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by unholythree
1185 days ago
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It’s hard for people to appreciate just how much better our lives are, and how much more just life is in western society now than all of the millions of years of human life before. 200 years ago some people were literal property, 150 years ago women couldn’t vote almost anywhere, less than 75 years ago Turing was chemically castrated for being a homosexual. Huge, meaningful strides have been made for equally and fairness very recently. It may seem terrible and unjust that there are some now that are as rich as a Roman emperor and can buy a great deal of influence, but the world was once thousands of unaccountable tyrants, free to brutalize their peasants and slaves. |
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Anthropologists have been arguing for quite some time that society wasn't "all that bad" here and there over the last twenty thousand years or so. Bad sometimes in some places certainly, but for many, there was general communal comfort and a large degree of sharing resources. As recently in the last 500 years, it was written with a note of surprise by European settlers in north America that the indigenous population never let someone go hungry or homeless.
Recommend reading some David graeber, his latest book is a phenomenal insight on new archaeological findings as well as bad assumptions anthropologists have made in the past.