Well said. It all depends on what your criteria are, as to whether life was better 100 years ago.
I’ve had similar discussions with people about how life was in the ‘50s. And in those discussions, invariably someone brings up how Jim Crow was still in existence then, and how women weren’t found in professional careers in big numbers as they are now. They would talk of social pressure especially for women, to get married and have children. They talk of how homosexuality was in the closet. They mentioned how people lived in fear due to the cold war and threat of nuclear war.
In any discussions such as this article, it all depends on your criteria, as to what your comparison to today and the old days will be.
On the one hand, we have much better healthcare available, much greater comfort in everyday life due to air conditioning, much less air pollution in our cities. On the other hand, we have a debased culture in which big numbers of children are not being raised with important values, and are not being raised in an intact family unit.
So who can say are we better off now? It depends on what criteria you are measuring.
Just to be clear I do not deny the material gains at all.
I would have been dead at age 30 in 1916, as I got appendicitis at that age and would have died from it.
One of my children as saved by modern medical care, he would not have made it out of Mom had we not had modern medicine.
I never would have met my wife in 1916, though we lived only 20 odd miles apart. Our social spheres would not have mixed or crossed paths in 1916.
If you want to be educated today, information is so cheap and readily available you can become very educated for very little money. Almost all of the areas of interest to me would have been sharply circumscribed in 1916, just due to the limitations in accessing information.
Nonetheless I do not think you can ignore the cultural impact. We live in a time when we can listen to any type of music. Want to hear various versions of Handle’s “Royal Water Music”? well the 1953 Berlin harmonic version is on YouTube, as well as around 5 other recognized classic versions, all different, all free. How has it become then that “Bitch better have my money” and Lady GAGA various gay songs have become what folks listen to? By any measure the music of today is degraded, yet good music of any generation is at your fingertips for free but overwhelmingly ignored.
On any topic of intellectual interest there is an unlimited library at your disposal online, we should be in a golden age of intellectual discourse. Yet what is the big area of University study: how many genders are there, queer theory and how many ways can you denounce western civilization. It is as if the savages have taken over these institutions and are aping what they saw, without any understanding of what it was all really about.
Feminism has been a disaster for both men and women. The numbers of middle aged miserable women is huge in any urban or suburban area. The patriarchy had some defects, but based on simply observation, the alternative of a free for all has been disaster for around 50% of women. Equally disastrous for the ex-husbands, men who never got married, never had kids and the kids of divorced families. While there is great pain in the loss of a child, I find the modern emotional misery I see for large segments of populations as equally troublesome.
The same can be said of human dignity. I am old enough to recall men born in 1900 and they all had a quiet dignity to them (at least in the 1970s) which for the most part seems to be lacking today. Not just middle and upper middle class, but working class folks as well. Simply stated they were better men in terms of everything that is important than a lot of the folks today. Not only attitude, but an appalling number of young men, while able to use modern technology, have no knowledge of how it works, it is like magic to them and they lack the curiosity to try (in fairness the complexity makes it a lot harder). Worse they cannot fix any of these modern contrivances and nor even maintain or understand 1916 technology (such as fix a simple engine, toilet plumbing, basic electrical wiring, carpentry).
One has to wonder if the technological world we have can be preserved in a culture such as ours is headed. I work in high tech. The average age of engineers where I work in in the late 40s to early 50s, with a hole below age 38 to age 23. if this continues we are destined to become like Brazil or even worse, end up like Rome circa 476.
It is a very mixed basket.