Would a king from the Middle Ages willingly swap lives with an average American?

Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to be a great and powerful king from the Middle Ages. I’m talking about kingly kings—those who would be deemed successful by other kings. If you were one of those top 25 percentile kings, just think of all the people waiting on you, and imagine all of your privileges, including your own court jester to entertain you, and lots of soldiers that you can use to expand or defend your territory. You would get to live in a beautiful big castle, and people from all around would seek your attention and bestow complements and gifts upon you and your family. Some of those visitors would come from far away and they would tell you stories from distant lands. If you got sick, the wisest doctor in the area would come to your service to give you the best health care available in the Middle Ages. Could there possibly be a better way to live than being a successful king? I then wonder how being a king would compare to living the life of an average American in modern times. Consider that the median household income for an American family in the year 2007 was about $50,000, and that this can buy you a lot of things. The average American has access to foods from all around the world by visiting the local grocery store. American families typically own automobiles that can go much faster and much farther than the horse of any king. The average American can use a television or computer to hear news from anywhere in the world. Using the Internet, the average American has a "library" thousands of times bigger than the library of any king. Americans don't have to imagine what it would be like to walk on the moon. They have photos and movies of people walking on the moon. They don't have to wonder what Mars looks like, because they have king-in-mini-cooperstunning photos. They don't have to wonder what stars actually are, or how big the universe is -- they have scientific answers to these questions and answers to many other questions that Kings wouldn't even know how to ask. The average American family has the option to stare at a large colorful television screen in their own home in order to be entertained by images and sounds that could not even be imagined by a king. When Americans get sick, they can go to hospitals that offer them stunningly effective cures for many maladies. The houses of average Americans are always kept warm in the winter and cool in the summer. A couple times each year, many Americans get to step into large silver machines that fly them to faraway places, traveling hundreds of miles per hour, where they capture incredible images with digital cameras. And then they share them with their Facebook kingdoms of hundreds of “friends.” You get the idea. Now let's assume that you could transport a Middle Ages king to modern times, and let him live the lifestyle of an average American for a few weeks. Here’s my opinion of what would happen: [more . . . ]

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Gifts that tell good stories

Geoffrey Miller has written an extraordinary book, Spent, that challenges us to recognize that our ubiquitous efforts to decorate ourselves and others with goods and services are primarily to project image and status. (and see here and here) "Many products are signals first and material objects second." The result is that we often engage in a vast orgy of spending mostly to look good in the eyes of others. What does this have to do with Christmas? We humans are also creatures who are always looking for shortcuts. Many of us have deliberately chosen to work long hours as part of "career" choices in order to make more money. Most of us who have who have made extra money as a result of those long hours at the office would much rather burn off some of that money at a store than to spend our severely limited amounts of time creating goods or providing services. We'd like to believe that our gift-giving is a display of our good intentions and of who we are, but as Miller points out, the store-bought gifts so many of us buy serve only to display only a narrow range of qualities regarding who we are:

Buying new, real, branded, premium products at full price from chain-store retailers is the last refuge of the unimaginative consumer, and it should be your last option. It offers low narrative value--no stories to tell about interesting people, places, and events associated with the product' design, provenance, acquisition, or use. It reveals nothing about you except your spending capacity and your gullibility, conformism, and unconsciousness as a consumer. It grows no physical, social or cultural roots into your local environment. It does not promote trust, reciprocity, or social capital. It does not expand your circle of friends and acquaintances. It does not lead you to learn more about the convention, manufacture, operation, or maintenance of the things around you. Retail spending reveals such a narrow range of traits: the capacities to earn, steal, marry, or inherit wealth, and the perceptual memory and media access required to spend the wealth on whatever is advertised most avidly now.
(p. 271 ff). Those who procure gifts with a moment's thought or two, and with the help of credit cards, often fail in their attempts to impress. Retail spending pointedly fails:
[a]s a costly, reliable signal of one's dedication to a particular person (in the case of gifts), or to a particular acquisition (in the case of things bought for self display).
Miller reminds us that creating something yourself speaks much more loudly than a premade thing purchased at retail. The proof is that gifts which require personal time and creativity make much better "stories" to tell to family and friends. I largely agree with Miller, though I think that retail spending can make a compelling story in some circumstances. For instance, what if someone has limited financial means, yet digs deeply in order to purchase a nonfrivolous gift that another person truly needs (e.g., assume that someone of limited means provided a student with books that were desperately needed for a coming semester). During the Christmas season, however, Miller's version of retail spending is a common occurrence. Most of us patronize retail stores in order to send out ready-made gifts. This much is not disputed. What can be disputed in an interesting way, is why . Many people would claim that we give gifts to each other because we "care about" or "love" each other. Miller's writings dig several levels deeper, recognizing that we are human animals who have come equipped with deeply felt needs to display our traits to each other, and that we resort to retails gift giving to serve these deep urges. In other words, Miller resource to biology rather than folk psychology:

Biology offers an answer. Humans evolved in small social groups in which image and status were all important, not only for survival, but for attracting mates, impressing friends, and rearing children.

(p. 1). During this Christmas season, and at all other times of the year, it is fascinating to re-frame the widespread displays of gift-giving as anciently-honed and deeply-rooted biological impulses geared to ensure survival. For more, consider this post, entitled "Shopping for Sex" and this post on The Church of Stop Shopping.

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On helicopter parenting

Many parents are starting to wake up to the insanity of "helicopter parenting," always striving to hover over their children, even as they get to be teenagers, in order to protect them from largely-imagined evils and to push them to be hyper-competitive. Helicopter parenting takes many forms, including over-scheduling children with enrichment activities and classes and fretting at each and every indication that a child is less than perfect. When I was a child, I was fortunate that my parents sent me off to take guitar lessons for a half-hour per week. I appreciated that opportunity. Other than that one activity, though, I was pretty much on my own. I played a bit of soccer in grade school, but my parents almost never went to the games or practices, nor did I expect them too. Nor did most other parents attend most of of the games. There were no such things as "select" leagues, where parents would convince themselves that their child was the next Pele, justifying three games every weekend in far flung locations, some of them out-of-state. As a child, I was allowed considerable time to do whatever I wanted, or to do nothing at all. When I was in the mood to play sports, it was usually a pick-up game, where the children knocked on doors to round up other players, choose the teams, gather their own bats and balls, officiated their own disputes and tend to their own minor injuries. During the summer we sometimes played sports most of the day, yet there were no parents anywhere to be seen. We were allowed to make lots of mistakes, thus allowing us to really learn many things, including how to really understand other people. This was a refreshingly wonderful way to handle things, when looking in retrospect. This was much better than having 20 parents each driving one-hour round trips to watch their 15 fourth graders play 50 minutes of officially refereed soccer. To be sure, I think that team sports can be a good thing. It's all the hovering parents that seems creepy. If most of the parents had shown up and shouted constant encouragement at my games as a 10-year old, I wouldn't have felt loved--I would have wondered what was wrong with all of them. After all, it's only a game, especially for young children. Whenever you find middle or upper class families these days, things are entirely different than they were for me. Many parents simply won't leave their kids alone; they are too terrified that if left to their own, their children will lose their competitive edges and miss out on the best college, the best job, or the best spouse. The schools that are "good" are too often those that dump several hours of daily homework on small children. Children are too often deemed to need special camps and tutoring, instead of allowing them to explore such things as cooking in their own kitchens and critters in their own back yards (or nearby creek), on their own. And the whole sordid phenomenon of helicopter parenting is thoroughly permeated with rampant consumerism. Image by Troon Lifeboat (creative commons) This week, Time Magazine has taken on helicopter parents in an impressively detailed article titled "The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting." One of the people featured in the Time article is Lenore Skenazy, who advocates "Free Range Kids.":

[T]oo many parents, says Skenazy, have the math all wrong. Refusing to vaccinate your children, as millions now threaten to do in the case of the swine flu, is statistically reckless; on the other hand, there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy, and the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million. When parents confront you with "How can you let him go to the store alone?," she suggests countering with "How can you let him visit your relatives?" (Some 80% of kids who are molested are victims of friends or relatives.) Or ride in the car with you? (More than 430,000 kids were injured in motor vehicles last year.) "I'm not saying that there is no danger in the world or that we shouldn't be prepared," she says. "But there is good and bad luck and fate and things beyond our ability to change. The way kids learn to be resourceful is by having to use their resources." Besides, she says with a smile, "a 100%-safe world is not only impossible. It's nowhere you'd want to be."
In the Time article, you can read that there has been a 25% drop in playtime (for 6-to-8 year olds) from 1981 to1997, while the amount of homework has doubled. As Sting sings, if you love them, you've got to set them free. Otherwise, they'll never learn to think for themselves and they'll never turn be allowed to turn into the persons they were destined to become. Because the central message of helicopter parenting is that you don't trust your children, helicopter parenting is a better way to ruin your child than to help your child. It's a way to prevent your children from learning by playing, failing and then playing and failing some more. It's a way to stifle cognitive development, by stealing play time from them. It too often seems that all of this attention is forced onto children by parents who are working long hours away from their children and trying to make it up by lavishing perfection on their children. Regardless, too many of those who engage in helicopter parenting are not really hovering about for the sake of their children, no matter how much they protest. Rather, as the Time article suggests, they are focused solely on melding trophy children as an attempted display of their own parenting prowess.

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A tumultuous story told by a stone with streaks of pure iron

Back in December, I had the chance to walk through New York's Museum of Natural History with Ebonmuse (of Daylight Atheism). He pointed out an exquisite stone from the Proterozoic Eon. You could plainly see broad streaks of pure iron running from side to side. Such streaks could never form today, due to our oxygen-rich environment. That observation was the beginning of a mind-expanding yet poetic story. I learned a bit of that story back in December. Now, Ebonmuse tells a much more expansive and dramatic version. Here's an excerpt, but I'd highly recommend a visit to Daylight Atheism for the full dose:

Looking at this stone, you get some idea of the dizzying vistas of geological time, as well as the turmoil that life has endured to reach the present day. Each of those colorful red and silver layers represents what was, in its own era, a disaster beyond imagining, one that reset life to its starting point. Each of those layers, as well, is a silent testament to life's tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds. Of course, the cycles of growth and destruction did not last forever. Eventually, evolution found a way, as evolution nearly always does, and oxygen was tamed to become a power source in an entirely new metabolic cycle. The oxygen-breathers arose, the remaining anaerobes retreated to the deep crevices of rocks and the sea, and life found a new equilibrium, with the balance of the atmosphere permanently changed. All the oxygen we breathe today is biologically produced, a tangible proof of life's power to reshape its own world.

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How our time-orientation effects the way we live our lives

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo asks the following question:

What if your attitudes toward time could explain why you are chronically late, why you’re likely to fight for rainforest preservation, or why you might be predisposed to addictions?

Zimbardo has written a new book explaining the psychology of time. In his opinion, the secret power of time is not about “clock time,” but rather about subjective time. His analysis has numerous real-world consequences. For instance, he takes on many addiction recovery programs such as D.A.R.E., accusing them of “useless propaganda. The problem is that these programs “only work for future-oriented people,” whereas addicts are “present-oriented.” addiction prevention programs all too often fail to recognize that the audience is not helped by lectures about future consequences. The real problem is that societal forces trap and tempt these present-oriented people, and they need lots of role-playing to deal with the problem at a point where it matters.

If Zimbardo’s name sounds familiar, it might be because of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment he conducted in 1971.

People divide the flow of human experience in various ways, and it affects the way they live their lives. For instance, time-orientation affects our decisions to give in to temptation or to delay gratification. Many people live in the present, and they focus on the here and now. Alternatively, other people are oriented to the past, and they bring the past to their present, in both helpful and unhelpful ways. Future-oriented people constantly weigh the costs versus benefits–in …

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