Discover more from Overcoming Bias
Zahavi’s seminal book on animal signaling tells how certain birds look high status by forcing food down the throat of other birds, who thereby seem low status. While this “altruism” does help low status birds survive, they rightly resent it, as their status loss outweighs their food gain.
In our society, “sympathy” by high status folks for low status folks usually functions similarly — it affirms their high status while giving little net benefit to the low status. For example, the latest New Yorker reviews several books on the Roman empire, including one on the lives of ordinary Romans:
Much of what we know about the Roman emperors is based on myth and misunderstanding. But even that much can’t be said for the vast majority of their subjects, whose way of life has barely left a trace in the historical record. …
[It is] an overwhelmingly dark picture. “Invisible Romans” is full of anecdotes and quotations that speak volumes about Roman attitudes toward women, slaves, and the cheapness of life in general. … In general the lot of the ordinary Roman was no different from that of the vast majority of human beings before the modern age: powerlessness, bitterly hard work, and the constant presence of death. The thing that strikes Knapp most about Roman popular wisdom is its deep passivity in the face of these afflictions, which feels so alien to moderns and especially to Americans. The Romans, he writes, had no concept of progress … A slave might dream of manumission but hardly of abolition. For women, “there were no alternative lifestyles and aspirations either offered or considered … Even the amenities of the ‘Roman world, like the famous public baths, lose their lustre … “baths offered not only social interaction but a lack of hygiene schooling even to contemplate.” (more)
It almost seems as if this author feels it would have been better if these pathetic creatures had never existed, if not for their eventually giving rise to worthy creatures like him. So sad, he muses, that they didn’t bother to even imagine the future changes that could justify their miserable existence. He probably thinks it only a coincidence that his disgust affirms his lofty status among all the humans who have ever lived.
Sigh. The lives of ordinary folks in the Roman empire might not have been as nice as this author’s, nor as nice as yours. Yes they sometimes had pain, hunger, and sickness, but even so they were mostly lives worth living, with much love, laughter, engagement, and satisfaction. Poor folk do smile.
Hatin’ On Farmers
There is a phrase in historiography which sums up this sort of ignorant retrospective dismissal of past societies: "the enormous condescension of posterity." Linked to this trope is our widespread, usually implicit belief that we live in the most enlightened, moral, and sane social formation in the history of humanity. Pick and pry at the value judgements most people make in their claims about history and you will almost always find this belief lying in wait.
Of course, I am sure in our case it is different, and we truly are the best. How delightful to find that, for the first time in the tens and hundreds of thousands of years of modern human history, humans have finally learnt how live properly! Thank God we have dispensed with the barbaric, inhumane, ignorant customs of our poor foolish forebears. We are indeed much too lucky! If only they could have benefitted from our wisdom.
Of course, I am sure our high command of rational knowledge and technology means that the various flies in our ointment are but minor foot-notes to our otherwise glorious culture. I am sure we should not question the selfish, short-sighted individualism which drives our culture of consuming cheap mass-produced goods and cripples and fractures what remain of our communities. Nor the narrative breakdown and political paralysis of our liberal democracies. Nor the depression and anomie sprung up in the dismantling of traditional social structures and traditional frameworks for the interpretation of the world. Nor the drug abuse, depression, suicide, violence and various other manifestations of despair and hatred which permeate our lives and the lives of our children. Nor of course the ever-mounting wave of environmental despoilation threatening the world with total ecological collapse. I am sure that while these features of our modern world may seem a tad concerning, they are really not problems at all, but golden proof of our enlightenment and progress.
I must admit, I speak with tongue somewhat in cheek. That said, I do wonder what those who come after us will say of our lives - if that is we manage to leave them a world from which they might be able to do so.
Will they look back at us, living in our concrete cities, locked up at night in little cells, sitting alone for hours on end staring blankly into hypnotic glowing screens, and by day walking through the teeming crowds, alone again, as steel machines roar back and forth, each carrying more of us, alone, will they look back and say: Now there were people who knew the right way to live!
Or perhaps they will shake their heads and mourn for the lives wasted in this age, a time in which they might well say that people reasoned themselves into insanity, and cut themselves away from their environments, and cut themselves away from their homes, and cut themselves away from one another, and covered the world with cold concrete and mute buildings, and spent their lives searching, searching, searching, their hearts rent with anger and pain, not realising that they were looking for something, not realising even that something had been lost.
How much are you willing to pay to “research safe and reliable germ-line interventions to reduce their capacity for pain significantly”?I don't know of any charity fund that does this, with the specific goal of reducing suffering as a heritable variable, but if there was, and it was trustworthy, I'd definitely donate.