Tag Archive | peasants

Medieval Monday – What Were They Thinking?

Dec3

Last month my medieval post [at the Seduced by History blog] generated a lot of discussion, and while some of it set me off, other points set me to thinking.  One point that was made was that you can’t judge the mindset of medieval people using modern worldviews and values.  True.  Very true.  So, curious as ever, I dove into my collection of history books to piece together a picture of what the mindset of the medieval world really was.

My bookshelf ... and also my cat Torpedo

My bookshelf … and also my cat Torpedo

Of course the first thing I discovered is that it was as drastically different within the different eras of the Middle Ages (commonly divided into Dark Ages, High Middle Ages, and Late Middle Ages) as our modern worldview is from any of those three.  A peasant living in the kingdom of the Franks under the rule of Odo the Great in 870 would have had a vastly different view of the world than a nobleman living in the England of Henry II in 1170, and both wouldn’t have recognized the values and thought process of a Venetian living in plague-swept Italy in 1370.  Life changed, and values with it, just as fast in the overly long stretch of time that we call the Middle Ages as fast as it changed from 1900 to today.

Okay, but what where those values, world views and thought processes like?

First of all, I just want to point out that that “famous” quote about medieval life being “nasty, brutish, and short” is a misquote.  The quote, written in 1651 by Thomas Hobbes, was in reference to warfare, not day to day life.  Yet somehow a lot of people have the mistaken idea that those words can be used to describe life in the Middle Ages, particularly the Dark Ages.

The reality of the Dark Ages was probably quite different.  According to Charles Van Doren, the people of the Dark Ages most likely didn’t think of their own lives as dark at all.  Sure, they were poor and uneducated, their lives were rural and small, and they were disconnected from everyone else in their so-called kingdoms.  But Van Doren’s theory is that none of that mattered, because the goal of life in the Dark Ages was not material, it was spiritual.

medieval cow womanAs he discusses in his book A History of Knowledge, Van Doren points to St. Augustine’s seminal work City of God as the primary intellectual motivator of the Dark Ages.  In City of God, written as the barbarian hoards were descending on Rome, St. Augustine says that while the material things of this world might pass away, it is the attainment of a non-material relationship to God that mankind should be striving.  This was a huge departure from the materialistic culture of the Roman Empire, but it was one that stuck.  After all, what better goal could your average person living anytime from 450 – 1000 have than something they had already attained: worldly poverty and spiritual riches.

Van Doren’s theory is that the centuries that we now call the Dark Ages were not a wasteland of underachievement and ignorance, but rather a time when the average person saw spirituality as worthy of merit, not wealth.  And it was a spirituality that bore a closer resemblance to the pagan past than what we think of as Christianity today.

By the year 1050 things were beginning to change.  As Norman F. Cantor discusses in his book The Civilization of the Middle Ages, Europe as it entered the High Middle Ages was a tapestry of vastly different ideals and achievements.  In England you had a culture that had been turned upside-down in the past couple of centuries as Viking invasions had rewritten both the laws and customs.  The king, Edward the Confessor, was pious but weak and his nobles saw no problem in waging personal wars against each other and their so-called sovereign for territory and position.  Further south, in France, you had a noble class, mostly descended from Italian and Rhenish nobility, engaged in similar local wars.  The German emperor, Henry III held more real power in his territory because of his connections with Rome, but this was not an era of centralized authority.

This was an era when most people still never traveled outside of twenty miles from the place where they were born.  Peasants were far more concerned with the unprecedented productivity of the land that they were experiencing than national politics.  The nobility felt this fluidity of fortune and looked for opportunities to seize power wherever they could.  It was an age of political maneuvering and small-scale battles.

Strangely enough, it still wasn’t an age when wealth mattered.  In fact, in spite of the fact that the economy was booming, money still wasn’t important to the people of the Middle Ages, not even by the twelfth century.  In the twelfth century, the heart of the High Middle Ages, status was all-important.  Status was gained through military and matrimonial victory.  If you were a noble it was all about who you had married and who you conquered in the process.  The rulers who made it to the top of the pile, Henry II of England, Philip Augustus of France, and Frederick Barbarossa of Germany, got where they were through strategic victories on private battlefields and through savvy negotiations in the bedroom.  They were able to maintain their empires through the same means.

Medieval-universityBut something else was going on behind the scenes, as Joseph R. Strayer demonstrates in his book Western Europe in the Middle Ages.  (These are all super awesome books, btw)  While the emphasis was still on status over wealth, in the High Middle Ages it was also becoming about the individual over the collective.  For kings a self-made man was one who battled his way to the throne.  For the common man, advancement could come through skill and hard work.

On the continent, in Flanders and Italy in particular, a new phenomenon was underway.  It used to be that all people could be classed into one of three categories: those who fought, those who prayed, and those who labored.  Now there was a new and increasingly powerful group: the bourgeois.  For the first time you had a small but influential class of people whose motto might just have been “show me the money”.  These people were increasingly rich.  They came from the lower tiers of the nobility, but also from the ranks of the peasantry who had made something of themselves.  They built cities, founded churches and religious orders, loaned money to kings, and advised the Church what to do.

Granted, it wasn’t quite time for the French Revolution yet, but this is where the seeds were planted.  Yes, the Church was the most powerful entity in Medieval Europe, but the Church was staffed with priests who came from very worldly backgrounds and who were more interested in politics than souls.  The twelfth century saw the rise of great universities that still exist today.  These centers of learning and inquiry were where most of the religious men from this time onwards came from.  By the thirteenth century the Church was powered not so much by the kind of spirituality St. Augustine advocated in City of God, but by the logic and proto-scientific inquiry of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.

Are you still with me?  We’ve gone from being a society content with its own material and intellectual poverty, simple in its spirituality and outlook, to a civilization with a sound economy, growing by leaps and bounds, in which status was king but wealth, individuality, and knowledge were beginning to be the measure of a man.  Two very different worlds.

And then it all blew up and fell apart.

Medieval_marketJust when life was good, when the immense forests of Europe were being cut down to make enough space for people to live, when peasants were contentedly excused from their feudal duties because they could easily pay scutage instead of providing labor, when monasteries were more like a cross between a university and a country club and universities were teaching metaphysics and methods of reason and deduction that would lead to the scientific method, when rediscovered knowledge began to filter back into the west from the east as trade became more prevalent, it all fell down like a house of cards.

If you want to get a good idea of what happened to set Europe back a couple hundred years in terms of development and standard of living, read Barbara W. Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14th Century.  I’ve actually written an entire series of blog posts about the various issues that brought Europe to its knees during this time: famine and climate change, the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, and the Papal Schism.  So instead of rehashing all of that horrifically fascinating history that made up the Late Middle Ages, I just want to talk about what it did to people’s attitudes.

Basically, it wrecked them.  All of the optimism of the High Middle Ages was gone.  Europe experienced a collective period of manic-depression.  Death could be around any corner, so you should either live it up and not care what happened or punish yourself for your sins and wait for the better life that was to come.  Suddenly material things became much more important because there was no telling when you were going to lose them.

When the English invaded France and it looked like they were going to win the Hundred Years War, soldiers looted noble homes and sent “stuff” back to England.  The average English home in the early 1400s was outfitted with pilfered French goods.  This was a huge change from, say, the Viking invasions of the Dark Ages.  Back then you were more likely to suddenly find your English house stocked with Danish goods than to find a Danish house decked out with English stuff.  Warfare had changed from conquer and settle to smash and grab.

This is also when the Church became more militant about squashing any opinion, especially scientific ones, that didn’t agree with their bottom line.  And yes, that’s the right metaphor.  In the 14th century the Church underwent a civil war.  Coming out of that there was a feeling that it needed to crack down on differences of opinion in order to maintain the level of political and social control that it had had back in the High Middle Ages when things were good.  Why?  Because there was big money in being the only spiritual game in town, in selling indulgences and relics.  And after the curtain was pulled back by the Papal Schism, giving the average man a glimpse into the corrupt inner workings of the Church, the rumblings that would eventually lead to Martin Luther and the Protestant revolution were already being heard.

So what were people in the Middle Ages thinking?  What were those attitudes that we can’t compare to the way people think now?  Well, as Strayer suggests, because the vast majority of primary resources that exist about the Middle Ages were written by and about less than 10% of the population, we can only guess what the other 90% of the population was thinking.  Granted, we can make educated guesses based on court records, papal decrees, and laws that were enacted.  For example, repeated attempts by the clergy in Paris in the 13th century to shut down the many public bathhouses due to an outbreak of syphilis probably doesn’t indicate that the prevailing attitude in the city was one of anti-cleanliness and chastity.  The importance of the brewing, spinning, and soap-making guilds, all female-dominated professions, in the High Middle Ages is a strong indicator that women were not expected to exclusively stay at home under the power of their husbands or fathers.  The prevalence of court cases in which a woman sued to have a man who had seduced her be forced to legally marry her, and won those cases too, indicates that it was not so much of a man’s world as we might be tempted to think.

And since this post is now twice as long as I intended it to be, I’ll leave it there.  The point is that attitudes changed drastically throughout the span that we think of as the Middle Ages.  If you’re a writer wondering what the world your characters inhabit might be like, keep in mind that the ever-changing tapestry of medieval thought was just as complicated as the world we live in now, even if the overall worldview was different.

[This post is a repost of the article I wrote for the Seduced by History blog this past weekend.  All images are in the public domain in the US, except my bookshelves]

Medieval Monday – Medieval Government

Nov5

Tomorrow in the United States we will all take part in a governmental extravaganza known as a presidential election.  In theory, the citizens of this country will vote for who we want to be our president – although in actuality we’re just voting for the electoral college – who will then decide based on the popular vote who will be president.  We’re also voting for federal and state legislators, who, let’s face it, are the ones who really wield the power in our governmental system.  In the words of Winston Churchill, “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.”

But how did things work in the Middle Ages?  How were people ruled a thousand years ago?

The most general answer to the question is monarchy.  Most kingdoms of medieval Europe were ruled by monarchs, although the type and scope of these monarchies varied widely from kingdom to kingdom and through the various centuries of the Middle Ages.  The Holy Roman Empire was administrated very differently from the Italian peninsula, which was ruled differently than Scandinavia or France or England.  For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to talk about government in post-Norman medieval England.

So monarchy, right?  Medieval England was ruled by a king who was believed to be divinely ordained and who’s word was law.  Right?

Well, yes and no.

Like Modern America, the government of medieval England was complex and layered.  It was heavily based on the feudal system.  True, you had the king at the top as the ultimate feudal lord.  In theory the king was the most powerful feudal lord and all of the other lords and landowners swore fealty to him and fulfilled their obligations to provide fighting men and money accordingly.

William the Conqueror certainly was the strongest feudal lord in that he raised an army and defeated his distant cousin, King Harold, to secure the throne of England.  And his descendants managed to hold onto the throne – although sometimes through a female connection instead of direct inheritance – for a really, really long time.  The king was absolute, and the only way to become king was to be born into the royal line of succession.  No election politics!  Yay!

Actually, instead of election politics and Super PACs, medieval England had wars.  Because where the line of succession from one monarch to another was not crystal clear, or where various sons of the rightful king decided to kill each other to take the throne, like in the case of Henry IIs progeny, war was the answer.  It wasn’t just the sons of kings either.  If nephews, cousins, or other relations felt that they would be a better ruler, they would raise an army to try to conquer the throne.

But wait, you say.  What gave anyone the right to question the king?

Well, the king was still subject to the feudal system, even though he sat at the top of it.  He relied on Great Councils to advise him, help him make decisions, and to implement those decisions and collect taxes.  These Great Councils consisted of the heads of the clergy, barons, and earls.  Sneak peak: The Great Councils developed into what we now know as Parliament.  And that shift happened most formally after the events of 1215 and the signing of the Magna Carta.  I could write a whole blog post about the build-up to, the implementation of, and the effects of the Magna Carta, but for now the important thing to take away is that the king was not absolute, he answered to his nobles.

Okay, so how did a noble get to be noble?  And how did that effect you and me, who statistically were most likely to be peasants?  How did government work for our kind?

It was all about the manor system.  When you get right down to it, “federal” government of kings and barons didn’t matter so much to the likes of you and me.  It was all about our local government.  In a lot of ways, local government would seem more familiar to us.  Yes, the be all and end all was our feudal lord, who inherited his manor.  Lords who didn’t inherit their manors either won them in battle from the previous lord or were granted them by the king.  However they came into possession of their land, the Lord of the Manor was the ultimate authority.

In theory.

Because the Lord of the Manor was often not present – away fulfilling his feudal obligations by fighting for his sovereign or just hanging out in London – he would appoint a man to be Steward and see to things in his place.  The Steward would perform all of the duties of a Lord.  This too could become a hereditary position.  In fact, the Stewart family that would eventually take the throne of England got their name because they were the hereditary Stewards of Scotland, ruling in the place of the English king until independence was gained.

It goes further still, because sometimes even the Steward couldn’t be bothered to see to the day-to-day workings of the manor.  That’s where the position of Reeve came into play.  The Reeve was the man on the ground, so to speak.  He was the one who had all of the actual responsibility, and in many cases the real power.  How someone became the Reeve depended on the traditions of the given manor in question.  In some cases he was appointed by the lord, but in many cases he was a peasant elected by the other peasants on the manor once a year at Michaelmas.  The Reeve was responsible for everything from maintaining order to delegating work to making sure the produce of the manor made it to market and received a fair price.  The Shire-Reeve, or Sheriff, was responsible for the administration of an entire shire.

So yes, while the king was the ultimate authority, like the federal government, and the Lord of the Manor was the de facto ruler of your patch, like a state governor, and while the Steward served to put the wishes of the Lord of the Manor in place, like a state legislature, the Reeve was the closest most of the population of medieval England got to authority, sort of like the mayor of a modern hometown.  And the Reeve was as likely as not to be elected from amongst the people.  If there was a dispute of some sort between citizens, you would take it to the Reeve or a local magistrate first, then the Steward if that failed, the Lord of the Manor if you needed to, and in the rarest of cases, to the king.  But in essence, most local disputes were solved at the local level by lower officials and the Lord of the Manor and the king were lofty figureheads.  Who the king was probably didn’t affect the daily lives of the peasants until and unless a war was fought directly on their land or they were plucked from the fields to go fight for their lord.

Mind you, I didn’t even scratch the surface of the influence of the Church or Church government here, and it was no small thing.

It was a very different sort of political system than we have now in America.  Frankly, I don’t think I would mind living in this system as long as my Lord of the Manor was a good man who had appointed an honest Steward, and my fellow peasants had elected a good man to be Reeve.  At least there wouldn’t have been political campaigns and TV commercials generating negativity.  Considering how fruitful, populous, and economically stable England became in the years of the High Middle Ages and beyond, I think it’s safe to say that more Lords of the Manor ran things in a mutually beneficial way more often than not.

I’ve never been one to automatically assume that just because citizens of a given area didn’t have the right to vote it necessarily meant that they were all oppressed, down-trodden, and destitute.  Living under an enlightened despot might actually have been a recipe for a more secure and prosperous life.  Or maybe I’m just saying that right now because if I see another political ad I might go postal.  Either way, I’ll definitely be voting tomorrow.

Medieval Monday – What Did the Middle Ages Smell Like?

Oct29

So there I was the other day, driving home from work, caught in traffic, stuck behind a car whose exhaust system needed serious attention.  As I wrinkled my nose and said, “Eew, gross” the thought hit me:  We like to think that we live in a pristine, modern world that smells sweet while looking back in time and assuming everything stank like sewage all the time.  But did it?

Uneducated modern thinkers might assume that because there was no running water in the Middle Ages everything was dirty and smelly.  Well, if you’ve known me and heard me talk about history long enough then you know that nothing galls me more than this completely false assumption.  As I discussed at length last year in my blog post about how medieval people did bath, frequently, hygiene was far more advanced a thousand years ago than modern people assume.

True.  Running water was not readily available in homes of the Middle Ages.  That does not, however, mean that it was any more stinky than the vast majority of the world today.

Depending on where you were.

© Zoelavie | Dreamstime.com

If you, like 90% of the rest of the population, lived on a manor in the countryside, then things probably weren’t any more noxious than they are in the countryside of the 21st century.  I’ve been out in Pennsylvania dairy country when the wind is blowing the wrong way and whoo!  Yes, it gets smelly in a hurry.  But when you take into consideration the sheer size of herds of livestock these days it isn’t all that surprising.

Herds of animals, be they cows or sheep or goats, were generally smaller in the Middle Ages than they are now.  They weren’t kept in vast industrial barns either.  Livestock in the Middle Ages was free-range.  I’m not saying that they didn’t get a bit niffy now and then, but Nature does have a way of taking care of those things.  So if you think about it, the smells of the animals in rural medieval life probably wasn’t any worse than what it is in the 21st century.

As for there being no indoor plumbing, well, that’s why outhouses were out.  In general, people are smart enough not to defecate where they eat and sleep.  I’m pretty sure that chamber-pots and other necessities were emptied on a frequent, regular basis.

So taking those more nasty things out of the equation, your average medieval home would most likely smell like a wood-burning stove and cooking.  You can get a sense of what this could have been like when you visit reenactment sights like Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Plymouth Plantation in the US.  Even though those buildings are modern reconstructions, enough period activity takes place in them that they have that sort of woody, smoky, meaty smell.  Frankly, that’s not all that bad.

What about the people themselves?  Well, as I’ve already established, they did bathe.  They also used herbs and plants of various sorts as medieval deodorant.  Was it as good as Secret?  Probably not.  Would a modern person traveling back in time notice more BO?  Probably.  But then, we’re so conditioned to think that humans should have no scent at all these days that we would be more bothered by it than a contemporary would.  At least that’s what I think.

Okay, now the exception to my assertion that the Middle Ages wasn’t a stinky place: cities.

Not even I, medieval apologist that I am, can get around the fact that cities smelled vile.  But it goes far beyond a bunch of people being packed tightly together in streets where sanitation consisted of tossing the contents of your chamber-pots out the windows.  There were drains, open and feeble though they were.  And there was an actual job held by the lowest of the low that was the medieval equivalent of the people who walk around with plastic bags cleaning up after their dogs.  There was money in poop.  And when it rained things freshened up considerably.

Wikicommons – public domain

No, the biggest problem medieval cities had was industry.  Industrial waste of a thousand years ago was just as nasty as it is now.  Only back then it was organic.  The byproducts of tanning, fulling, cloth dying, forging, and a whole bunch of other medieval crafts were just gross.  A single household might have emptied a few chamber-pots a day into the street, but industry chucked some serious crap into the streets and rivers around cities.  Literally.

This is why the nobility had estates in the country and why they went to them when the weather was hot.  When the weather was colder it made things a little easier.  But the heat of summer made cities like London and Paris pretty much unbearable.  The situation got so bad in the Late Middle Ages that the great cities began building underground sewers.  That didn’t help the nearby rivers, though.  It would still be centuries until those problems were cleaned up.

So all in all, the quality of scent in the Middle Ages really depended on where you lived.  And since most people lived in the country, we would probably all have been fine.  But sweet or sour, fresh or ferocious, the scents around us in the Middle Ages would not have been the ones we’re used to now.  I dunno, I think I could do without car exhaust and chemical fumes.

Medieval Monday – There’s A New Sheriff In Town

Oct8

One of the details in my Noble Hearts trilogy that makes them particularly susceptible to being compared to the Robin Hood legend is the presence of a sheriff.  Not to give too much away, but he’s the bad guy in The Loyal Heart and the good guy in The Faithful Heart.  Either way, the mere mention of a sheriff as being in charge takes people’s minds instantly to that best-known sheriff of all, the Sheriff of Nottingham.  But there’s a reason why I needed the character of a sheriff in my novels and why the author of the Robin Hood legend needed one in his.  It’s the very simple reason that if you lived in the medieval English countryside, the sheriff was in charge.

This was, of course, an evolution of government.  Way, way back in Anglo-Saxon England, long before the Norman Invasion, the countryside was divided into tiny little individually-owned properties known as manors or demesnes.  Manors were owned by a lord and worked by peasants who had feudal duties to that lord.  In these early days the lord would provide protection for the peasants on his land and the peasants would perform labor.  Easy.  And who was in charge of overseeing all of that work?  The reeve.

A reeve was basically someone chosen by the people to be an administrative officer.  Before the Conquest this more or less meant that he was in charge of seeing to the day to day organization of life and work on the manor so that the lord didn’t have to be bothered if he didn’t want to be.  There were several kinds of reeves too.  There were manor-reeves in charge of the manor, port-reeves in charge of port areas, town-reeves in charge of towns.  You get the idea.  And then there were shire-reeves.

The shire-reeve’s job was originally that of detecting and preventing crime.  His reach extended throughout the entire shire that he had been elected to serve.  It was an important position, one that demanded a man who was both competent and respected.  He held a great deal of authority within a shire, and yet he wasn’t necessarily a lord himself.

After the Conquest life in England changed.  As England made the transition into the High Middle Ages with its prosperity and stability, the jobs of the reeves changed as well.  On a manor the reeve continued to be in charge of day to day activities, but he also took on the major financial tasks of the manor.  He was responsible to making sure the manor’s produce was sold at reasonable prices, that taxes and fines were collected for the lord, and that all accounts were paid.  And yes, he was generally a peasant chosen once a year at Michaelmas to serve a year-long term.  Although quite frequently a good reeve could end up holding the position for life.

Chaucer’s Reeve was a seriously good guy

Now, multiply that new and highly responsible manor-reeve by an entire shire and you have the new shire-reeve … or sheriff, as the position came to be called.  This new sheriff was responsible for the administration of the shire as a whole.  He was responsible for financial and governmental transactions throughout the entire area of his shire.  He was also still responsible for detecting and preventing crimes, and for doling out justice for those crimes.Of course, by this time the sheriff wasn’t a peasant elected by his peers to serve a limited term.  The sheriff was usually someone much more important, a landowner appointed to the position.  Of course you could also buy the position of sheriff too, like Hugh Nonant bought his three sheriffdoms of Warwickshire, Leicestershire, and Staffordshire in the late 1180s.  Incidentally, Hugh Nonant was one of Prince John’s supporters during the time that Richard was away on his crusade and in captivity, and he was tried and punished along with John when Richard returned in 1194.  So the originator of the Robin Hood legend wasn’t just making up the idea that a sheriff here or there supported the prince over the king.

The fact of the matter is, the sheriff of any given shire was a crucial figure in shaping the law and government of that shire.  Robin Hood’s author didn’t make that up, Disney didn’t make that up, and I didn’t make that up either.  But sometimes a boring administrative fact of history becomes so romanticized that we mistakenly believe it must have been a unique creation of an author looking for a villain.  If that were the case, I’m surprised we don’t have more congressmen villains in modern novels!

So when you find yourself reading The Loyal Heart and being tempted to think “Hey, Buxton seems an awful lot like the Sheriff of Nottingham,” stop to consider that he might, in fact look much more like Hugh Nonant instead!  And Buxton’s successor as sheriff….  Well, I won’t give that one away.  You’ll just have to read the book.

Stupid Things Modern People Do

Mar2

How many times have you heard someone scoff at the ignorant things that people in the past used to do?  A lot, right?  Now many times have you found yourself feeling smug because you can take a shower while those nasty Medieval peasants never bathed (which is a lie, by the way)?  A lot of people think that we in the Modern Age are the smartest and savviest people ever.  But I have a feeling that if someone from a bygone era could take a peek into our world they would shake their heads at some of the truly insane things that we all do.

Here are my top choices for the mind-numbingly stupid things that modern people do:

1.  We buy water.  The bottled water industry makes billions of dollars a year.  While one could argue that it’s important to have pure drinking water and that a lot of people throughout history haven’t had access to this basic necessity, does that really justify paying a dollar or more for a bottle of water?  Taps abound everywhere.  Modern tap water is much cleaner than anything people of the past had available to them.  And that’s even before we run it through a filter.  But here we are, repeatedly paying big money for “special” water in a bottle.  And guess what?  Most of the time that water comes from a tap somewhere else.

How ridiculous is it that we turn up our noses at free water and dig deep in our purses to buy someone else’s water?

2.  We sit in one place all day.  Not necessarily by choice, but we do.  I do at least.  Throughout most of human history people have spent their day moving.  Whether that was working in the fields or marching as an army or taking care of household tasks, people moved.  The wealthiest of people may have spent long stretches of time sitting at a dinner table or in a parlor having tea, but they still went for walks and moved around from engagement to engagement.

Here in the modern world so very many of us spent at least 8 hours a day in Cubeville.  Our office chairs get butt-grooves.  If we do get up it’s usually only to walk as far as the printer or the bathroom or the water-cooler (which someone has paid for).  Those who do find some time to move throughout the day pay money to go to special places with machinery that helps us use our muscles.  An entire multi-billion dollar fitness industry has risen up to compensate for the fact that we are evolving into banana slugs.

3.  We voluntarily ingest chemicals.  Seriously, have you ever read the label on some of your favorite foods?  I have a package of Girl Scout cookies sitting right next to me.  Some of the ingredients include thiamine mononitrate, partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil, and annatto color.  I don’t even want to know what’s in the Big Mac I had last week.  I read an article a while back that talked about how the McRib sandwich includes some of the same ingredients as those used in yoga mats.

Not only that, naturally produced and minimally processed foods, the kind people have eaten for millennia, are next to impossible to find and really expensive when you do find them.  Most of us are completely unaware of what parts of the cow we’re eating.  And don’t get me started on the contents of hot dogs, yummy as they are.  We’ve come a long way from that delicious Medieval peasant pottage that was a staple of historic diet.

We’re paying the price for it too.  Obesity is a problem like it never has been.  What we’ve accomplished in modern, curative medicine for acute conditions we’ve totally lost in everyday health and wellbeing.

4.  We don’t talk to people.  At least not directly.  I’m as guilty as the next modern person of chatting for hours online and sending emails to my friends instead of picking up the phone.  Or visiting.  But back in the day not only was visiting a major social activity, communities would gather in the center of town or in people’s houses for real, live interaction with their neighbors.  The tradition of oral storytelling has been replaced by more sitting, in front of the TV this time, and making music together, dancing, and conversation have become increasingly rare art forms.

Not surprisingly then, cases of anxiety, depression, and mental illness have been on a measured rise throughout the 20th and into the 21st century.  Numerous studies have shown that the less time you spend interacting in person with other people the greater your chances for depression.  And who’s to say that we won’t lose our ability to interact with each other at all?

5.  We buy stuff with money we don’t have.  Guess how the Great Depression of the 1930s started?  It started because throughout the wild days of the 1920s people were buying stocks and things on margin.  That means that they were “buying” them with the idea that when the stocks turned a profit that profit would be used to buy the original stock.  And then the bottom fell out.  History repeated itself in 2007, although no one wants to admit it.

But guess what?  The same thing happens every day.  I’m as guilty of it as the next person.  Although I don’t have as much credit card debt as the average American, if for some reason my credit card company decided I had to pay them back immediately, I wouldn’t be able to do it.  Multiply that by millions and suddenly you realize that our entire economic system is built on nothing.

Peasants and lower class folks of bygone eras might have been considered poor by modern standards, they didn’t have as much stuff as we do, but they also didn’t live under a mountain of credit card debt.  I would hypothesize that if all of the debts we’ve rung up to sustain our modern lifestyles was suddenly called in, we’d be in much worse shape than the peasants of a thousand years ago.

I think I’ve proven my point.  We might think that we’re modern, enlightened people, but at the same time we’ve trapped ourselves in a lot of really silly or unhealthy behavior.  There is no historical precedent for some of the nim-nod things we do.

Of course, it makes me wonder what kind of face-palm inducing activities people will be involved with in a hundred years or so.  Whatever those things may be, you can bet they’ll be looking back on the people of today and calling us ignoramuses.