

The age of steam - erehweb
http://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/the-age-of-steam/

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dusklight
It's not that the olden times were more civilized .. it's more that today, our
uncivilized components can read and write and use facebook, whereas in the
past the working class wrote no blogs and left no written record (because they
didn't know how to write) about how shitty they were being treated by the
gentry.

Class structures were so stratified in the past that the "proles" were barely
even considered human by those people who can read and write, i.e. those
people who left written records so that we can read about them now in
literature and such.

If you were rich (usually from inherited wealth that you did nothing to earn,
rich from the labor of the oppressed poor who were never given any opportunity
to be anything other than poor) then maybe you were civilized to other rich
people and could write about how "civilized" life was. If you were poor, child
labor and wife beating were the norm. Let's not even talk about how the slaves
were treated. Civilized? I think not.

