Over at Kim's place there's this post on the 'noble savage' crap. I say 'crap' because that ideal is just that. Which reminded me of a similar situation someone once brought up.
At Medieval Fair, as I was hammering away on something, someone brought up the idea of being able to travel back to medieval or pre-medieval times to live, and wouldn't that be so wonderful for me? I didn't quite laugh at them, but it was close; I try to be polite to people. After regaining control I explained some of the reasons why it would NOT be all that wonderful, and thought I'd recap some of them here.
Steel, at that time, was usually damn hard to come by. So, for that matter, was wrought iron, which is why any blacksmith you'll find will still have a pile of bits & pieces left over from earlier pieces; recycling wasn't politically correct, it sometimes meant survival in your trade at minimum. Whereas nowadays I can go to a salvage yard and for $.20/pound buy scrap steel that is of better quality than most smiths through history ever saw. Want virgin metal for a special project? A little more expensive. I can pull up, for instance, the Enco catalog and order drill rod and other high-carbon stock in round or flat bar and have it delivered to the door.
I ain't no peasant, which with some exceptions all smiths were; and even the high-ranking artisans were generally still just a damn workman of no particular social standing or value. You depended on pleasing the lord of the area for both work and staying alive. And not pissing off some passing bandit who'd decide to rob and kill you.
Medical care at the time was, for the most part, nothing to look hopefully toward. I've been burned, cut and otherwise injured, and with the wonders of modern medicine had nothing more than stitches in the long term. I had a long term, which(especially in the case of appendicitis) would not have been the case in the past. Not to mention all the other stuff that's a nuisance nowadays; back then could be crippling and/or a death sentance.
Food is a lot more varied and cheap now. Bitch all you want about various aspects; fresh meat, fruits & veggies, cheese year 'round, bread you don't have to bake yourself, ways to keep it all fresh instead of going bad in a day or two. And, if you need a little something extra, supplements available cheap from vitamins to glucosimine.
Justice, despite the bullshit in our system is a LOT more available now than back then.
And, it being a fact that my shoulder is not up to a whole lot of swordwork now, having a firearm in case of self-defense need beats hell out of keeping an axe or sword and shield handy. You ever tried using a real shield? I'll keep my Benelli, thank you kindly.
Which all ties into something else; people who think that going back to, say, a 4- or 500 A.D. time would be better because things were so much cleaner without all the industrial crap in the air. Just to keep this to one field,
Do you plan to have metals? For farming and hunting tools(forget about fighting tools; in this view they usually think violence will be rare)? That means the following:
Mining to get the ores.
Fuel for the smelters and forges. With no gas or electricity, that means either coal or charcoal. Coal means more mining; charcoal means cutting down and burning trees. A LOT of trees, since charcoal has less energy per pound than you get from good coal. Say goodbye to lots of forest.
And so on, from there. No way to preserve meat except smoking and drying(unless you live near a place where you can get a lot of salt). Lots of diseases, including tetanus since there's no vaccine and you use lots of horses & oxen as draft animals. Like to sit in the evening and read? No books, or else so rare that you can't get one, and after sundown it's too damn dark to read. No music unless you make it yourself. And so on.
No question, there were good things about back then. But in the overall, if I could go back it'd be for visits; I like hot water out of a faucet and clean sheets on the bed and air conditioning. That's another point; a lot of the people talking about the 'wonderful old days' have never been without heating in the winter and cooling in the summer except when walking outside. I've been through Oklahoma summers without anything except a fan; like it is tonight, you lay with the fan on you and you still sweat and pray for fall to come soon. Screw that.
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