Learning shit is my favourite form of recreation but learning any new historical thing ever fucks me up so much bc adding any shred of context to the things I hate about life on earth today makes me want to scream. For example, like, a few months ago I was reading The Faithful Executioner by Joel F Harrington and realized very early into the book that our conception of the purposes of brutal medieval punishments reveals a LOT more about us than it does about the people who enacted them.
Shortly prior to the period during which Franz Schmidt, the subject of The Faithful Executioner, lived, responses to murder and other horrendous acts were typically managed by blood debt or other honour systems like those that play pivotal roles in the Norse epics and ancient Greek tragedies and are found in surviving legal codes from numerous other cultures.
Whatever your personal stance on avenging a loved one's death, a significant problem with these systems was that they often spun out of control in various ways, such as creating cyclical feuds between families or communities that could persist for decades, or facillitating an excuse for the victimization of community members who were simply unpopular.
A high priority of the judicial system at this time was to quell these cycles of violence by satisfying the aggrieved public. Making a public spectacle of things like executions and floggings was far more about averting a cycle of violence and supplanting extrajudicial punishments with judicial ones than the motives we so often ascribe to them.
The popular image of medieval tortures and public executions as being performed for their own sake, or to satisfy the laws of a wrathful Christian God, or as a crude attempt at deterring similar crimes comes more from our own perceptions of morality and criminality than from surviving historical records. It holds up a mirror to today's prevalent attitudes toward addicts, the extremely impoverished or unhoused, non-working people and people whose work is deemed to be of low or insufficient value.
People who believe in capital punishment today typically see condemned persons as needing to die for ontological reasons, not because of what the victim's family might do if the law doesn't satisfy them. These are so often the same people who will talk about who does and does not "deserve" food and shelter or about "teaching criminals a lesson." We ascribe these grotesque opinions retroactively to medieval people either because we're not conscious of how they pervade our own worldview, or to foster in ourselves a sense that today's cultures are definitively more enlightened and compassionate than those of the past.
Another example, a while ago I listened to Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization by Amanda H. Podany and I was repeatedly floored by her emphasis on both the symbolic and material ways in which the ancient Mesopotamian cultures she studies prioritized the wellbeing of community and family as a whole, including the lowliest members, over the exercise of a king's or head of household's (to them these were practically one and the same) powers. It might not quite be enough to make a motherfucker want to go back in time without antibiotics or water sanitation but it sure made me despair about how the fuck a culture like ours, which descends from theirs in so many ways, could have ever reached the point where we allow mass death and suffering on an unthinkable scale at the whims of hyperwealthy Musk-like and Bezos-like figures.
I dunno man. I'm not quite ready to say ignorance is bliss, but I so often feel like my specific interests and hobbies have rendered me very alone in seeing a certain angle of something being so very very wrong.
