Commonality Across the Ages

I have long believed that we are not that different from our ancestors, even our ancient, ancient forebears. Our essential natures have not changed. And I argue that technological advancements do not make us more "advanced" as a people. If medicine or other technological means allow us to live until we are 80 yet we live in misery until our final breath, how have such things benefited us? Longer life does not equal better life, nor does less work equal more play and pleasure.

This is good news for writers of historical fiction, since one has only to study relatively few details--historical facts and technology differences--to be able to write believable stories. The human being is desperately complex, and always has been, but we know ourselves all too well.

The following exerpt says this much better than I have just done:

"The passions, the sources from which these must spring in all their modifications, are generally the same in all ranks and conditions, all countries and ages; and it follows, as a matter of course, that the opinions, habits of thinking, and actions, however influenced by the peculiar state of society, must still, upon the whole, bear a strong resemblance to each other. Our ancestors were not more distinct from us, surely, than Jews are from Christians; they had "eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions;" were "fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer," as ourselves. The tenor, therefore, of their affections and feelings, must have borne the same general proportion to our own."

From: Dedicatory Epistle To The Rev. Dr Dryasdust, F.A.S. which precedes Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott