Imagine that I have a time machine, and that I have the chance to swap two people from their times and lives to the other’s. For this thought experiment I chose a woman in her early 20’s—from a 1,000 years ago (most likely from somewhere in northwest Europe)with another young woman about the same age from today. They would both soon be experiencing any number of mutually exclusive problems, that is, the skills they both have are now virtually worthless.
Today there are actually very few people you know, the people on the street, the guy next door, John Doe (or Jane Doe)who actually know how to make a fire (without modern technology, as in matches, lighters, or any other modern convenience). OK, there are a few boy scouts who got a merit badge for fire starting, but it’s not as if they do it every day… Other than these boy scouts and a few survivalist types, starting a fire the ‘old school’ way is nearly a lost art…at least here in the technological west…soon to be everywhere.
Conversely, the woman from the past would be functionally illiterate (for the sake of this little experiment I will use my powers to ensure that both of these women can speak and understand the native language, just for the sake of keeping this little experiment from becoming far too complex…). While she could speak, and understand words, she wouldn’t be literate, wouldn’t know how to use a microwave, how to use a computer, TV, telephone, automobiles, or airplanes. I haven’t even mentioned some more ubiquitous things like books, table salt, pepper, sugar, and for another dark age kicker…personal hygiene (from a USA POV…).
These vast differences between these two people seem rather obvious when you look at it for only a minute. But I could replace the 1,000 year old woman with another counterpart from the 1830’s, this time from Great Britain… Now it gets more interesting since these huge differences between the first two women (a thousand years apart) would still maintain (OK, about 80% of them!). My point in these comparisons is that we have, as a culture, thrown out an awful lot of information, skills, and even technologies which we would be VERY hard pressed to reproduce.
A thousand years ago, most people in Northwest Europe were illiterate, lived only to their late 30’s, saw real hardship, disease, and death. The sum of higher knowledge was kept in safekeeping by monks, and the average person actually believed in ghosts, demons, and witches. They knew that their lives were controlled by supernatural forces (and not from the church either!).
Nowadays, we live in a world where we have many more conveniences, life is easy (if only in comparison!), and we have a great deal of technology at our fingertips. We have access to almost all of the knowledge and information that exists (classified state secrets are a very small portion of the totality of human knowledge…). So, with this said, how many of us avail ourselves of this knowledge? We have cell phones, TV’s, laptops, GPS, TiVo’s, and all sorts of other kinds of technology at our fingertips, but how many of us really understand how they really work, how many of us are even interested? Taking a few of these points as reasonable (if a bit arguable) it seems that there are far fewer differences between all of these lives than you would think, especially when there are supposed to be! They had pixies, we have the ghost in the machine, they were illiterate, but how many books do you read?
They died at a very early point in their lives, but they tried to do everything they could with the knowledge that they had…but do we?
Thomas Hobbes said: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” in 1651… we are more solitary, just as nasty, but we have made a few small steps away from brutish…
