History Memes

The UK may be stagnating and with a grimmer future ahead of it than previous times but huge advances have been made in South & East Asia where nearly a couple billion people were previously enduring some of the most intense poverty in the world. Progress is not uniform, some places are backsliding including very prominent countries, but many people globally are also seeing improvements in their lives too.

Today's 20 somethings in western countries*********

Completely agree, I'm personally sick of the Medieval times being viewed as "the Dark Ages" where everything was objectively worse. Not only is it from a modern, first-world perspective as you've pointed out, but it's also extremely Euro- and Christian-centric and ignores that most of the rest of the world experienced at least a couple 'Golden Ages' during the same time. Hell, even IN Europe, the Islamic states were often (though not always) better off than a lot of their Catholic counterparts. I think a large part of the modern view of the Medieval times being 'backward' come from two main sources: 1-propoganda that came during/immediately after the various Crusades/Iberian Reconquista (not to mention the subsequent discovery of the Americas); 2-the Bubonic Plague which, without a doubt, WAS awful for everyone involved, but for whatever reason we tend to forget that it was only a relatively short amount of time (roughly one decade towards the start of the time period during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, and another decade roughly 800 years later) within the much larger time frame of a whole millennium

And yet even those parts of humanity live better than 100 years ago.

This is important. It's not like we had Ibuprofen for thousands of years, right? Modern medicine is insanely useful but that got nothing to do with anything that's getting worse right now. That medieval slander is completely uncalled for. They had many technological breakthroughs just like we do and there were a lot of times and places in history that were much worse than these 1000 years in Europe have been on average.

People worked a lot less before the industrial revolution in general. The general population in Medieval times was also far more self-determined than people during absolutism later in the modern age. When people look at the Louvre today they don't realize a grand place like that was only for the Epstein class of another time and built on theft and corpses, hence people brought out the guillotines.

They also ate 3x less than you today