Re: In fact, the ordinary middle class person today can go more places, communicate with more people, experience more things, eat more exotic foods, have better health care, read more books and have far better entertainment than Louis XIV, three centuries ago, who was probably the most indulged person on earth at that time.
It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
Excerpted from:
Subject 33609
As Orwell shrewdly notes, what matters is not so much the (material, social, technological,...) progress from one generation to the next as the perception of (huge) disparities and inequalities between the lower and upper classes within a given generation/society. For instance, life expectancy for Westerners in general has probably doubled over the past 400 years. That is, in the 1600s, Europeans had a life expectancy of, say, 45 years on average (famines, bubonic plague, etc). Yet, that is not to satiate today's blue-collars whose life expectancy lags that of white-collars/executives by several years.... |
