Much of the historic (so not recent) idolation of the elderly (even when “the elderly” meant folk in their 30s and 40s…) was specifically about the pursuit of knowledge and self betterment. It was knowing how to make your spears fly farther or how to properly rotate the crops in the field and so forth.
Fast forward and The Rich would outright buy philosophers for the prestige of being the patron of someone so intelligent and influential. Which continued on to the arts and so forth.
Hell, not too long ago it was “work hard so you can get into a good school and make something of yourself”.
Now? it is outright vilification of “intellectuals” and people who think “Too long, didn’t read” is an insult rather than a condemnation of their own attention spans.
Or, to roll way back: it is people saying “Fuck you old man. I don’t need your sharp pointy sticks. I am gonna go punch that tiger until it turns into chicken”.
even when “the elderly” meant folk in their 30s and 40s…
I‘ll stop you right there. At no point in human history was someone in their 30s or 40ss considered elderly. Statistics that claim an average life expectancy of 40 years are heavily skewed by child mortality. If you made it past 5 years old, your top causes of early death were war for men and childbirth for women. Survive/dodge that and there was a decent chance to make it past 70.
That applies about as far back as we can estimate individual people‘s lifespans. For example Ramesses II ruled for about 65-70 years and it’s assumed he became Pharaoh in his 20s, making him about 90 years old in total. Plato made it to at least 75. There are many more examples throughout all of history.
Yes, the nobility and the royals basically had comparable lifespans to those today.
The average peasant? Wikipedia so grain of salt, but it lines up with much of what I have seen over the years en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy.
Life Expectancy at Birth (LEB) in the Bronze age is believed to be around 24. Now, this is going to be skewed because we are generally finding the sites of battles (easier to find 20 corpses than 1…). But, at the same time, LEB in the medieval period (30-33) is going to be skewed by most records caring a lot more about the nobility than some rando on a farm.
LEB has 100% gone up as wars become less common and medicine becomes much more effective and plentiful. And I’ll admit I was exaggerating for comedic effect here. But also… not that much.
Because maybe you DO have good odds of living to your late 50s if you make it to your early 40s… the average is low for a reason and it isn’t JUST infant death. It is working hard to survive day to day and being incredibly vulnerable to crop yields (whether starving or being sent to war because said nobility got hungry/bored). And when you are seeking knowledge from those more experienced around the village… they are gonna skew a lot younger than Lord Farquad’s uncle.
Your comment was very long, so I asked TempleOS-AI to summarize it for everyone:
“The passage argues that earlier societies often valued knowledge, skill, and learning, while modern culture increasingly dismisses intellectualism. It also challenges common myths that the past was uniformly ignorant, sexist, or racially homogeneous, noting that women had agency and diversity existed more than people assume. Overall, it criticizes the idea that the world has “always been terrible,” arguing that such beliefs distort history and fuel modern anti-intellectual and extremist views.”
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
No. It really hasn’t.
Much of the historic (so not recent) idolation of the elderly (even when “the elderly” meant folk in their 30s and 40s…) was specifically about the pursuit of knowledge and self betterment. It was knowing how to make your spears fly farther or how to properly rotate the crops in the field and so forth.
Fast forward and The Rich would outright buy philosophers for the prestige of being the patron of someone so intelligent and influential. Which continued on to the arts and so forth.
Hell, not too long ago it was “work hard so you can get into a good school and make something of yourself”.
Now? it is outright vilification of “intellectuals” and people who think “Too long, didn’t read” is an insult rather than a condemnation of their own attention spans.
Or, to roll way back: it is people saying “Fuck you old man. I don’t need your sharp pointy sticks. I am gonna go punch that tiger until it turns into chicken”.
dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 4 days ago
I‘ll stop you right there. At no point in human history was someone in their 30s or 40ss considered elderly. Statistics that claim an average life expectancy of 40 years are heavily skewed by child mortality. If you made it past 5 years old, your top causes of early death were war for men and childbirth for women. Survive/dodge that and there was a decent chance to make it past 70.
That applies about as far back as we can estimate individual people‘s lifespans. For example Ramesses II ruled for about 65-70 years and it’s assumed he became Pharaoh in his 20s, making him about 90 years old in total. Plato made it to at least 75. There are many more examples throughout all of history.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
Sort of.
Yes, the nobility and the royals basically had comparable lifespans to those today.
The average peasant? Wikipedia so grain of salt, but it lines up with much of what I have seen over the years en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy.
Life Expectancy at Birth (LEB) in the Bronze age is believed to be around 24. Now, this is going to be skewed because we are generally finding the sites of battles (easier to find 20 corpses than 1…). But, at the same time, LEB in the medieval period (30-33) is going to be skewed by most records caring a lot more about the nobility than some rando on a farm.
LEB has 100% gone up as wars become less common and medicine becomes much more effective and plentiful. And I’ll admit I was exaggerating for comedic effect here. But also… not that much.
Because maybe you DO have good odds of living to your late 50s if you make it to your early 40s… the average is low for a reason and it isn’t JUST infant death. It is working hard to survive day to day and being incredibly vulnerable to crop yields (whether starving or being sent to war because said nobility got hungry/bored). And when you are seeking knowledge from those more experienced around the village… they are gonna skew a lot younger than Lord Farquad’s uncle.
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
Your comment was very long, so I asked TempleOS-AI to summarize it for everyone:
“The passage argues that earlier societies often valued knowledge, skill, and learning, while modern culture increasingly dismisses intellectualism. It also challenges common myths that the past was uniformly ignorant, sexist, or racially homogeneous, noting that women had agency and diversity existed more than people assume. Overall, it criticizes the idea that the world has “always been terrible,” arguing that such beliefs distort history and fuel modern anti-intellectual and extremist views.”