Mark Shea has the same problem with the BBC’s Robin Hood series that I do. The only difference is he seems to actually watch the show, and I bugged out after being presented with a scene of modest medieval maiden Maid Marian traipsing through a village market wearing a short-sleeved shirt and capri pants, both of diaphanous material that in a real girl of the period would have been confined to a scarf or headdress. I don’t care that it stars that cute guy from that Doctor Who episode (“42”) either. I’m not a stickler for complete historic verisimilitude (I love the film Gladiator, for one thing), but this is more than I’m preparing to put up with. I’ll stick with the New-Agey pagan nonsense of the 80s “Hooded Man” version starring Michael Praed.
Oh yeah — and what he said about our culture being degraded compared to that of our so-called primitive ancestors is something that I’ve been thinking for quite some time. What is always funny to me is the way people start bleating on about “dentistry” whenever someone brings up the strange fact that people in the supposed “Dark Ages” seem to live in an atmosphere steeped in enough rapturous poeticism to give a million goth kids orgasms, but when faced with the actual fact of having to go to the dentist reveal just how skin deep is their love of our sophisticated medical tech. (Full disclosure: I hate going to the dentist, and have a mouthful — well, less than that, actually — to prove it.)
(Via Kathy Shaidle.)
Next day update: a thought did occur to me, though, that made me question Mark Shea’s Absolute Fandom response to the music and poetry of ancient culture. And that thought was: just how do we really know that our ancestors were more completely steeped in excellent song and story — just because our culture seems to find those fragments which are all we have left of the long ago to be somehow better than what we produce today? It just might be that we think everyone in, say, old Babylon wandered about their society doing nothing but singing and dancing and so on, but how do we know that what they sang and danced was what we found on the clay tablets? What if “Gilgamesh” was just some “official version” of a hero story, sponsored by the local rulers of the time, which the actual bulk of the populace had little interest in, and we only have the tale because the songs and poems people really liked were only passed on orally, no one bothered to write them down. Oh, and all those popular songs and poems were about the rich bitch down the street having sex with her uncle’s goats, songs about drinking and farting, and fair similar in content (or, well, lack thereof) to the more sophisticatedly presented junk we get on the E! channel.
Another thing is life in the good old days was really hard except for the very rich, who could afford to sit around all day listening to beautiful poems about Ra. Most people didn’t have time for singing and dancing, and would have looked at you funny if you asked them about weird modern concepts such as “art.” “What do you mean do I think the songs in praise of the gods are artistically pleasing? I’m not singing just to impress folk — if I didn’t praise the gods I’d end up in the underworld having my heart eaten by a jackal!”
11 Responses to “Our Degraded Culture: Entry No. 728,325”
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July 9th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
I watched this for a while. I was not impressed, to put it mildly. There were the obvious period errors, but I couldn’t get my arms around the idea of a guerrilla (which is what Robin Hood was, even in this flaky show), fighting against a murderous ruler, but avoided killing to the point of losing battles. ESPECIALLY in that era, when PC lovey dovey diplomacy (AKA, the “enlightened” European Union) wasn’t even a pipe dream.
If it had been presented as a spoof of the Robin Hood legend, I would have been more entertained.
July 9th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Cadfael bugs me because of this. IIRC in one episode he mouthed off (no, not offered advice) to the frickin’ KING, for goodness’ sake, and he wasn’t roughed up, imprisoned, or executed.
July 10th, 2008 at 4:18 am
I liked Cafael. It was at least true visually to the period, and I can readily accept an ex-Crusader monk mouthing off, as you say, to authority, And as a matter of fact Cadfael’s defiant habits often got him in trouble.
July 10th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
OK, I have no idea what you mean in your second paragraph. Are the “Dark Ages” what are commonly called the Middle Ages, or own time with its degrade culture? Whose actions “reveal just how skin deep is their love of our sophisticated medical tech”? Is that done by going to the dentist, or not? Or going to the dentist but complaining about it? Or complaining about dentists but then going? I read the Shea link and the Shaidle link, but saw no reference to dentistry. Did I miss it?
July 10th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Looks like I hit a nerve. (Pun intended.)
July 10th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
PS: see the update. By the way, the “dentistry” thing is a joke that’s at least as old as tv. Surely you’ve heard the dentistry crack, or maybe that one about the plague, whenever someone says the slightest kind thing about some age of the past.
July 10th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
No, honestly, I haven’t.
P.S. Note that Shea’s basic claim, the mass of poetry and lack of prose in ancient writing, is quite weak. Just consider Linear B, a predecessor of Greek, the discovered examples of which consists almost entirely of accounting records. Or cuneiform — “These early records are used almost exclusively for accounting and record keeping”. It’s argued that hieroglyphics have the same basis, or indeed that all of the earliest writing was based on accounting. I see a pattern and it’s not the one Shea sees.
July 10th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Shea does have a tendency to latch onto some beloved idea and run it into the stratosphere.
July 11th, 2008 at 12:52 am
One thing we forget is how little leisure time previous ages really had. What demagogues like to call our “addiction to oil” is actually our society’s reliance upon cheap energy to replace human labor. In agriculture, for example, we have the smallest ever percentage of our population producing food surpluses that could feed the world, were the political barriers to that end removed (no, starvation is NOT caused by a lack of music videos for charity, or because the US Army buys a new tank).
And those farmers who produce the food live in luxury far beyond the comprehension of previous ages. As does nearly everyone else in our modern industrialized world – including our so-called “poor.” Believe me, I’ve been to parts of the planet where the middle class doesn’t have life as good as does our poor.
So the wonderful art and literature we so admire was accessible to a very small percentage of the population, who could only appreciate it during daylight hours, and had to be in actual proximity to it. There was very little popular culture because there were nearly no consumers for it.
Along with dentistry, I appreciate that I can have a library of bound books beyond the means of nearly everyone, however wealthy or privileged, throughout history, and that I can read them in comfortable surroundings in my own house, which is not dependent upon slave or indentured labor, and further I am not subject to slavery or indentured labor myself. Pretty damn good, I think.
Isaac Asimov once recounted how, at a dinner party, a woman was bemoaning how hard it was to get servants and said she wished we lived in an earlier age when they were plentiful. Asimov said “That’d be terrible – we’d be the servants.” Most people who reflect fondly upon how wonderful a vanished age was probably never assume they’d be the dumb schmuck emptying the lord’s chamber pots.
July 11th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
OK, so people disrespect the past by noting its barbaric form of dentistry, but then refuse to go to a modern dentist, thereby demonstrating that they were just snarking. Hmmm, haven’t really encountered that, but then I move in technophilic circles. Plus, my kids like to go to the dentist, and have at times asked, in all seriousness, “why don’t I go to the dentist anymore?” when it’s been a while since their last visit.
July 11th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
“…my kids like to go to the dentist…”
Does not compute. Logic sensors misfire. Synapses shut down in 12… 10… 8…. 17.. eleventy-one… beeble braxod morko fongle