If our history books are to be trusted, any time other than the present was a terrible time to exist. Women exploded during childbirth, and men could be expected to live to a ripe old age of 25. Nobody had any teeth, and everybody was unwittingly eating poison all of the time.

But great works of art and literature didn’t simply pop up out of nowhere after the surrender of the nazis, and those things take good health, time, and energy to make. Come to think of it, the world is arguably an uglier, more polluted, and more desperate place than ever. So which is it? Was the past a terrible place to be, or are we just blinded by our present-moment bias?

Why Was the Past So Scary?

We’ve undeniably made loads of advances in medical technology, nutrition, and transportation safety. It’s no controversial statement, therefore, to say that the lack of these things made living in the world more precarious. Let’s look just a few advancements that have contributed to our notion of living in an especially safe time.

Antibiotics

Without antibiotics, infections could easily spread and were far more likely to kill.

Modern policing

Without a modern police force, civil unrest could result in hundreds of deaths. Murder and other violent crimes could go overlooked.

Vehicle safety

For thousands of years, traveling far away meant risking life and limb. Whether you feared falling from a horse or being attacked by bandits, it was far safer to stay in one place.

Emergency surgical techniques

Heart attack is the most common cause of death. Cancer is right below it, then physical trauma. For ages, dealing with these woes meant little more than praying to the gods and maybe attempting some rudimentary surgery. The prognosis was rarely good.

Modern farming

Modern farming techniques have all but eliminated famine. Famine kills mind-numbing numbers when allowed to take hold.

Mass literacy

Mass literacy has helped the world significantly, though indirectly. With the spread of common ideas, so too has the understanding of basic nutrition and safety spread to the masses. Most people now know that whisky isn’t an elixir of life and that one shouldn’t go touching rodents before dinner.

Nuclear deterrence

Before 1945, the number of casualties incurred in major wars sometimes represented a terrifying proportion of the human population. The Mongol conquests and World War II both took dozens of millions of lives, and there was seemingly no stopping the losses. As awful as it seemed at the time, only the threat of nuclear annihilation prevented similar casualty figures from cropping up during the Cold War and later conflicts.

Was It Really That Bad, Though?

Sometimes reading accounts of life before the modern era can make it seem like things have always been very much the same. The Odyssey, The Republic, War and Peace, and Meditations echo sentiments of the human condition that have changed little. So things must not have been that bad, if people had time to pontificate and write things down, right?

Well, there are a few statistical reasons history looks so brutal. Here are the big ones:

Infant Mortality

Back in the day, children frequently died in or shortly after childbirth, often taking their mothers with them to whatever afterworld they subscribed to. Doctors of previous eras had no means to stem the hemorrhaging that frequently accompanies birth, and even the simplest infections could quickly become fatal. What well-evolved creatures humans are, no?

In both Rome and Medieval England, you could expect “25 maternal deaths and 300 infant deaths, respectively, for every 1,000 live births.” Compare that with the US’s 5.4 infant deaths for every 1,000 live births and 32.9 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2021 (CDC, 2001). And the US isn’t considered a particularly good place to give birth.

You can easily see how this might skew statistics. Infants still count as people, and when nearly one-third of them die at age zero, the average lifespan starts to look pretty grim. That’s why you hear crazy statements like “they only used to live until 35 back then.”

*And this is just a century of progress*

Child Mortality

When ancient infants reached childhood, they still weren’t out of the woods. Do you remember having that ear infection as a kid? Or maybe you had a cough that had your parents running to the drugstore in the middle of the night? Well, imagine if you had died then. That would have sucked, right?

Crime and Banditry

Back in the day, doing crime was a lot easier. Gone were the pesky ring cams and traffic recordings that today catch poorly impulse-controlled youth the world over. If you wanted to rob someone, all you had to do was make sure no one was looking, bop your victim over the head, and run away. The perfect crime.

Now, it might seem that this sort of thing was happening to everyone all of the time, but those in positions of power got wise to such deviance pretty fast. Members of the middle and upper-class kept trusted guards, built gates, lived in tight communities, and rarely strayed far from home.

The poor, though, had no such safety measures. Traveling dangerous roads and city streets meant that one had to choose whether to themselves commit petty crimes or face a certain death in miserable conditions.

This might not seem dissimilar from the modern condition, but when you consider how significantly even minor safety nets, such as homeless shelters or ambulatory care have helped the modern poor, the past can seem a brutal place.

Historical Events

The vast majority of history occurred without anybody writing about it. People got together and had children, farmers sowed crops, and buildings got replaced by bigger, newer ones.

There are probably millions of stories of happy marriages, peaceful village lives, and prosperous families that we’ll never hear about. This is because these things aren’t what get written down.

Just like the bloodiest, most horrific news stories are the ones we like to read, the most tumultuous, murderous doings of the most prominent members of ancient societies were the things that chroniclers preferred to record for future readers.

Read any history of an Egyptian, Chinese, or Persian dynasty, and you’ll get a fascinating and horrific tale of assassinations, fratricide, patricide, war, and infidelity. Remember, though, that most people weren’t kings, and they had no need to murder their brothers for land. Nor did they have disgruntled troops to command or treasuries to oversee.

Most people simply lived their lives, and only occasionally, they faced awful calamities. Invading armies could level cities, and plagues could wipe out huge swathes of the population. But these events are known to us because they are outside the norm, not because they are the norm.

Is The Modern World Really Safer?

On the whole, you may feel happy about your place in history. Life expectancies are good, medicine seems to be improving, and AI is about to make everything from porn to the news a lot more entertaining. It may be hard to understand, then, that a lot of people are still suffering. Here are a few reasons why:

Perhaps you dodged it, but the COVID-19 pandemic killed 7 million people and crippled many more millions.

In 2021, 828 million people struggled with hunger. That’s almost the entire world’s population until 1800.

World War II, a relatively recent conflict, killed more people than any other event in history, at about 75 million.

Today, we are seeing the most conflicts since the Second World War, and 2 billion people currently live in countries or regions affected by war. Again, that’s the entire world’s population until about 1927.

Worse, while nuclear deterrence seems to have worked thus far, the world has arguably never been at such high risk of total nuclear war.

Conclusions

You might already know it, but many of us are influenced by our present-day bias. We like to think of ourselves at the cutting edge of history, rather than in the middle of a long period of brutal trials and tribulations.

By some metrics, people in the past had it much harder, but by others, the present offers just as many modes of pain and suffering. Things are different, though. We probably have higher highs and lower lows on average, whereas our predecessors were more accustomed to the mundanity of struggle, sickness, and death. A lot depends on where you happen to have been born and how you happen to have been raised.

So what can you do about your precarious situation on this rock called Earth? Our advice: find a cause, however big or small, figure out who is important to keep in your life, and cling to these things as hard as you can. That’s what life is all about, isn’t it?

And that’s it for today’s post. If something about our brutal past has you hooked, maybe check out our book, Kur, a Mesopotamian saga of gods and the afterlife, or check out our other books on offer.

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