Nowadays we often see a wave of nostalgia for the 80s and 90s. The music, the fashion, the slower pace of life; all of it is warmly remembered. I feel that nostalgia too. Yet alongside those memories comes the reminder of what was normal then; smoking in offices and airplanes, rigid workplaces, casual discrimination, and an almost unquestioned tolerance for pollution. Those things felt ordinary at the time. Now they seem like blind spots we can hardly believe we had.
If we can see so clearly the limits of an era only a few decades behind us, then we must admit that our own time has blind spots too. Some of them may be small, others immense. Thinking on a longer historical scale, we can begin to imagine how each era’s cruelties are woven into its normalcy; not hidden in shadows, but standing in plain sight, unrecognized for what they are.
Every age lives with the quiet conviction that it stands at the cutting edge of progress. People in the past believed it, just as we do now. Their streets, homes, customs, and technologies seemed modern to them, the culmination of everything their forebears had worked toward. They could look back with condescension on earlier times, convinced that they had left behind ignorance and hardship.
Yet each age has its blind spots. What feels natural and unremarkable to those living in it often appears, in hindsight, as shockingly cruel. Progress in one area often coexists with regression or stagnation in another, and sometimes the cruelties are made worse by the very tools that the age celebrates.
This has been true for centuries. The past is not simply a ladder of improvement, but a shifting horizon where light and shadow always move together.
The Pre-Modern World: Fates Fixed and Beliefs Unquestioned
In the pre-modern world, most people’s lives were set at birth. Class, gender, and religion determined their work, their rights, and their prospects. A farmer’s child would be a farmer, a servant’s child a servant. Mobility was rare, and rebellion against one’s station could be dangerous.
Belief and daily life were bound together by superstition. Disease might be blamed on evil spirits, a failed harvest on divine displeasure. Rulers and priests often held authority through a mixture of faith, tradition, and fear. Public punishments, even executions, were not only accepted but attended as community events.
We may romanticize this world for its slower pace, its craft traditions, and its communal bonds. But its signature cruelty was the absence of personal freedom. A person was not an individual in the modern sense, but a member of a fixed order, their fate shaped by forces they could neither escape nor question.
Early Modernity and the Age of Enlightenment: Liberty with Shackles
The modern age brought reason, science, and a new language of rights. The Enlightenment promised liberty and the dignity of the individual. Printing spread knowledge, philosophy challenged kings, and revolutions claimed to speak for the people.
Yet alongside these ideals flourished one of history’s most brutal systems; the transatlantic slave trade. The Middle Passage, carrying enslaved Africans to the Americas, turned human beings into cargo in the most literal sense. Packed into the holds of ships for journeys of six to twelve weeks, they lay chained together, often in spaces so tight they could not sit upright. The air was thick with disease, and death was constant. Dysentery, smallpox, and malnutrition claimed many before they reached land. Survivors were sold at auction, their humanity reduced to price tags.
Between the 16th and 19th centuries, millions were transported this way, with profits fueling European cities, colonial plantations, and the industrial economy. Enlightenment thinkers spoke of universal rights while investing in or benefiting from slavery. Pseudo-scientific theories of racial hierarchy gave a respectable veneer to economic greed.
The signature cruelty of this era was slavery sustained by the very forces that claimed to liberate humanity. It was not hidden in shadows, but embedded in the economic and intellectual life of the age.
The Industrial and Modern World: Rational Progress, Mechanical Brutality
Industrialization transformed cities, production, and daily life. Steam power, electricity, and modern medicine raised life expectancy and eased some forms of labor. The growth of education and democratic institutions brought more people into public life.
Yet the factories that powered this progress often consumed the bodies of their workers. Long hours, dangerous machinery, and child labor were common. In crowded urban slums, disease spread quickly. Nature was treated as an endless resource, and pollution darkened skies and poisoned rivers.
In the 20th century, the modern state learned to harness its organizational power for mass violence. The Holocaust, carried out with rail schedules, bureaucratic records, and industrial killing facilities, murdered six million Jews alongside millions of others deemed undesirable. Stalin’s Great Purge and forced collectivization starved and executed millions in the Soviet Union. Mao’s Great Leap Forward caused famine that killed tens of millions, and the Cultural Revolution destroyed lives, families, and cultural heritage in the name of ideological purity. In Cambodia, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge emptied cities, forced people into labor camps, and executed intellectuals, minorities, and anyone suspected of dissent. In Rwanda, a hundred days of killing in 1994 took the lives of over 800,000 people, enabled by modern communications and political organization.
These genocides were not eruptions of medieval brutality but the deliberate use of modern systems; logistics, propaganda, industrial efficiency, and centralized power to kill on a scale the world had never seen.
The signature cruelty of this period was the transformation of reason and industry into precise instruments of destruction.
The Postwar 20th Century: Ambivalence in an Age of Plenty
After the Second World War, much of the world entered a period of expansion. Consumer goods became accessible to more people. Civil rights movements challenged old hierarchies. Public health campaigns reduced infectious disease. Space exploration, television, and home appliances reshaped the imagination of what was possible.
Yet many backward practices persisted. Smoking filled offices, homes, and airplanes. Workplaces demanded long hours with little flexibility. Discrimination remained legal in many countries. Environmental damage accelerated, largely ignored in the rush for growth. Factories poured untreated waste into rivers, cities choked under smog, and chemical pesticides spread through soil and water.
The prosperity of the developed world often came at the expense of the Global South. Advanced economies extracted raw materials from poorer nations, kept prices low for imported goods, and used developing regions as sites for cheap labor and hazardous industries. Communities in these countries bore the brunt of resource depletion, unsafe working conditions, and industrial pollution, while the benefits flowed elsewhere.
The era inspires nostalgia for its stability and optimism, yet much of that comfort rested on environmental neglect, structural inequality, and exploitation hidden from view. Its signature cruelty lay in the quiet harms that were tolerated because they were everywhere, profitable, and convenient.
Our Present: The Blind Spots We Refuse to See
We live in a time of astonishing capability. We can speak across continents instantly, cure diseases that once killed millions, and train machines to learn and adapt. Wealth and knowledge circulate at a speed unimaginable to our ancestors.
But our own blind spots are no less real. The richest one percent control a share of resources so vast it distorts the lives of billions. Many among them have wealth greater than the GDP of entire countries. They travel in private jets, own fleets of luxury cars, and live in mansions with more rooms than they can count; symbols of prestige we often celebrate in magazines and on social media. We envy them, follow their lifestyles, and admire their “success.”
Yet future generations may look at this admiration with the same moral shock we now reserve for the slave markets of the past. They may see the hoarding of unimaginable wealth in a world where millions struggle to eat, work in unsafe conditions, or lack clean water as not merely unjust, but grotesque. They may wonder how we could cheer such inequality and call it progress.
Our signature cruelty may be the combination of extreme inequality and invisible control, both dressed in the language of innovation and opportunity.
The Cruelty Yet to Be Named
What will the future see when it looks back at us? Perhaps they will wonder why we tolerated environmental destruction while claiming to value sustainability. Perhaps they will see our surrender of attention and privacy to machines as a deep loss of autonomy. Perhaps they will see the commodification of every aspect of life as a narrowing of the human spirit.
The most troubling thought is that we may not even be able to guess the full list. Many cruelties go unnoticed because they are embedded in what feels normal.
Humility in Our Time
If history teaches anything, it is that moral progress is not automatic. Each generation must search for the injustices it has grown too accustomed to see. That requires humility, because our own moment is not the final form of civilization, but another step in a long and uneven path.
Technology will continue to change our lives, but it is the willingness to question our comforts, our assumptions, and our systems that will decide whether the future remembers us as enlightened or blind. We cannot choose what our descendants will think of us, but we can choose to live as if they are already watching.
And perhaps, decades from now, when nostalgia for our own time blooms, the people remembering it will see both the warmth and the blindness. Just as we look back on the 80s and 90s with mixed feelings; fondness for what was beautiful, and disbelief at what we accepted; they will sift through the memory of our era. We can only hope they will find more to admire than to forgive.
Image by Kim Hunter
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