Opus 2014-103: Plow and Crown: Greetings, Peasants

I have come to the conclusion that I would have been a peasant in ancient time.  If not a peasant I might have been a slave.

Early kings and nobles achieved their position on the strength of their arm, the speed of their reflexes and the sharpness of their swords.  If you won the fight you became the boss.  If you could hold your own you became a noble.  If you won a lot of fights you became a king.  It was common for royalty and the noble classes to be illiterate.  It was better to be good with a sword than a pen.  You had servants and slaves for that kind of thing.

Recently I went to a Project Appleseed event to learn about the skills of being a rifleman.  I found that I had a real hard time focusing on both the front sight and the target.  My eyes were never that good and now they are getting old.  If I focused on the sight, the target was a blur.  If I focused on the target, I could not see the sight.  This makes it difficult to hit what you shoot at.  Even worse, I have never been known for my coordination or athletic ability.  I think I was about ten years old before I learned to ride a bike.  When ice skating I managed to step on my own hand.  I have all the skills of a peasant.

Or a slave.  In Roman times many of the teachers were slaves.  They conquered the Greeks and made slaves of their philosophers and intellectuals.  It was not unknown for teachers to be crucified for not teaching the children well. 

How would Western society have developed different if glasses had been developed earlier?  Would literacy have been more common and the equality brought by wide spread education come sooner?  Would classes have been less set in concrete?

Simple things can make big differences.  If the Russian Princes had possessed machine guns then Genghis Khan would have been a sucker instead of a scourge.  If the Confederate States had purchased large numbers of Henry and Spencer repeating rifles before starting a war, Lincoln would have never lasted for re-election.

Be grateful that you live in a blip in history called the United States of America.  We have had liberty and prosperity for the masses at a level never seen in history.  In any other culture most would be walking behind a flatulent ox, plowing someone else’s field instead of worrying about how cow gas is ruining the environment. 

I hope that we are not coming to the end of that blip but it seems to me that the tide has turned.

homo unius libri