This is something I've thought about a lot. I suspect that human individuals aren't really "designed" (whatever that means) to self-direct, to make their own identity, to make so many choices and decisions. That the freedom to do so, which is a modern achievement (at least on such a mass scale), is also a burden. It's inherently more psychically difficult and stressful than having your life structured for you, which tells you were you belong, why you are meaningful (even if your prescribed place isn't particularly desirable), and obligates others to you. I think that's why there is always an uproar of romantic, anti-modern nostalgia at each major phase of technological/social upheaval in the last few centuries of European history. I do take lessons from what I believe is our "natural" anthropology (to be socially interdependent and mutual, not atomized individuals), but also think the achievements of modern freedom are worth it even if they are harder and more stressful. I'm not sure humans have ever been "happy" as a dominant state on a mass scale, or that we should consider it a failure if we aren't!
Yes I agree that even if we are less happy (which I am not totally convinced of), that our durable achievements are worth it! And that if humanity ever is to achieve greater contentment than was possible in our animal state, it can only be through the technological progress that can only be achieved through modernity. It's kinda like how all these anthropologists will do a gotcha and be like "people in agricultural societies were less healthy than those in hunter-gatherer ones". Like...yeah, but bodily health isn't the only important thing in the world. The pyramids are pretty good too!
This is not about your post in particular, but I think it is notable that a lot of discussions about whether PTSD existed in the distant past focus on warfare. Unlike shell shock and battle fatigue, the WWI and WWII terms, PTSD encompasses any number of different sources of trauma. The most common in the modern world being sexual assault and car accidents. Sexual violence was probably at least as common in the past and while it is easy to imagine certain pre-modern societies where a wider range of violence was not only acceptable, but in many cases admirable, had less combat PTSD that seems less likely with sexual violence.
For instance republican Rome idealized military service, actually had high rates of it both among aristocrats and yeoman farmers, and there is little literary evidence for post traumatic stress like symptoms. (see https://acoup.blog/2020/04/24/fireside-friday-april-24-2020/ for a good discussion by a classical military historian) However, it is very hard to imagine that
the extremely patriarchal Romans had cultural institutions that helped rape victims process their trauma. Sexual violence in Latin literature is a complicated topic, but I don't think modern psychologists would consider the idealization of Lucretia's suicide to be a helpful cultural model.
On a side note the contention that only 20% of American infantrymen during WWII actually fired their weapons with an intent to kill ultimately derives from S.L.A. Marshall, whose work is controversial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.L.A._Marshall
His work is controversial, but I think it's suggestive! And it seems like there've been other findings that support it.
With regards to PTSD and sexual violence, the first thing is that it's not 100 percent certain that rates of sexual violence _are_ lower today than they were in pre-modern times. While modern society unquestionably has less killing and assault, it also has mixing of the sexes to an unprecedented degree, and it appears that rape is extremely common in modern America. Something like 1 out of every 5 women have been raped. Whereas the patriarchy of Roman times, with its seclusion of women, at least reflected that sexual assault was something to be protected against. One is reminded of Andrea Dworkin's famous statement that the conservative woman has made the devil's bargain: she has decided that she is content to be victimized by just one man, instead of by ALL men.
But we just don't know what women in pre-modern times thought or felt =[ I can think of at least one example of a woman writing about rape, which was in the Tale of Genji. Genji is just constantly raping women. Alot of his seductions are rapes. In at least one of the cases, he rapes a priestess who becomes depressed and kills herself, then haunts him, which (I believe) ultimately results in his death.
There does seem to be homeostasis in much of our appreciation of life. But we haven't found much of an alternative search for meaning than reducing suffering or increasing joy.
It would be pretty strange if pre-modern people were never psychologically traumatised! It’s much harder to say how prevalent such things might have been, though.
Great post Naomi! It’s been a while since I’ve seen Shaka Zulu, Carl Schmitt, and Icelandic sagas all brought together - in a piece on depression! Yes, it’s interesting to see the chemical explanation of depression gradually lose its force and for more holistic (as well as intuitive arguments) to take pride of place.
Yes, I am interested to see what happens! The interesting thing too is that antidepressants DO work. If it was all just a scam that would be one thing, but there is a real effect there, although its size can be debated.
The idea that pre-modern people may have been happier (or at least less depressed) than we are is super interesting, and I think one that is not super impossible to explore? There are still people today who live mostly premodern-ish lives with little access to media, knowledge of the outside world, etc. and probably some anthropologist somewhere has done studies on their experience of mental health. Obviously these would be mostly modern people interpreting things through their own lived experience, but one prevailing theory (based mostly off my Googling this for the past fifteen minutes, so I could be totally off) seems to be that when people talk about evil spirits, curses or being literally haunted by ghosts of the past, they were really expressing their depression/anxiety/mood and personality disorders.
But then again, I also found a bunch of really depressing articles about the mental health of Indigenous people today, and the number one cause of psychological distress there was colonization and modernity, so that's evidence to support that theory.
If you're willing to accept totally unsupported and unscientific anecdotal evidence, a lot of my diaspora Mainland Chinese friends have grandparents who went from the village to living mostly modern lives, and the impression that I get is that those grandparents don't have the expectation of baseline happiness that their American grandkids do. Like, yes, life is a grim unrelenting slog of misery where you eat bitterness and try to get rich and then die, but that's just about what you'd expect. And their dissatisfaction is mostly expressed in relentlessly criticizing everyone around them instead of navel-gazing about their trauma.
Yes, I think the idea is that the pre-modern person's belief in both fate and in the spirit world took the place of modern psychology, but it's possible that the spirit world is a better doctor than a psychologist is! After all, you can pray to a spirit and placate it! I also think a person can be non-depressed without being happy. Depression rips you out of daily life--you drink, rage, commit suicide, etc--but if you're just unhappy and expect to be unhappy, but you keep doing all the things you're supposed to do, then is there really a problem at all? Part of the beauty of depression is that it's so intolerable that it forces you to make a change of some kind.
I agree that this could be explored and probably is being explored! I should read about it a bit!
I don't agree that people on the right hate "POCs" or see them as The Other. There are A LOT of Latinos on the right and even in MAGA. Latinos need to be thought of as white though, not "poc". Also, the understanding of race and racism is directly descended/co-opted from historical oppression of Black Americans.
Asians are continously compared to Jews in center/right publications like The Tablet. And Asians really don't have a foothold in conversations about racism; it is still fundamentally a dichotomy between whites and Blacks. Liberals Asians just try, and fail, to align themselves with Black people by co-opting anti-Blackness and turning it into garden variety racism.
The concerns of the right are overwhelmingly about unmitigated immigration, specific culture war stuff depending on the country, the economy/quality of life issues and of course the white liberal obsession with progressive politics (this last part is mostly in the anglophone world though).
I think conservatives are more united than liberals because they hate social justice and reject all these annoying tenets, and I personally find white liberals too racist and obnoxious to take seriously. I have been reading a lot of the center/right stuff and vastly prefer it over white liberalism/progressivism.
Black liberalism is just as bad if not worse because Asian and white liberals have the neither the desire nor capacity to critique Black people who are race first, ahistorical/revisionist "leftists".
The things I like are tainted by and with white liberal racism and Black liberal delusion. Like the environment. Many environmental and animal rights things are ran by white liberals. The things they focus their attention on are often tainted by their politics (which they got from twitter).
Like the Hawaii fires. One org I followed simply reguritated the prolific idea that the fires were caused by wealthy white vacationers and their proclivities. How can this be trueand why it's this org repeating this uncritically?
There's a local org that pushes for renewables but we know lithium is mined out of Africa and the people who do this work are suffering under these conditions. But white liberals are foaming at the mouth about fossil fuels vs ugly wind farms and don't see that extraction is extraction. No matter the WHY. This us not relevant to white liberals who want everyone to have electric cars.
I hate Black liberals because they're engaged in group hive mind, seem anyone who disagrees with them a racist, and prop up Black conservatives are little more than people who betray Black people and deserve to suffer. No one calls this out.
White and Asian liberals kowtow to nonsensical demands by Black people (ie reparations, representation) while being racist and not actually having a useful politic outside of calling everyone a fascist or demanding we "be kind".
Liberals are a problem! Like a huge ideological one!
I'm glad you touched on Compact here. I always read their stuff a la carte, since I'm not a subscriber, so I don't have any kind of holistic sense of where they end up landing in terms of who to side with. So it's Trump in the end?
I read so many of their pieces and have the same reaction you do, which is they seem sensible and easy to align with support for Biden, or at least much easier to align with support for Biden than with the rapacious Darwinian capitalism of the right.
How do you derive your sense that in the end they're driven by hostility to POCs, queers, and PMCs?
I mean you don't really get the flavor unless you sit down and read it, bc unlike most right wing publications compact is devoted to speaking to and converting centrists--this means they tread carefully around race in particular. I would say this article summarizes the Compact view, which is more or less "we should be in charge" where we is white Christian nationalists.
It's paywalled! But Rufo is such a bad actor in general, I can somewhat guess. Also, I'm so mystified by the Hungary-love of some right-wingers. But maybe that's to your point -- I'm mystified because what could Hungary possibly offer to a rootless cosmopolitan Jewish liberal intellectual like me. And the answer is nothing. It would hate me (though not as much as it would hate you).
Essentially the Compact crows believes in majority rule. If you read all their economics articles, it's all stuff Biden believes. If you read all their other articles, it's stuff that they're free to do under liberalism. You're already free to be religious to have traditional values to stay at home be a mother not get abortions, etc. But they believe that liberalism inevitably dissolves those values, and they think that the majority of people WANT those values. Ergo liberalism is good for the minority at the expense of the majority. Liberalism steals the majority's desire for fulfillment through motherhood, to benefit the minority's desire for career advancement, etc. Moreover capitalism accelerates this trend by forcing more and more activity into the economic sphere, so now corporations mediate, for profit, in people's personal lives. And capitalism also pushes the idea of personal choice, turning everything into meaningless consumerism.
As a result, capitalism and liberalism are both inherently destructive of values that MOST PEOPLE really want. Ergo they want to dismantle many of the protections liberalism offers to the minority, including freedom of speech and religion, etc. As a route to this, they also want majority rule over capital, to limit capitals inherent destructiveness. They believe that we are already locked in a death struggle between majority values and nihilism, and that the only sensible solution is to forcibly impose majority values through what is essentially illiberal democracy.
The problem is they dramatically overstate the actual prevalence of these majority values. There are very very few countries in the world that have equal numbers of catholics, mainline, and evangelical protestants like we do. We are one of the most religiously diverse nations on earth. We simply do not have the kind of shared majority values that you need to make national conservatism doable.
It's a kind of radicalism, it sounds like. As a non-radical, I'd just say if you want to support motherhood and family values, you should provide more of a social safety net, paid parental leave, etc., lot of good social democratic policies, i.e. vote for Biden. Which clearly seems like the wise choice, vis a vis the Republicans, who are pure creative destruction capitalism within our current system. But if you think that that's all just rearranging deck chairs as the Titanic sinks, and what you need is that kind of authoritarian imposition of majority values, then I guess the Republicans are a better bet. I mean I see the logic, is what I'm saying, though I think it's dumb in all sorts of ways.
I hold out hope that in his ongoing journey Sohrab Ahmari will eventually bend back around to liberalism.
Yes the genius of Compact is with everything they write you do get a feeling of hope, like maybe we can compromise! But I just don't think they're really genuine about that, because if they were they would vote Democrat, since who really exemplifies family values and restraints on capital more than Joe Biden? Like if you have even the barest interest on compromise, you would just vote for Manchin democrats over anything the republican party has to offer...
Also they really aren't in favor of a social safety net in the traditional way we think of it, bc it increases a person's options and hence enhances that liberal dissolution of values. Their social policy is sketchy byt I get the feeling they're more in favor of a sort of syndicalism, the interlocking of state and capital so that the state forces companies to take care of their workers, leaving people prosperous but still enslaved to authority.
It's not fascism bc it's more religious than nationalist, but it definitely FEELS a lot like fascism to someone like me
And yet there are people and institutions that do change over time, in reality. So I can hope that maybe they'll change to where compromise is possible, even if it's not right now. I guess it comes down to how deep that illiberalism, or hostility to minoritarian groups, runs in the DNA.
I bet they were slightly less depressed (all that fresh air while doing backbreaking work with the plow) but the main thing was that nobody could write memoirs outside of say, St. Augustine. If you gave peasants literacy lessons, they would all be complaining of "paines" and melancholy.
Have lost two people to suicide quite recently, the younger are more prone to suicide than you might think.
I think that you have a point that the conditions of life in the present our more harsh than they need to be and an examination of that is intensely useful.
This is something I've thought about a lot. I suspect that human individuals aren't really "designed" (whatever that means) to self-direct, to make their own identity, to make so many choices and decisions. That the freedom to do so, which is a modern achievement (at least on such a mass scale), is also a burden. It's inherently more psychically difficult and stressful than having your life structured for you, which tells you were you belong, why you are meaningful (even if your prescribed place isn't particularly desirable), and obligates others to you. I think that's why there is always an uproar of romantic, anti-modern nostalgia at each major phase of technological/social upheaval in the last few centuries of European history. I do take lessons from what I believe is our "natural" anthropology (to be socially interdependent and mutual, not atomized individuals), but also think the achievements of modern freedom are worth it even if they are harder and more stressful. I'm not sure humans have ever been "happy" as a dominant state on a mass scale, or that we should consider it a failure if we aren't!
Yes I agree that even if we are less happy (which I am not totally convinced of), that our durable achievements are worth it! And that if humanity ever is to achieve greater contentment than was possible in our animal state, it can only be through the technological progress that can only be achieved through modernity. It's kinda like how all these anthropologists will do a gotcha and be like "people in agricultural societies were less healthy than those in hunter-gatherer ones". Like...yeah, but bodily health isn't the only important thing in the world. The pyramids are pretty good too!
This is not about your post in particular, but I think it is notable that a lot of discussions about whether PTSD existed in the distant past focus on warfare. Unlike shell shock and battle fatigue, the WWI and WWII terms, PTSD encompasses any number of different sources of trauma. The most common in the modern world being sexual assault and car accidents. Sexual violence was probably at least as common in the past and while it is easy to imagine certain pre-modern societies where a wider range of violence was not only acceptable, but in many cases admirable, had less combat PTSD that seems less likely with sexual violence.
For instance republican Rome idealized military service, actually had high rates of it both among aristocrats and yeoman farmers, and there is little literary evidence for post traumatic stress like symptoms. (see https://acoup.blog/2020/04/24/fireside-friday-april-24-2020/ for a good discussion by a classical military historian) However, it is very hard to imagine that
the extremely patriarchal Romans had cultural institutions that helped rape victims process their trauma. Sexual violence in Latin literature is a complicated topic, but I don't think modern psychologists would consider the idealization of Lucretia's suicide to be a helpful cultural model.
On a side note the contention that only 20% of American infantrymen during WWII actually fired their weapons with an intent to kill ultimately derives from S.L.A. Marshall, whose work is controversial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.L.A._Marshall
His work is controversial, but I think it's suggestive! And it seems like there've been other findings that support it.
With regards to PTSD and sexual violence, the first thing is that it's not 100 percent certain that rates of sexual violence _are_ lower today than they were in pre-modern times. While modern society unquestionably has less killing and assault, it also has mixing of the sexes to an unprecedented degree, and it appears that rape is extremely common in modern America. Something like 1 out of every 5 women have been raped. Whereas the patriarchy of Roman times, with its seclusion of women, at least reflected that sexual assault was something to be protected against. One is reminded of Andrea Dworkin's famous statement that the conservative woman has made the devil's bargain: she has decided that she is content to be victimized by just one man, instead of by ALL men.
But we just don't know what women in pre-modern times thought or felt =[ I can think of at least one example of a woman writing about rape, which was in the Tale of Genji. Genji is just constantly raping women. Alot of his seductions are rapes. In at least one of the cases, he rapes a priestess who becomes depressed and kills herself, then haunts him, which (I believe) ultimately results in his death.
There does seem to be homeostasis in much of our appreciation of life. But we haven't found much of an alternative search for meaning than reducing suffering or increasing joy.
Interesting post. You might like Sebastian Junger's 'Tribe,' a book with a similar thesis.
Shakespeare has a description in Henry IV, Part 1 that is considered by some to be referring to PTSD: https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/shakespeare-post-traumatic-stress-disorder/
It would be pretty strange if pre-modern people were never psychologically traumatised! It’s much harder to say how prevalent such things might have been, though.
I'm sure they were psychologically traumatized. They and us are the same species after all!
Great post Naomi! It’s been a while since I’ve seen Shaka Zulu, Carl Schmitt, and Icelandic sagas all brought together - in a piece on depression! Yes, it’s interesting to see the chemical explanation of depression gradually lose its force and for more holistic (as well as intuitive arguments) to take pride of place.
Yes, I am interested to see what happens! The interesting thing too is that antidepressants DO work. If it was all just a scam that would be one thing, but there is a real effect there, although its size can be debated.
Happy release day!
The idea that pre-modern people may have been happier (or at least less depressed) than we are is super interesting, and I think one that is not super impossible to explore? There are still people today who live mostly premodern-ish lives with little access to media, knowledge of the outside world, etc. and probably some anthropologist somewhere has done studies on their experience of mental health. Obviously these would be mostly modern people interpreting things through their own lived experience, but one prevailing theory (based mostly off my Googling this for the past fifteen minutes, so I could be totally off) seems to be that when people talk about evil spirits, curses or being literally haunted by ghosts of the past, they were really expressing their depression/anxiety/mood and personality disorders.
But then again, I also found a bunch of really depressing articles about the mental health of Indigenous people today, and the number one cause of psychological distress there was colonization and modernity, so that's evidence to support that theory.
If you're willing to accept totally unsupported and unscientific anecdotal evidence, a lot of my diaspora Mainland Chinese friends have grandparents who went from the village to living mostly modern lives, and the impression that I get is that those grandparents don't have the expectation of baseline happiness that their American grandkids do. Like, yes, life is a grim unrelenting slog of misery where you eat bitterness and try to get rich and then die, but that's just about what you'd expect. And their dissatisfaction is mostly expressed in relentlessly criticizing everyone around them instead of navel-gazing about their trauma.
Yes, I think the idea is that the pre-modern person's belief in both fate and in the spirit world took the place of modern psychology, but it's possible that the spirit world is a better doctor than a psychologist is! After all, you can pray to a spirit and placate it! I also think a person can be non-depressed without being happy. Depression rips you out of daily life--you drink, rage, commit suicide, etc--but if you're just unhappy and expect to be unhappy, but you keep doing all the things you're supposed to do, then is there really a problem at all? Part of the beauty of depression is that it's so intolerable that it forces you to make a change of some kind.
I agree that this could be explored and probably is being explored! I should read about it a bit!
I don't agree that people on the right hate "POCs" or see them as The Other. There are A LOT of Latinos on the right and even in MAGA. Latinos need to be thought of as white though, not "poc". Also, the understanding of race and racism is directly descended/co-opted from historical oppression of Black Americans.
Asians are continously compared to Jews in center/right publications like The Tablet. And Asians really don't have a foothold in conversations about racism; it is still fundamentally a dichotomy between whites and Blacks. Liberals Asians just try, and fail, to align themselves with Black people by co-opting anti-Blackness and turning it into garden variety racism.
The concerns of the right are overwhelmingly about unmitigated immigration, specific culture war stuff depending on the country, the economy/quality of life issues and of course the white liberal obsession with progressive politics (this last part is mostly in the anglophone world though).
I think conservatives are more united than liberals because they hate social justice and reject all these annoying tenets, and I personally find white liberals too racist and obnoxious to take seriously. I have been reading a lot of the center/right stuff and vastly prefer it over white liberalism/progressivism.
Black liberalism is just as bad if not worse because Asian and white liberals have the neither the desire nor capacity to critique Black people who are race first, ahistorical/revisionist "leftists".
Isn't this just proving the point though? You know what you hate--liberals--and that matters in politics a lot more than what you like.
The things I like are tainted by and with white liberal racism and Black liberal delusion. Like the environment. Many environmental and animal rights things are ran by white liberals. The things they focus their attention on are often tainted by their politics (which they got from twitter).
Like the Hawaii fires. One org I followed simply reguritated the prolific idea that the fires were caused by wealthy white vacationers and their proclivities. How can this be trueand why it's this org repeating this uncritically?
There's a local org that pushes for renewables but we know lithium is mined out of Africa and the people who do this work are suffering under these conditions. But white liberals are foaming at the mouth about fossil fuels vs ugly wind farms and don't see that extraction is extraction. No matter the WHY. This us not relevant to white liberals who want everyone to have electric cars.
I hate Black liberals because they're engaged in group hive mind, seem anyone who disagrees with them a racist, and prop up Black conservatives are little more than people who betray Black people and deserve to suffer. No one calls this out.
White and Asian liberals kowtow to nonsensical demands by Black people (ie reparations, representation) while being racist and not actually having a useful politic outside of calling everyone a fascist or demanding we "be kind".
Liberals are a problem! Like a huge ideological one!
I'm glad you touched on Compact here. I always read their stuff a la carte, since I'm not a subscriber, so I don't have any kind of holistic sense of where they end up landing in terms of who to side with. So it's Trump in the end?
I read so many of their pieces and have the same reaction you do, which is they seem sensible and easy to align with support for Biden, or at least much easier to align with support for Biden than with the rapacious Darwinian capitalism of the right.
How do you derive your sense that in the end they're driven by hostility to POCs, queers, and PMCs?
I mean you don't really get the flavor unless you sit down and read it, bc unlike most right wing publications compact is devoted to speaking to and converting centrists--this means they tread carefully around race in particular. I would say this article summarizes the Compact view, which is more or less "we should be in charge" where we is white Christian nationalists.
https://compactmag.com/article/what-conservatives-see-in-hungary
It's paywalled! But Rufo is such a bad actor in general, I can somewhat guess. Also, I'm so mystified by the Hungary-love of some right-wingers. But maybe that's to your point -- I'm mystified because what could Hungary possibly offer to a rootless cosmopolitan Jewish liberal intellectual like me. And the answer is nothing. It would hate me (though not as much as it would hate you).
Essentially the Compact crows believes in majority rule. If you read all their economics articles, it's all stuff Biden believes. If you read all their other articles, it's stuff that they're free to do under liberalism. You're already free to be religious to have traditional values to stay at home be a mother not get abortions, etc. But they believe that liberalism inevitably dissolves those values, and they think that the majority of people WANT those values. Ergo liberalism is good for the minority at the expense of the majority. Liberalism steals the majority's desire for fulfillment through motherhood, to benefit the minority's desire for career advancement, etc. Moreover capitalism accelerates this trend by forcing more and more activity into the economic sphere, so now corporations mediate, for profit, in people's personal lives. And capitalism also pushes the idea of personal choice, turning everything into meaningless consumerism.
As a result, capitalism and liberalism are both inherently destructive of values that MOST PEOPLE really want. Ergo they want to dismantle many of the protections liberalism offers to the minority, including freedom of speech and religion, etc. As a route to this, they also want majority rule over capital, to limit capitals inherent destructiveness. They believe that we are already locked in a death struggle between majority values and nihilism, and that the only sensible solution is to forcibly impose majority values through what is essentially illiberal democracy.
The problem is they dramatically overstate the actual prevalence of these majority values. There are very very few countries in the world that have equal numbers of catholics, mainline, and evangelical protestants like we do. We are one of the most religiously diverse nations on earth. We simply do not have the kind of shared majority values that you need to make national conservatism doable.
It's a kind of radicalism, it sounds like. As a non-radical, I'd just say if you want to support motherhood and family values, you should provide more of a social safety net, paid parental leave, etc., lot of good social democratic policies, i.e. vote for Biden. Which clearly seems like the wise choice, vis a vis the Republicans, who are pure creative destruction capitalism within our current system. But if you think that that's all just rearranging deck chairs as the Titanic sinks, and what you need is that kind of authoritarian imposition of majority values, then I guess the Republicans are a better bet. I mean I see the logic, is what I'm saying, though I think it's dumb in all sorts of ways.
I hold out hope that in his ongoing journey Sohrab Ahmari will eventually bend back around to liberalism.
Yes the genius of Compact is with everything they write you do get a feeling of hope, like maybe we can compromise! But I just don't think they're really genuine about that, because if they were they would vote Democrat, since who really exemplifies family values and restraints on capital more than Joe Biden? Like if you have even the barest interest on compromise, you would just vote for Manchin democrats over anything the republican party has to offer...
Also they really aren't in favor of a social safety net in the traditional way we think of it, bc it increases a person's options and hence enhances that liberal dissolution of values. Their social policy is sketchy byt I get the feeling they're more in favor of a sort of syndicalism, the interlocking of state and capital so that the state forces companies to take care of their workers, leaving people prosperous but still enslaved to authority.
It's not fascism bc it's more religious than nationalist, but it definitely FEELS a lot like fascism to someone like me
And yet there are people and institutions that do change over time, in reality. So I can hope that maybe they'll change to where compromise is possible, even if it's not right now. I guess it comes down to how deep that illiberalism, or hostility to minoritarian groups, runs in the DNA.
I bet they were slightly less depressed (all that fresh air while doing backbreaking work with the plow) but the main thing was that nobody could write memoirs outside of say, St. Augustine. If you gave peasants literacy lessons, they would all be complaining of "paines" and melancholy.
Maybe! But a lot of people _could_ read. And when we read their stuff, it doesn't really feel like depression. Who the heck knows tho
Pre-moderns also died earlier in general.
Suicide, in particular, seems to be greater amongst older people, so earlier deaths by disease / violence could've preempted suicide
Have lost two people to suicide quite recently, the younger are more prone to suicide than you might think.
I think that you have a point that the conditions of life in the present our more harsh than they need to be and an examination of that is intensely useful.