What can explain all this callousness? … people don’t generally value the lives of those they consider below them
Maybe that’s a factor. But I would be careful about presuming to understand. At the start of the industrial age, life was cheap and perilous. A third of all children died before the age of five. Imagine the response if that was true in a modern developed society! But born into such a world, an atmosphere of fatalistic resignation would set in quickly. All you can do is pray to God for mercy, and then look on aghast if the person next to you is the unlucky one.
Someone in the field of “progress studies” offers an essay in this spirit, on “How factories were made safe”. The argument is that the new dangers arising from machinery and from the layout of the factory, were at first not understood, in professions that had previously been handicrafts. There was an attitude that each person looks after themselves as best they can. Holistic enterprise-level thinking about organizational safety did not exist. In this narrative, unions and management both helped to improve conditions, in a protracted process.
I’m not saying this is the whole story either. The West Virginia coal wars are pretty wild. It’s just that … states of mind can be very different, across space and time. The person who has constant access to the intricate tapestry of thought and image offered by social media, lives in a very different mental world to people from an age when all they had was word of mouth, the printed word, and their own senses. Live long enough, and you will even forget how it used to be, in your own life, as new thoughts and conditions take hold.
Maybe the really important question is the extent to which today’s elite conform to your hypothesis.
Maybe that’s a factor. But I would be careful about presuming to understand. At the start of the industrial age, life was cheap and perilous. A third of all children died before the age of five. Imagine the response if that was true in a modern developed society! But born into such a world, an atmosphere of fatalistic resignation would set in quickly. All you can do is pray to God for mercy, and then look on aghast if the person next to you is the unlucky one.
Someone in the field of “progress studies” offers an essay in this spirit, on “How factories were made safe”. The argument is that the new dangers arising from machinery and from the layout of the factory, were at first not understood, in professions that had previously been handicrafts. There was an attitude that each person looks after themselves as best they can. Holistic enterprise-level thinking about organizational safety did not exist. In this narrative, unions and management both helped to improve conditions, in a protracted process.
I’m not saying this is the whole story either. The West Virginia coal wars are pretty wild. It’s just that … states of mind can be very different, across space and time. The person who has constant access to the intricate tapestry of thought and image offered by social media, lives in a very different mental world to people from an age when all they had was word of mouth, the printed word, and their own senses. Live long enough, and you will even forget how it used to be, in your own life, as new thoughts and conditions take hold.
Maybe the really important question is the extent to which today’s elite conform to your hypothesis.