What About Worldbuilding #18 - The Age of Ignorance

Hey, I know a lot of you are doing NaNo (I think I got those letters right) so good luck with all of that.

Premise

Alright, folks, we’ve got something of an unusual topic today (shocking, I know /s). Those of you who paid attention in your world history classes will remember mentions of something called the “Age of Enlightenment”, a movement or whatever. Honestly, I didn’t pay much attention either, I preferred to doodle in the margins of my notes and… This isn’t an autobiography.

Anyway, if you’d like to know more about the aforementioned age, please hit up Google. What we’re going to talk about here today is something I’ve dubbed the “Age of Ignorance” (not to be confused with The Age of Innocence, which is a whole different kind of thing).

To put ourselves in the right mindset going forward, let us all collectively wind the clocks back to a time before expedient travel and widespread trade, back to a time of relative myth.

Imagining Other People

If we wander back into the past, we find ourselves walking in the shoes of the common people that lived in that time. Knowledge of the wider world was limited, and what’s real always remained closer to home. Stories would trickle in from time to time, coming from explorers and merchants.

Stories though, that’s the key thing here.

In this Age of Ignorance, one would find that understanding of other cultures and places would be passed on by word of mouth and, naturally, the stories would change over time. As the interpretations shifted, the expectations would easily drift toward mythological and legendary.

Take, for example, a traveler from a less technologically advanced region returning home from visiting a more advanced region. How would they even describe things like firearms, railways, or the locomotive to their people?

Hell, it’s easy to think that they would drift into descriptions of sorcery or witchcraft. Try describing a firearm to someone without relying on them already having some basic knowledge of how they operate. It’s agonizing.

A demonstration is best, but that’s a different sort of rant and I’m not working on that at the moment. And it would be in these early cultural interactions, with the spread of stories, that mysticism and mystery would be applied to a people different than one’s own.

Why are you still going about this, we get it…

I’m sure you do! It’s not terribly complicated so if a moron like myself can make a point on it, then it can’t be terribly complicated. I would, however, like to point out that the idea here is to adopt this in the worlds you go out and build.

Imagine the first instance of one of these stories being told, of these being one of the few instances of cultural contact up until this time, and then imagine how that changes the perception of those people going forward. With progress marching on, at some point those two people will come into more consistent contact with one another, and the characterizations and expectations of every encounter will be influenced in some way by those early stories.

Hell, let’s say there’s a people North of Generic Nation #1. Those people keep parrots, they’re often perched on the shoulders of their owners. Now say someone from our Generic Nation happens to meet these folks from the North and brings back stories about their culture and their world, so to speak. She tells her story to a dozen people, who tell a dozen people in return… and so on. At some point in this retelling would lose its tenuous grasp with reality and all of a sudden there’s stories of rainbow winged people in the North.

Can you imagine their disappointment a couple of decades down the line??

Tragic.

FFC Winners

Okay, we had one hell of a judging round this time:

1. Me
2. Myself
3. And I

Honorable Mentions Everyone else

Real Talk -> No results this week, obv.