We have an interesting view of history.
We seem to believe
that everything before the modern time was miserable, filled with too much work
and little reward.
We have been taught that our modern conveyor-belt system of
economics and society is the best model that has ever existed, and we are
trained to fear anything that threatens the current system.
Consider this quote from the writer C.H. Douglass:
How is
it that in 1495 the laborer was able to maintain himself in a standard of
living considerably higher, relatively to his generation, than that of the
present time, with only fifty days of labor a year [raising crops on a family
farm], whereas millions are working in the age of marvelous machinery the whole
year round, in an effort to maintain themselves and their families just above
destitution.
When Douglass wrote this in 1945, he probably had no idea
that computers would come along and that this brilliant invention would help
lead to regular adults doing almost double the amount of daily work for money
than in his day.
In fact, if one includes the work-for-pay of both adults in
the home, the amount of work-for-pay in a family has much more than doubled
since 1945.
The industrial age brought more work, not less, and the information
age is doing the same.
One can agree or disagree about whether society should be
based on the family farm, the industrial factory, or a digital age, but we
should at least consider the reality--not some mythical view that everything
today is the best it has ever been and that the people in history were always
worse off than now.
For example, as John Sharpe put it:
Caveat lector! For there is little resemblance indeed of the real
ownership of real property...to the 'rent-from-the-bank' home 'ownership' (sic)
of most American families.
All is not always as the popular view says.
We need to
study, and especially think, at a
deeper level than most of our classrooms or the nightly news.
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Social Leader Daily by Oliver DeMille
