Of course a single individual can commit horrendous acts, our fabrications of common devices within society brings powers millions of times stronger than ancient times. Yes, even an irate woman can careen her speeding Audi into a crowd of peoples, bringing death & destruction via a rather benign device. With this power of our creations several orders more lethal, it also brings the level of responsibility just that many orders more...
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It wasn't so long ago that 1 in 4 people died of violence. Nowadays it's orders of magnitude less.
And did you know why the average age was just 40 or so? Because more than 50% of children died before 2 years of age.
That's why people had 10 children - they'd be lucky if 5 made it past 2. Past 5, half of that.
Yeah, you'd love it there.
Jan
@jan.didden I can't agree to those stats - where did you get them from?
The mortality rate was high, not due to vioilence but to lack of health & safety regulations and medical treatments.
Even as recently as 100years ago in the UK coal mining, agriculture & fisheries, the the accident and death rates were very high for the above reasons.
It's nonsense to think families were intentionally large because parents expected to lose a few kids from infant mortality. More to do with contraception me thinks.
The mortality rate was high, not due to vioilence but to lack of health & safety regulations and medical treatments.
Even as recently as 100years ago in the UK coal mining, agriculture & fisheries, the the accident and death rates were very high for the above reasons.
It's nonsense to think families were intentionally large because parents expected to lose a few kids from infant mortality. More to do with contraception me thinks.
Actually women may have had 17/18 pregnancies and maybe 12 were actually born but only 2 or 3 made it to adulthood and right there begins the planet's problem. In the 19th century cleanliness and medicine both improved so that a lot more children survived. Take a look at the population numbers around the time of the Napoleonic wars. From then on there was an explosion. Ethiopia - pop. 1800 @ 2.95 million, now 120 million and climbing. UK population 1800 @ 10.5 million, now @ 68 million.
There's nothing really bad about using oil and gas or coal - it's how much has been and is being used now. The whole gamut of plastics have been incredibly useful to humanity. It's the enormous amount and abuse of the various plastics that is the problem. No politician anywhere will talk about population except in the negative - Erdogan in Turkey exhorting women to have at least 3 children. Countries worried about falling populations.
Once we were happily jumping up and down in the baobob trees in the Rif valley. Probably an earthquake tipped a lot of the monkeys onto the ground, the predators ate well, however some survived and got into walking on the ground. Then we found cave living was a good idea. Then we learned to live outside the caves. The point is that human society has always been evolving. So society has to change, adapt to the nec. falling numbers which benefit the evolving monkey and the planet on which it depends for it's very existence but right there is the problem - societal change.
In planetary terms it was only late yesterday afternoon we were happily jumping up and down in the trees, sadly an awful lot of us have never mentally left the trees, they are still looking to the alpha male to direct them via politics, religion and race. I think I still have a poster from around 1970 - due to lack of interest tomorrow is cancelled.
"It's nonsense to think families were intentionally large because parents expected to lose a few kids from infant mortality". Horrific infant mortality just two-hundred years ago is a fully documented fact. In the year 1800, fully 33% of children born into the best cultures did not live past five years old. With the advent of early photography in the mid 1800s', the child mortality was still so ingrained in the culture, so-called family portraits included recently deceased sons & daughters in these portraits....rather spooky photographs of those times showed those dead, posed individuals among the living, the dead notable as the shutter speeds were a few seconds, those living were slightly blurred from movement , those who were dead showed perfectly because those children didn't move.
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It's not; it is also the primary driver why birth rates drop as standard of living rises. With a pension, you no longer need children to take care of you at old age.
Combined with the fact that as standard of living rises, the cost of raising children also rises. The overall effect is dramatically falling birth rates. This is basic stuff. It's a live experiment in large parts of the African continent.
Jan
@jan.didden
31 minutes ago
You still miss my point. Families DID NOT think about having a large family for any reason. They happened due to lack of contraception.
(I am referring to centuries ago, or indeed, millenia ago in reference to 'Stone Age' society.
31 minutes ago
You still miss my point. Families DID NOT think about having a large family for any reason. They happened due to lack of contraception.
(I am referring to centuries ago, or indeed, millenia ago in reference to 'Stone Age' society.
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Jan,
You miss the very old and surprisingly used method of family planning, if you had an unwanted new baby, you could leave it in the forest.
Supposedly the fairies or some such would then take care of it.
In an agricultural society, particularly in a bad year, some governments did store grain from better times. A few even did provide for the peasants.
History is of course written by the survivors.
You miss the very old and surprisingly used method of family planning, if you had an unwanted new baby, you could leave it in the forest.
Supposedly the fairies or some such would then take care of it.
In an agricultural society, particularly in a bad year, some governments did store grain from better times. A few even did provide for the peasants.
History is of course written by the survivors.
Jan, they didn't need 12 or 13 to survive, that just made for a huge economic headache. Why do you think there are so many wars in Africa. Take Ethiopia that I quoted - in 1900 the population had grown from less than 3 million in 1800 to 10 million in 1900 and now 120 million and rising.
Your argument about rising living standards is from the comfortable northern hemisphere. You have also either deliberately or through ignorance left out the religious factor - god will provide. Here also there is division - Catholics in the northern hemisphere disregard what the pope says but even a supposed revolutionary like Daniel Ortega has banned abortions in Nicaragua. As much as I totally support Palestinians, I have worked with these people, they are intelligent hard working, good to have as neighbours but 10 children!. Same in Iraq and Syria.
I love forests, maybe this is racial memory or longing, knowing where the Celtaech came from. The Semitic Arabs and Hebrews were overjoyed at their conquest of the Iberian peninsular. They revered the forests that once covered the peninsular. 7/8ths of Europe was covered by great oak forests in the lowlands and conifers in the highlands, same for the island of the coast of NW Europe. It was only after the overrunning of the great civilisation of Al-Andaluz that the forests were cut down.
Before the Romans left the island they had cut down all the best and biggest oak trees. No one would have noticed the sycamore tree when the Roman soldiers guarded the wall, indeed it would never have been allowed to grow, since it would have compromised the security.
That sycamore tree was a symbol of all that is lost due to over population. Before Christianity cast a shadow across the continent all the peoples that inhabited Europe had a common tale of The Green Man.
By Saturday evening I should know that I have put in a price to buy a house in the countryside not far from where I live now - there are no streetlamps to pollute the night sky and I can use my telescope to view the night sky and a short walk through the fields there is a forest, a big forest for me to visit - vamos a ver.
Plus there wasn't any TV, affordable books or hi fi until very recently, so what else are you going to do?
Plus no central heating, so you've got to find away to keep warm.
That's an island perspective and an Anglo-Saxon one. However on the mainland, every country that I know of has a tale and they all relate to 'the forest'. There is so much b/s spouted by the so called Druids, who congregate at Stonehenge, absolutely nothing to do with the actual Druids. That that ancient monument has a Saxon name who were still loping along on the northern steppes is outrageous when that was being built by the Beaker/Euskadi people.
Fact, the Romans were determined to destroy the Druids because they were the bedrock of Celtic cultures everywhere. To that end they sailed across to the island off the Welsh coast known long after as Anglesey which of course was not it's name at the time of the raid, almost certainly a bastardisation of a later Norseman who settled there. Anyway they slaughtered all the Druids.
Not taught in English schools and probably not in Scottish schools is that after the slaughter on Culloden moor the English and Germans rounded up all the bards and chanters and executed them because 'they gave aid and succour to the rebels'. These men carried the oral history of their clans, centuries of events and customs and though by that time all Christianised, they still were aware of the nature of the Druids. This was the real reason for their execution/murder. Like banning Gaelic - destroy the language, destroy the culture, destroy the people.
A book well worth reading for it's honesty - The Welsh by John Davies first written in Brytonnic, then in English is on a par with the great Athenian historian - Thucydides in it's honesty. So many Celts have swallowed b/s masquerading as factual history. He not only writes about the 'Welsh' but about all the Celtic peoples who inhabited the island. Myths are exposed as myths and the integration of Norse and Jute Vikings is full explained. Scots should be interested in 'the men of the north'.
I expect they were often too worn out with toiling on the land otherwise they'd have made their own entertaiment (sex aside) - singing, boozing, dancing, sparring etc.
I hadn't realized until Neil Postman's book "The Disappearance of Childhood" that thinking of children as something special that needed to be treasured and protected is a fairly recent construct.
It is interesting that his theory in the 80's that we were moving away from treating children as needing protection from the ugly things in the world and that was basically leading to adults that still act like children, fits the original story in this thread. I see a lot of instances where adults are acting out like children, just with larger, more powerful bodies and the ability to do more harm. A kid would have broken a limb off a tree, a child in an adult body uses a chainsaw.
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