Go back to your own Golden Age

People glorify the past, sometimes very distant past. I don't know why, nor do I really care; instead I just wish to point out the obvious: thinking that long time ago life was great reveals deep ignorance of history. Before the Industrial Revolution, life was characterized by poverty that is hard for us now to imagine, constant back-breaking labor, frequent bouts of various diseases, short life-spans, etc. Everyone but the very wealthiest had to work incredibly hard their entire lives, and still lived on the brink of starvation. While now we consider it natural that our society grows wealthier over time and that our children will have better lives than we do, this concept was completely alien to our ancestors. Before the Industrial Revolution there was no GDP growth to speak of anywhere in the world. The contemporaries thought that the happy days of humanity were already gone. Old legends from virtually every culture contain stories of a Golden Age in the past when people had their basic material needs met and were happy, along with some explanation as to why that great period had to end leading to the terrible misery to be experienced forever after.

There is one additional, and often underestimated, fact which makes the good old days seem like a nightmare when compared to the times we live in now. The past was incredibly violent, incomparably more so than the present. Here is a paper (gated) estimating homicide rates in what is now Germany and Switzerland between the years 1300 and 2001. The measuring unit is number of homicides per 100 000 people per year, and homicide is defined very narrowly as civil murder or manslaughter; deaths resulting from wars, ethnic cleansing expeditions or any other form of "organized killing" are excluded from the count. In 2001 the homicide rate hovered around 1 on pretty much the entire studied territory. Between 1300 and mid-1600's, the rate varied from 20 to 100. Murder was commonplace. Remember: this doesn't include war deaths. Also remember: if homicide was so much more common than it is now, so must other violent crimes (assault, robbery, rape) have been. Now tell me again that you wish you'd have been born in the Middle Ages.

Why were medieval people so much more violent than we are? The reason can't be genetic (we don't evolve this fast), so it must be cultural. Which brings me to the second topic of this post: the feedback loop between laws, law enforcement, and social norms.

It's a truism to say that social norms of a given society influence the laws by which that society governs itself. But it's underestimated (mostly by conservatives I think) how often causality runs in the other direction: the laws of a society influence its social norms. In 1350, there was no law enforcement to speak of; you were on your own. Given that, it shouldn't surprise anyone that homicide was perceived by society as a perfectly legitimate way of settling disputes. It's only now, when we have courts and a powerful police force, that murdering someone to resolve an ongoing conflict is seen as morally unacceptable.

This particular change of social norms took entire centuries, but it doesn't always have to be the case. Sometimes a change in law or law enforcement practices can trigger an incredibly rapid change in people's moral convictions. My favorite example of this is what happened in the U.S. after Loving v. Virginia. This case, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, amounted to overturning all state-level legal restrictions on interracial marriage that were in effect at the time. A national public opinion poll conducted shortly after the Court's decision showed that over seventy percent of Americans disagreed with it and thought that states should be free to ban interracial marriage if they wanted to. If this poll were replicated now, or even twenty years ago, what do you think that percentage would have been?

Very often we hear that you can't "shove social change down people's throats" because it simply doesn't work. I beg to differ; it definitely can work.