look totally new- there were obese urban paper-pushers in the Roman Empire, for example. But it seems that if you invert the number of urban desk-jobbers and farmers, you get a fundamentally different society and ‘human experience’, and that seems to be a somewhat fair comparison of now and Rome.
I wonder whether some of the inferential distance here is around what is understood by ‘the human experience’.
Materially, the human experience has changed quite profoundly, along the lines Vaniver points out (dramatic improvements in life expectancy, food supply, mechanisation, transport and travel, and so on).
Subjectively, though, the human experience has not changed much at all: the experience of love, loss, fear, ambition, in/security, friendship, community, excitement and so on seems to have been pretty much the same for humans living now as it was for humans living as far back as we have written records, and almost certainly well before that. Certainly when I read historical accounts I’m often struck with how similar the people seem to me and people I know, even when they are living in very different circumstances. This, I’m guessing, is what katydee is getting at.
So the human subjective experience of, say, having an immediate family member die has not changed fundamentally, but the rate at which humans have that experience that has changed fundamentally.
(Reflecting on this makes me feel very, very glad indeed to live now rather than at any time in the past. For instance, Darwin seems to have been as besotted by his kids as I am by mine, and I expect I’d be just as upset as he was were one of my children to die of scarlet fever, but it’s extremely unlikely to happen to me—or indeed anyone I know—because it’s almost always very easy to treat now. This has knock-on effects too: I get nervous and worried whenever my kids get ill, but nothing like as nervous and worried as he did, because I know that the chances that they’ll die are so much lower.)
I suspect this latter change in the human experience is what is meant by most of the people saying that it has changed.
Kaj_Sotala has already discussed most of these, but I wanted to focus on friendship. Ancient friendships seem to have had as a major component mutual defense against violence. As violence decreases, that aspect of friendship decreases- I’ve never had a friend come to my aid in combat, because I’ve never been attacked, and never come to someone else’s aid, because I’ve never had the opportunity.
As well, modern friendships seem to be categorically different from most ancient friendships. Instant messaging with someone who is a close match to your personality and interests who lives across the globe feels rather different than physically interacting with the person who lives next door to you, who isn’t particularly close to your personality or interests. Modern childhood friendships are much more likely to be age-segregated than they were in the past, and so on.
My adrenaline system seems to work as well and in the same way as someone from a thousand years ago- but I’ve had far less cause to activate mine, and so while I’m mostly okay with calling the hardware ‘pretty much the same’ I have a hard time calling the experience ‘pretty much the same.’
In e.g. the Middle Ages, the average person might have spent their whole lives on the countryside in a small community where everyone knew everyone, people rarely heard any news from the outside world, there were relatively strict sexual morals and never very much to do on one’s limited spare time, and most people inherited the profession of their parents and basically knew their place in the world from birth.
Compare this to someone living in a large modern liberal city, whose daily commute might already involve traveling a longer distance than the middle age peasant would travel in their whole life and who also has the option of traveling around the world, who may be in daily contact with more people than the peasant knew in their whole life, who has never known for certain what he would do in her life and has already changed careers three times, who may sleep with different people every night, etc. etc.
I would claim that these people would have vastly different experiences, even in terms of love, loss, fear, friendship, community, and so on. Yes, there are some elements which are the same, but the overall experience is still different enough that the peasant would have been literally incapable of imagining the modern urbanite’s life.
I think the reverse is also true- modern Western societies are so individualistic that I imagine most moderns can’t imagine what it was like to be in some of the communities or hierarchies of the past.
Agreed.