Personally, I would find it hard to get along at any time and place that didn't have corrective lenses, air conditioning and pepperoni pizza, but if I had to choose, I would probably go back to ancient Athens. Aside from all the deep conversation, there's a rich tradition of theater, plenty of goat meat and pita bread and if the city gets too hot, you aren't to far away from the beautiful coastline of the eatsern Mediterranean.
If You Could Live in any Historic Period and/or Place?
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 Manruss |
If You Could Live in any Historic Period and/or Place? |
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Posts: 826 (01/08/08 10:06:34) |
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Armchair Analyst |
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Posts: 4 (05/07/09 16:13:19) |
Well, Athens is probably a horrible choice. I dunno, but some 3/4th of the population must have been slaves. If not, you'd still lead a horrible life
unless you are born into nobility. Depiction of Greece in standard literature is completely wrong.
Persia and India would have been better choices for that period. Cyrus banned slavery, Asoka shunned war and promoted equality. But personally, I would like to be born before the agricultural revolution began - free food available all the time, idyllic existence, work (i.e. hunting) averaging out to only a few hours a week. Best of all, free sex. Women were more accessible before "morality" memes evolved. Look within. Thou art the Buddha
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sammy8 |
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Posts: 275 (05/08/09 06:36:44) |
Yeah, nobody went hungry before agriculture was invented.
That's why they invented agriculture - they were tired of spending the entire day hunting and gathering and still going hungry!
1950s America for me. Big cars, plenty of oil and nobody knew we were killing the planet yet. And have you seen the sweaters girls wore? |
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Strange Loops |
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Posts: 110 (05/08/09 07:57:44) |
If we're worried about being the slave in Athens, then shouldn't we be worried about being the non-alpha in a primativist tribe? (is mating all that
accessible?) And food may not be available all the time to hunter-gatherers -- a leaves and grubs do not taste as good as pizza when you're preferred food
source is out of season or in population decline.
"Nothing can hold you back - not your childhood, not the history of a lifetime, not even the very last moment before now. In a moment you can abandon your past. And once abandoned, you can redefine it. If the past was a ring of futility, let it become a wheel of yearning that drives you forward. If the past was a brick wall, let it become a dam to unleash your power. The very first step of change is so powerful, the boundaries of time fall aside. In one bittersweet moment, the sting of the past is dissolved and its honey salvaged." --Tzvi Freeman
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VanMeta1 |
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Posts: 148 (05/08/09 08:49:23) |
The future for me please. It's history that just hasn't happened yet, after all.
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Manruss |
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Posts: 799 (05/08/09 11:37:47) |
Armhcair: Well, Athens is probably a horrible choice. I dunno, but some 3/4th of the population must have been slaves. If not, you'd still lead a horrible life unless you are born into nobility. Depiction of Greece in standard literature is completely wrong. From what I've read, slaves only comprised about a quarter to a third of the population of ancient Athens. I think you may be thinking of ancient Rome. And yes, I suppose assumes I would not be living in slavery or on the bottom rung of society, but don't all such choices?
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
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Armchair Analyst |
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Posts: 8 (05/09/09 21:56:05) |
Maybe slaves were only a fourth. But you'd have to be pretty desensitized to their suffering to enjoy life in ancient Greece. It wouldn't be very
different from being born as a blue-eyed blonde "Aryan" in Nazi Germany, enjoy life while seeing so many around you killed. This also applies to 50s
America, with Jim Crow laws and all. Same applies to most of history really, up to the present.
Nomadic existence was even more egalitarian than today. That's a big plus for me. Then food actually is not that big a deal. For example H. erectus fossils found in Central Asia show that they lived in a "natural steakhouse" (National Geographic's choice of words). There was abundant food for all. I also once saw a program on PBS once about an anthopologist who videotaped the San ("bushmen") of the Kalahari, and stayed with them for a while. One food that they relished was the larvae of some insect. They'd collect the larvae (almond sized), put some salt through an orifice and pop it into their mouths. Once the anthropologist got used to it, he claimed it absolutely gourmet stuff. Jared Diamond calls the agricultural revolution "the Worst Mistake in Human History": http://www.environnement....istake_jared_diamond.pdf Leisure is another aspect. Most of your time is leisure time. Then there is free sex. Women practiced sexual promiscuity at the same level as men those days. OK, so there is the question of longevity. We'd die early. But then there would be a bevy of topless gorgeous H. sapiens or H. erectus females all around me until that day. Isn't free sex something to die for? 
Look within. Thou art the Buddha
Last Edited By: Armchair Analyst
05/09/09 22:16:56.
Edited 6 times.
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sammy8 |
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Posts: 276 (05/10/09 18:20:20) |
So anywhere with any injustice is out? I guess that leaves fantasy land. The time you are talking about would require you to murder to stay alive, and most of
those women you are excited about would be raped regularly. There's a reason that laws were invented - the time period you are picking was the worst, most
savage, cruelest period in human history.
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Manruss |
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Posts: 801 (05/11/09 09:49:26) |
Armchair: Maybe slaves were only a fourth. But you'd have to be pretty desensitized to their suffering to enjoy life in ancient Greece. It wouldn't be very different from being born as a blue-eyed blonde "Aryan" in Nazi Germany, enjoy life while seeing so many around you killed. This also applies to 50s America, with Jim Crow laws and all. Same applies to most of history really, up to the present. This doesn't sound like a criticism of ancient Athens, but a criticism of living anywhere at any time. If history is rife with injustice, and it is, then why single out ancient Athens?
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
-Albert Camus |
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Armchair Analyst |
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Posts: 9 (05/13/09 19:44:37) |
This doesn't sound like a criticism of ancient Athens, but a criticism of living anywhere at any time. If history is rife with injustice, and it is, then why single out ancient Athens? No it doesn't apply to all times in history, but most, especially Western. There have been societies in the past which have been pretty egalitarian. From the Tainos and the Moriori to Maurya India and Achaemenid Persia. But these are only small examples. By large, most periods/places in human history has been rife with inequality, up to and including the present. In fact, didn't Marx observe that only in hunter-gatherer societies was there "primitive communism"? There's a reason that laws were invented - the time period you are picking was the worst, most savage, cruelest period in human history. Yes indeed I was. But I was merely pointing out that Greece might not have been all that better. It's how we perceive history. Napoleon or Caesar were barely different from Hitler, but they were born in an earlier period. We paint Greece as an utopian society when it might not have been one. But I am not clear what you meant by that being the reason laws were invented. Can you clarify? Look within. Thou art the Buddha
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hmcclungiii |
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Posts: 88 (05/17/09 03:10:36) |
Personally, if I had a choice to live a life in the past, then COME BACK TO MY ORIGINAL LIFE, I would choose to be a slave. I know it sounds strange, but how
else could one really understand and be empathetic?
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Manruss |
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Posts: 808 (05/29/09 08:45:53) |
Aside from that, there's a wide variation between the quality of life in slaves depending upon their skills and the society in which they lived. Being a
slave forced to work aboard a galley or digging in a salt mine would suck balls, no question, but being a bondservant or a tutor for a noble Roman family
wouldn't be so bad. In fact, it would probably be a good sight better than being the average free man living in Germany or Gaul at the time. Even in the
American South, the division between the quality of life of a slave and that of a free man wasn't so clear. Plantation owners frequently hired free white
immigrants to work for subsistence wages to do jobs that were too dangerous for them to risk their permanent assets (i.e. slaves) to do. Conversely, a house
slave got to live in the manor house, and frequently earned wages far above his free white counterparts who were outside digging wells. This is not to suggest
that slaves have nothing to complain about, but rather that being a free man, depending on your station and what civilization you're living in, is not all
it's cracked up to be and is, in fact, frequently worse.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
-Albert Camus |
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hmcclungiii |
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Posts: 90 (06/14/09 19:46:00) |
Very interesting considerations there for thought.
I suppose I was referring more along the lines of a slave in the American South, picking cotton or something like that. Not a "house-slave", but the bottom level plantation worker. |
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AWNQ |
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Posts: 201 (06/20/09 08:55:19) |
hmcclungiii wrote: I think that this would be very interesting, and even moreso if upon waking up as a slave, you were unaware that at some point in time you would return to your previous identity. Feelings of hopelessness probably make the difference between empathy and "slumming it". Come to think of it, a tangent: it's this fundamental inability to achieve a state of hopelessness that makes it so difficult for the middle class to empathize with people who are understood to be lower class, irrespective of their good intentions. A talking point..?
"All life isn't suffering, sometimes there are parties and makeouts! And marijuana!"
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MKULTRA ver II |
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Posts: 674 (06/28/09 19:32:54) |
If you had to choose between coming back as a Nazi torturer or a Jewish victim, which would it be? Or how about one of the Japanese sadist doctors of Unit 731
who then goes on to be given a plush corporate job after the war, versus one of the Chinese prisoners that got experimented on with chemicals, surgery,
explosives, etc?
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AWNQ |
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Posts: 204 (06/28/09 19:57:03) |
MKULTRA ver II wrote:I don't think that this is a fair thought experiment, since it constrains the parameters of my very identity... The only way that I, AWNQ, could become a Nazi torturer is if I am put in those circumstances and decide to torture people for the benefit of the Nazi party. If a genie were to whisk me away to that time period and give me the personality of a Nazi torturer, I (as AWNQ) would cease to exist. It would be tantamount to me dying and a whole different, alien person taking my place. Now, it's another matter to ask whether I would prefer to be someone locked in a concentration camp or someone who is charged with executing the rules of said camp; both those scenarios allow me sufficient agency to link the current AWNQ with whatever actions that would (possibly) turn me into a bona fide Nazi torturer. As a cheap answer: I would prefer to be a Nazi torturer, since I understand the term to mean "a person who tortures Nazis". :-) p.s.: no, that's not quite right... I don't really want to torture anyone, to be honest
"All life isn't suffering, sometimes there are parties and makeouts! And marijuana!"
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MKULTRA ver II |
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Posts: 675 (06/28/09 22:18:18) |
I think you're squirming, your answer is too evasive.
I think the thought experiment is fair, at least as fair as asking what you'd like to be reborn as. And in some respects it isn't a particularly far fetched scenario. It is not uncommon for humans to have to choose between becoming the torturer or the tortured. For instance when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in the late seventies, if you had disobeyed orders to torture someone, or even just didn't torture them enough, it could be taken as proof you were a CIA spy. If you ended up working at http://en.wikipedia.org/w...ol_Sleng_Genocide_Museum you'd have to make the choice. p.s.: no, that's not quite right... I don't really want to torture anyone, to be honest Well, there you go, your answer. You would rather be horrendously tortured than be the torturer, if forced to choose by terrible circumstance beyond your control. I admit that if I was trapped working in a Nazi camp, or Unit 731, or S-21, then I would in all likelyhood be a coward, terrified of the voilent, agonizing horrors I wittnessed and inflicted daily, and would rather be inflicting than receiving. Not very noble, but that's my guess. |
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Asplagis |
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Posts: 131 (06/29/09 08:58:27) |
I'd probably just kill myself and get it over with.
As for the slaves thing, I'll refer to Wonder Showzen... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdL2jiM601U (check out 1:42)
Asplagis
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Manruss |
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Posts: 821 (06/29/09 15:18:59) |
MK: If you had to choose between coming back as a Nazi torturer or a Jewish victim, which would it be? I think that's an excellent question, MK. Speaking for myself, I think I would choose to be the Nazi torturer for the simple reason that it leaves me with more existential options than the torture victim. The victim is completely helpless, powerless and at the whim of his tormentors. His only choice is to endure or to mount some futile and suicidal form of resistance. A torturer has far better options. He can opt to continue in his role as torturer, ask for reassignment, disappear from formation one day with a mind towards escaping service of the Nazis altogether. He can mount a more effective resistance to his government than the torture victim. He can embark on a subtle resistance of giving inmates extra food and easing up on them whenever possible. Or he can mount a more overt resistance by smuggling arms to the inmates, sabotaging the machinery of the system or getting word out to the outside world about what is really going on in camps like his. I'm not sure if I'd be heroic enough to try any of the latter options, but I'd like to have those options on the off-chance that I would be.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
-Albert Camus |
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