While there is no doubt life is better now than in prehistory (generally), modern-day history offers a lot of cruel modern-day novelties non-existential in prehistory.
One journalist has rebutted that the Middle Ages may not have been so bad by saying: “What about Gulags?”
Homo sapiens are species enormously prone to wars. And while a lot of wars have been present in the past, global wars are a novelty. The whole planet fighting.
Inequality has no par (maybe except for the 19th century). A few super-rich families own 99 % of all the wealth. It is like 10 hunter-gathering groups owning 99 % of the wealth of 16,000,000 other hunter-gathering groups. Unimaginable.
Enormously pronounced social hierarchies led to events or facilities like the Holocaust or gulags. Tens of thousands of officials hierarchically structured and totally uncaring people (yes, homo sapiens are eating out at restaurants not caring someone else is dying) were given orders they fulfilled. Some minorities distinguished by xenophobia are being tortured for life? In the world of people and their societies, yes, it is entirely possible.
Born in North Korean concentration camps and being abused, brutalized, oppressed, and tortured for a whole (sic!) life? The 21st century gives you this opportunity.
Slavery and modern-day slavery (serving well for the ruling elites) that is so prevalent were sporadic in prehistory. Imagine being beaten, hooked on some drugs, and your freedom restricted in every possible manner.
No doubt we cannot tolerate rapists, murderers, arsonists, and robbers without being punished? But a complex prison system with systemic torture? The concentration camps, prisons, gulags, systematic religious persecution, and domestic torture can be classified as systematic oppression sporadically found in prehistory. Incarnating people is bad but the top mind still didn’t find any better treatment (or they are not supposed to find it as the prisons are big business (once again, unimaginably in prehistory)).
And the advantages of living in prehistory:? Community life, social bonds, simplicity of life, and absence of technological stress
I wrote that our times are better than prehistory. But I meant it in general terms. If you choose it by the worst experience a human being can be exposed to, our times are the worst (North Korean camps, torture chambers, and so on). If you choose it by the best experience, our times are best by a landslide. And it is possible because of science, capitalism, and various social changes such as enlightenment and so on.
The final paragraph is derived from the book Arguments for atheism (Jan Bryxí, 2023): “People often catastrophically fail to understand how brutal the world was before the Scientific and Industrial revolution with capitalism came – which is basically all the time humans have existed.
Life expectancy at birth averaged 10 years for most of human history. 105 billion people have lived on earth with such a low expectancy. Where has God been?
Life was short, brutish, full of hunger, thirst, fear of danger, violent death, mental and physical pain. Nearly all illnesses were incurable. Wars, genocide, infanticides. One group had nothing to eat or drink, they went and raped, or murdered another clan members. Of course, people had also experienced positive things but compared to this?”
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