• bouh@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    9 months ago

    While modernity brought many good things, people weren’t all serfs in the middle ages.

    I also must remind you that many people in your country are living a miserable life, barely managing to buy food, and most people don’t own their house. Self governance is a thing only the bourgeois talk about because they were wealthy enough to be jealous of the privileges of the nobility. They merely changed the system so that money provides privileges rather than blood, but it’s not much more just than it was before.

    • SCB@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      9 months ago

      It’s absurd to compare even the poorest Americans (or any non-developing nation) with Middle ages peasants.

      The standard of living by comparison is immeasurable. The poorest person in a developed nation today enjoys a standard of living higher than most royalty throughout the ME.

      The ostentatious palaces and shit were largely a product of the Renaissance era. Most ME lords lived in what is effectively a single room stone building and drank water contaminated with their own feces.

      I understand that things can, and should, improve further but this is well beyond a reach.

      • bouh@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        9 months ago

        You’re mistakening were the progress were made. The end of famines started with the industrial revolution. The increase in life expectancy went from taking care of child deaths and antibiotics for the biggest part. Vaccines come right after those. And war is probably next. All of these are why the population was multiplied by 10 between 1940 and now.

        But that doesn’t make the life of everyone a paradise. There are homeless people in your country, and those are no better now than before. Depending on where you live, you don’t necessarily get to be cured in a hospital because liberalism thought good to forbid free healthcare. When you’re poor, you only have access to bad food, if you’re not too poor.

        I don’t idealize the past. But I don’t demonize it either only to be able to idealize our present.

        • SCB@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          9 months ago

          It’s not idealizing anything to recognize that standard of living for poor people in developed countries (and, by this standard of measurement, developing nations as well) is massively improved over even 40 years ago, much less 400. That’s just accepting reality.

          Not even touching the “liberalism means health care is expensive” argument, because that’s just fucking silly. Healthcare is unduly expensive in exactly 1 developed nation. That’s on those people, not liberalism.