It is easy for aspiring Luddites like me (note where you are reading this: I’m am teaching you irony) to downplay the value of all the things we have created: our roads, cars, airplanes, factories, ships, air conditioning, etc. If the important part of life is between your ears, then what is the value of such superfluity (is that a word? Well, now it is)?
Most of us, in the developed world, grow up in comfort and safety. There are car accidents, and cancer, and some crime, but basically we know we will be fed at the end of the day, and nothing too bad is likely to happen to us.
Ensconced in this world view, we forget how valuable a trait cruelty can be in the struggle for survival. In a dog eat dog world, is it not the fiercest, meanest person who rises to the top? Now, you can’t be safe alone, normally, so you cluster, but if you look at history, is it not one story after another of one group treating another horribly?
The value of material progress is that it reduces and even eliminates the value of cruelty. I won’t say cruelty was ever NEEDED, but it is an almost invariant feature of societies that lived in anything like difficult condition. Hell, even the inhabitants of the South Pacific were often cannibals, and those conditions can scarcely be called difficult.
What our social order–based as it is on free enterprise, and self government–is the ability to get along with others. Yes, it rewards (for now) initiative and aggression, but within confined bounds.
We need to remember, too, that just 50 short years ago black people could not vote in some States, and had their own bathrooms, pools, and part of the bus. Those who broke the rules stood a decent chance of being beaten.
We have become a soft society, no doubt–we have forgotten that pain is as necessary in its own way to growth as water and air–but we do still need to point to the benefits of that softness, which is a congenital revulsion towards “mean people.” That many of the meanest people are the ones who use that slogan does not negate that fact.