If You Think The World Is Getting Worse, Revisit The Gilded Age
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a public obsession with this idea that we are living in “unprecedented” bad times. To be fair, the last five years have been especially chaotic with Covid, extreme political and social divisiveness, skyrocketing costs of living, and declining mental and physical health. These are very real and serious issues deserving of attention and solutions. But is our society really worse off than it has ever been?
Focusing only on the problems of our modern world might very well result in this depressing conclusion. But if you take a moment to reflect on the past, you might find yourself realizing just how good we have it today. Human history is ripe with examples, but the Gilded Age is a particularly great place to start.
Good Luck Surviving
If you were born in the western industrial world between the 1870s – 1910s, life was brutal.
For starters, the odds of even making it to adolescence were grim. Only about 20 percent of babies born would make it to their fifth birthday, due largely in part to the unsanitary conditions of daily life.
Every day, babies drank from what were later dubbed “murder bottles,” which put their lives at stake. These bottles had long rubber tubes that connected to the bottle’s nipple, which were nearly impossible to clean, making them a breeding ground for bacteria. Contributing further to the problem, doctors had advised that these bottles need only be cleaned every two to three weeks.
Parents were also encouraged to water down their baby’s milk or opt for sweetened condensed milk. So if you were fortunate to survive the gastrointestinal infections from the bacteria in your bottle, you might still be left with a weak immune system and malnutrition.
If you made it past infancy and lived in one of the rapidly industrialized cities, you probably resided in cramped living quarters. With so many people, exposure to infection and disease was imminent. Without the marvels of modern medicine and proper hygiene practices, contracting a sickness could very well mean death.
Indoor plumbing was ushered in during this era, but for most of the country’s population, especially those who lived outside of big cities, outhouses or privies were still commonplace. It wasn’t uncommon for them to be placed next to wells or other water sources, leading to contamination–a major source of diseases like tuberculosis, cholera, smallpox, and typhoid fever.
Instead of cars, city streets were filled with horses, each producing 20-30 pounds of manure a day, also perpetuating diseases. Not to mention, should a horse die on a congested street, its rotting carcass was likely abandoned. Even if you could tolerate the smell, your community would suffer from anthrax outbreaks.
Killer Fashion
Today, there is a lot of talk surrounding the negative impacts of the unrealistic beauty standards perpetuated by social media influencers. This is nothing compared to the beauty standards of the Gilded Age, where beauty and fashion trends could literally cost you your life.
Women strove to achieve the perfect body through “waist training” using corsets, where their midsections were strapped in tightly to these organ-constraining contraptions all day and even while they slept at night.
Every time a woman sat down at her vanity to “put on her face,” she had no idea that she was exposing herself to deadly toxins. Face powder contained lead and arsenic, rouge was made of crushed up bugs and mercury, the latter of which could also be found in lipstick, and mascara was made from the toxic herb, belladonna.
Women were not the only ones risking their lives for fashion. Men’s hair products often included lead. Arsenic was also used on clothing to achieve a desired color. In the Gilded Age, even your clothing was trying to kill you. And without modern science, no one had a clue.
If you were a fan of nightlife, you were no stranger to the “radium craze”. Radium was being marketed as a health supplement that energizes your body. Elite social clubs would throw radium parties where they served bright, radioactive cocktails and provided all manner of glow-in-the-dark entertainment that wow’d guests … while it slowly poisoned them at the same time.
Social And Political Chaos
The belief that we are more politically and socially divided today than ever before may be due, in large part, to the advent of social media constantly bringing these divisions to light. When we look back at what was going on in the Gilded Age, it is obvious just how fraught with turmoil the past truly was.
In the Gilded Age, class warfare was ramping up as labor unions claiming to stand for the working class caused chaos with massive strikes and violent protests. This problematic movement would carry over into the Progressive Era where the National Labor Relations Act gave even more power to labor unions.
This era was also riddled with racism. The Civil War had ended but government sponsored racism was alive and well. Unjust Jim Crow laws kept the 14th Amendment’s promise of equal treatment under the law out of reach for black Americans, a reality that would continue until 1965. As far as gender equality was concerned, women were constantly fighting for their right to vote, a victory they would not see until 1919.
To pretend today’s problems even compare with those of the Gilded Age shows a deep misunderstanding of history.
Things Really Aren’t As Bad As The Might Seem
There will always be a million reasons to get discouraged about the state of the modern world. And that’s not objectively detrimental– understanding the world’s problems help us create solutions that help us advance individual liberty. But giving into hopelessness and negativity only begets hopelessness and negativity, which keeps the world stagnant.
So if you find yourself becoming distraught by these “unprecedented” times, take a look through a history book and you’ll find that these times aren’t so unprecedentedly bad after all. Sure, times may be crazy, but the progress we have made over the course of human history is really, quite extraordinary.