I disagree with the statement that the luxuries and conveniences of contemporary life prevent people from developing into truly strong and independent individuals.
There is a pernicious but pervasive idea that our ancestors were more “true to themselves” than those of us in the modern world, because they lived lives that were closer to the “natural” order. In our modern society—so the argument runs—of hot showers, fast food, cappuccinos, and smart phones, we have become flabby, caviling, and timid. The time of “real men and real women” is long past, and we, their descendants, are a much-reduced species.
Certainly, it is undeniable that people in the past were better at handling the most atrocious hardships. They had so much more practice at it, after all. Under circumstances in which half of infants (and a fifth of mothers) die in childbirth, plague runs rampant, famine is common, a minor infection can kill, and marauders, bandits, and rapacious landowners make life a daily struggle, physical and emotional toughness would be an absolute requirement. Anyone who decries the ease and comforts of our modern life should consider a move to Mogadishu, Damascus, or Kabul. There, they could embrace all the character-enhancing aspects of life that are they are currently denied: untreated suppurating skin diseases, for example, or dentistry without anesthesia, or orphans slowing starving to death in the streets, or—hanging over everything—the nauseating miasma of violence and the possibility that, at any time, a group of armed men may come and take everything you own, and likely torture you in the off-chance that you are hiding something more, or purely out of boredom. This was life for our ancestors, in most cases a scant few centuries ago, and it is appallingly easy to find places where this is life today. (We can probably assume, incidentally, that though the statement reads “contemporary life,” what it means is “contemporary life in a developed country, especially for those in the middle class or above,” not “contemporary life for a homeless orphan in Calcutta or Abidjan.”)
What modern society, or “contemporary life” represents, above all, is a range of choices that were utterly unavailable for most people not long ago—or even most people today, in undeveloped regions. Even for the most privileged individual—i.e., a healthy straight man not born into abject poverty—modernity offers choices that run the gamut from the freedom to pursue a fulfilling job (rather than engaging in menial labor fourteen hours a day, six or seven days a week), or to receive cancer treatments (rather than dying painfully, and untreated, in middle age). For a woman, modernity offers the choice to receive an education, to marry a person of her choosing, and to have children or not according to her own desires rather than performing the same service as a breeding animal for her husband and his family. For a homosexual of either gender, modernity offers the choice to pursue a loving and fulfilling romantic relationship rather than being trapped in a loveless union according to arcane religious or cultural expectations. For a member of a minority race, modernity offers the choice to receive an education and work a competitive job on a level playing field. For a person born with physical or mental disabilities, or with a chronic illness like diabetes, modernity offers the choice to be allowed to live, pure and simple, rather than being smothered in infancy or dying young due to lack of medical care. For such as these, the idea that people were “truly strong and independent” in the past should seem like a bad joke at best.
The concept of a bygone golden era, in which people were simply better than they are in our spoiled present, is a seductive one (especially, it must be noted, to members of the locally dominant ethnic or economic group—those outside this lucky demographic tend to be fully aware how much better off they are to be living now). But the fact that we—or at least those of us privileged enough to live in a developed modern nation—have more choices than our ancestors did is unequivocally better than the alternative. Yes, our modern freedom also offers us negative choices: the choice to become lazy, weak, overweight, addicted, and so on. And, undeniably, far too many people make those easier, if more harmful, choices. But to blame that on a dissolute modern society, and to harken back nostalgically to the past—a past that, for the vast majority of human beings, was full to the brim with drudgery, suffering, oppression, and violence—is an asinine and shamefully myopic point of view.
Ephemeral GirlyGirl 