Pre-industrial society was a shithole for most people compared to the present. And I’m not basing that on metrics like literacy or access to political franchise

Pre-industrial society was a shithole for most people compared to the present. And I’m not basing that on metrics like literacy or access to political franchise. I’m talking about things like “how likely are you to bury half your children?”, and “how likely are you to be raped or murdered?” We’ve made ourselves so comfortable now (which is great) that we’ve forgotten how unusual our circumstances are and lost interest in how we created them. It’s not a comment on the intelligence of the average historical person, or the richness of their emotional life. It’s just an acknowledgement that the tools we used to try to improve our lot for most of human history (including “common sense”) were not very successful, at least compared to the ones we’re using now.