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I know people like that exist today, but in ancient/medieval times, why was it so easy for nearly everyone living during said times to relentlessly kill, rape, destroy, enslave others, etc. etc. without hardly anyone feeling the least bit bad about it? Do you think people back then just weren't capable of being able to empathise or sympathise at all?
The ability to "empathise and sympathise" is directly proportional to the people's comfort level. Life is incredibly soft in today's world, in the United States. I checked the world wealth calculator and I'm about 99% percentile, which is not a boast as a lot of Americans qualify. For this I'm immensely grateful to have lived in a society that permits the acquisition of the life's comforts. I doubt humanity has changed much from a physical perspective vs., say, Ancient Greece.
1,000 years ago my people were toiling on a plot of land in a cold, desolate place called Ireland. They lived short, miserable lives and took what joy they could, when they could. They had feelings and all the rest but didn't always have time for worrying as much as we do about the minutiae. They were too busy toiling the fields for whatever subsistence crops they could. Might have been potatoes, though those were introduced as a cheap staple food I'm not sure when so who knows really. The land could support a certain number of people, or if you will: the technology supported it. Beyond that, people died and died young of disease, dysentery, smallbox, or who knows what.
That's the default condition for ten thousand years of humanity, longer if you count our ancestors. Basics first, sympathy next, then empathy. Staying alive and eating were major problems until maybe only a hundred years ago. Those outside the tribe were alien, to be shot on-sight at the worst of times and only tolerated at the BEST.
Of course.
Should society be upended by a real plague, not this puny problem we have now, or some other massive cataclysm, life will be cheap and a great die-off ensue. Kiss sympathy and empathy goodbye. No one knows when, or if, that will happen hence not much to worry about. Humanity does have a tendency to decline from great civilizations back into chaos and dark ages, "as far as we know" (Thank God for Irish monks who kept many of the ancient writings in monasteries as barbarians pillaged Europe, else we'd know much less about ancient times and the great arch of history).
Not sure about empathy/sympathy, but, concern for others must go back a looooong way.
"The Middle Paleolithic spans the period from 300,000 to 50,000 years ago. Some of the earliest significant evidence of religious practices dates from this period. Intentional burial, particularly with grave goods may be one of the earliest detectable forms of religious practice since, as Philip Lieberman suggests, it may signify a "concern for the dead that transcends daily life."[3]
Though disputed, evidence suggests that the Neanderthals were the first humans to intentionally bury the dead, doing so in shallow graves along with stone tools and animal bones"
Empathy and sympathy are human traits that evolved in pre historical times to preserve the cohesiveness of tribal living. It is a narrowly defined behavior and doesn’t necessarily extend to other tribes or groups of people. Since tribal living often entails armed conflict with others to survive one cannot waste feelings for outsiders.
Civilization grew over vast periods of human history. Advances in science, the arts, the structure and growth of centralized governments that supposedly advanced humanity and the standard of living. But in the end despite our so called culture and morality there are the others that are perceived as threats and must be eliminated.
I know people like that exist today, but in ancient/medieval times, why was it so easy for nearly everyone living during said times to relentlessly kill, rape, destroy, enslave others, etc. etc. without hardly anyone feeling the least bit bad about it? Do you think people back then just weren't capable of being able to empathise or sympathise at all?
I suspect many tribes and societies had internal controls over that kind of behavior or else the groups would have imploded. The first five books of the Bible are but one example. It may have been unusually advanced but I can't believe it was unique.
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Originally Posted by DXBtoFL
You are correct. The notion of a self-autonomous individual who must be respected simply for being an individual is very much the legacy of the enlightenment (although the concept itself is strongly influenced by Christianity). Historically, and frankly, which is still widespread in much of the world today, people's identities were strongly grounded in their tribe, culture, class or religion and which demanded obedience and loyalty from you. Your opinions were not yours, but your religion or culture or tribe. You were not important as an individual, but your value was as part of the greater society that effectively owned you. The United States was the first country to reject this ancient understanding of human relationships and institutionalized the concept of an autonomous individual as of its core identity, which was what made America so revolutionary and is something that is sadly lost in today's woke cultural wars and the ignorant SJWs.
That aside, empathy and sympathy are ancient human expressions. The medieval era was brutal but not necessarily more or less brutal than most of human history. It was a de facto way of life. Yes, certainly, you could have sympathy and empathy for the badly treated.
Christianity was important in the development of western beliefs and as a guidance for moral behaviour.
Constantine the Great, who was proclaimed Emperor of the Roman Empire in York, England in 306 AD brought Christianity to the Roman Empire.
In the centuries that followed there were numerous Saints and religious orders in Europe, however even Christianity became a source of conflict, mainly between the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant Church.
In terms of Great Britain, the Lindisfarne Gospels were an important 7th Century religious text, thought to be the work of a monk named Eadfrith, who became Bishop of Lindisfarne in 698 and died in 721.
This areas of England in Northumberland was linked to a lot of Saints including St Oswald, St Bede, St Aiden, St Cuthbert, Saint Chad, Saint Wilfred, St Hilda etc.
There are other such important religious sites in Britain and Europe, as well as the Middle East, which is the birth place of Christianity.
So not everyone in ancient and medieval times lacked empathy and compassion or were godless hordes.
Human nature has been unchanging.. so I assume the innate capacity for sympathy is the same now as it was centuries ago.
External factors like feast or famine (& contemporary superstitions) influence generational expressions of compassion, but we're practically no better or worse than our ancestors.. God help us ~
For most of human history - most, as in 99% or so of the time of our species - if someone spotted a person that was not one of them (ie, same bad/tribe/group), the best course of action was either to kill that person (and take their stuff) or, depending on the odds of failure, to slink away unnoticed (if possible).
The course of human development has changed that calculation. Our region is no long one valley, one oasis in the desert, one useful bend in the river. Our place - that place belonging to ourselves and those with which we depend upon for our survival - has become larger and larger until now it mostly consists of states number in the millions and, to a large degree, on even those members of other states. To accommodate this reality, we have civilization - the conscious decision to behave not instinctually but practically.
We see this reflected in the homicide rate, or the rate of deaths from violence, has progressively lessened as states have become more powerful and have established a monopoly (or near monopoly) on legal violence (ie, deadly force, as well as punitive control such as imprisonment). The share of deaths in non-state societies as documented archaeologically, in the past in places where such societies no longer exist (exs: Australia, North America) and in places where they persist, such as the Amazon basin and New Guinea, show the percentage of deaths due to violence to be off the charts - anywhere from ~4% to over over 50%. In comparison, the percentage of such deaths in the U.S./Canada/Europe/Australia post-1950 is a fraction of 1/10th of 1%.
This is not dissimilar to the classic Prisoner's Dilemma game theory scenario. Cooperation is more fruitful than working against each other. One of the primary reasons that we today are so awash in wealth and security in the Western world is that we don't have to spend in inordinate amount of time and effort and expense avoiding being killed.
The empathy was always there. It is now simply being directed more broadly because we've come to understand that it is in our benefit to do so as long as we have erected the proper umbrella of social and civic enforcement mechanisms to mitigate the ability of individuals to game this system of cooperation. Don't kill Bob, because Bob makes stuff and does things that you can't make or do, but that you might want to acquire consensually from Bob in exchange for stuff you can make or do but which Bob can't. And if you don't play along, the state will punish you.
Mostly, it works. And because we keep refining the overarching system and more deeply imbuing the social ethos to follow the tenets of this idea, it progressively works better and better. Again, this is not theory - we see this in the long-term change of social behavior.
For most of human history - most, as in 99% or so of the time of our species - if someone spotted a person that was not one of them (ie, same bad/tribe/group), the best course of action was either to kill that person (and take their stuff) or, depending on the odds of failure, to slink away unnoticed (if possible).
The course of human development has changed that calculation. Our region is no long one valley, one oasis in the desert, one useful bend in the river. Our place - that place belonging to ourselves and those with which we depend upon for our survival - has become larger and larger until now it mostly consists of states number in the millions and, to a large degree, on even those members of other states. To accommodate this reality, we have civilization - the conscious decision to behave not instinctually but practically.
We see this reflected in the homicide rate, or the rate of deaths from violence, has progressively lessened as states have become more powerful and have established a monopoly (or near monopoly) on legal violence (ie, deadly force, as well as punitive control such as imprisonment). The share of deaths in non-state societies as documented archaeologically, in the past in places where such societies no longer exist (exs: Australia, North America) and in places where they persist, such as the Amazon basin and New Guinea, show the percentage of deaths due to violence to be off the charts - anywhere from ~4% to over over 50%. In comparison, the percentage of such deaths in the U.S./Canada/Europe/Australia post-1950 is a fraction of 1/10th of 1%.
This is not dissimilar to the classic Prisoner's Dilemma game theory scenario. Cooperation is more fruitful than working against each other. One of the primary reasons that we today are so awash in wealth and security in the Western world is that we don't have to spend in inordinate amount of time and effort and expense avoiding being killed.
The empathy was always there. It is now simply being directed more broadly because we've come to understand that it is in our benefit to do so as long as we have erected the proper umbrella of social and civic enforcement mechanisms to mitigate the ability of individuals to game this system of cooperation. Don't kill Bob, because Bob makes stuff and does things that you can't make or do, but that you might want to acquire consensually from Bob in exchange for stuff you can make or do but which Bob can't. And if you don't play along, the state will punish you.
Mostly, it works. And because we keep refining the overarching system and more deeply imbuing the social ethos to follow the tenets of this idea, it progressively works better and better. Again, this is not theory - we see this in the long-term change of social behavior.
Good post, entirely in line with the premise of Steven Pinker's 'The Better Angels of Our Nature'...which I should probably get around to reading soon.
I've often wondered how the earliest human groups reached mating age given how long it takes to raise a child to self-sufficiency, even in a hunter-gatherer society. Can you imagine sitting in smoky, stuffy cave with numerous babies and toddlers, smelling, upchucking and wailing?
Instinct or not, it's a wonder at some point people didn't just lose it. "I don't care how much you love it. It stinks and it's noisy and it isn't any good for anything. Out it goes!"
Easy. People lacking the instinct for child-rearing won't produce viable offspring and their genetic material isn't passed on. Mammals are crazy hard-wired to protect their young - or even the young of other mammals. There's a reason we go "Squee!" over kittens or puppies.
A tribe that wishes to survive will protect children, pregnant women and women of child-rearing age. Men? We're nature's disposable unit. If a tribe loses 5 men to sabre-toothed tigers, the remaining men will just have to impregnate a few more women tp keep up the birth rate.
For most of human history - most, as in 99% or so of the time of our species - if someone spotted a person that was not one of them (ie, same bad/tribe/group), the best course of action was either to kill that person (and take their stuff) or, depending on the odds of failure, to slink away unnoticed (if possible).
The course of human development has changed that calculation. Our region is no long one valley, one oasis in the desert, one useful bend in the river. Our place - that place belonging to ourselves and those with which we depend upon for our survival - has become larger and larger until now it mostly consists of states number in the millions and, to a large degree, on even those members of other states. To accommodate this reality, we have civilization - the conscious decision to behave not instinctually but practically.
We see this reflected in the homicide rate, or the rate of deaths from violence, has progressively lessened as states have become more powerful and have established a monopoly (or near monopoly) on legal violence (ie, deadly force, as well as punitive control such as imprisonment). The share of deaths in non-state societies as documented archaeologically, in the past in places where such societies no longer exist (exs: Australia, North America) and in places where they persist, such as the Amazon basin and New Guinea, show the percentage of deaths due to violence to be off the charts - anywhere from ~4% to over over 50%. In comparison, the percentage of such deaths in the U.S./Canada/Europe/Australia post-1950 is a fraction of 1/10th of 1%.
This is not dissimilar to the classic Prisoner's Dilemma game theory scenario. Cooperation is more fruitful than working against each other. One of the primary reasons that we today are so awash in wealth and security in the Western world is that we don't have to spend in inordinate amount of time and effort and expense avoiding being killed.
The empathy was always there. It is now simply being directed more broadly because we've come to understand that it is in our benefit to do so as long as we have erected the proper umbrella of social and civic enforcement mechanisms to mitigate the ability of individuals to game this system of cooperation. Don't kill Bob, because Bob makes stuff and does things that you can't make or do, but that you might want to acquire consensually from Bob in exchange for stuff you can make or do but which Bob can't. And if you don't play along, the state will punish you.
Mostly, it works. And because we keep refining the overarching system and more deeply imbuing the social ethos to follow the tenets of this idea, it progressively works better and better. Again, this is not theory - we see this in the long-term change of social behavior.
Can't rep you again, but - excellent post.
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