Something similar plays out with "sweatshop labor" these days. People talk about the abuses, but there's often the same flow of people from the countryside lining up for the openings.
That's not to say that stopping stupid abuses and unsafe conditions isn't important, it's just important to keep in mind how bad things often were. Simply having a job with a salary that guaranteed you wouldn't starve was a huge improvement for some people.
Of course farmers get sick, but they don't get the diseases created by industry. There are a great many respiratory conditions and cancers that don't occur naturally.
the life expectancy in Liverpool and some other parts of England during the peak of industrialisation fell to 25 years, the average height fell by almost 10cm, so actually it was pretty bad and it took decades for the situation to improve. I would have very much preferred to be a self-sufficient farmer during that time. Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens goes through a pretty big amount of data that shows that traditional communities and even hunter-gatherers lived much better and longer lifes than people that had to endure the human meatgrinder that was industrialisation.
https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-livin...
Not being Nicolas Cage, I was not. However, there are many, many countries today who are similar to 19th century UK/US. Would you like to go to rural China and compare the peasant subsistence farming still happening there with urban China and its sweatshops?
> suffering is suffering.
Sure. People suffered. They suffered horribly as peasant farmers living on less than $2/day, or they suffered as laborers making possibly a bit more. Work was universally hard.
It's possible (likely) that future people will see what we went through - disease, hunger, unemployment, bad management, personal suffering/alienation and a host of other problems - and say literally the same thing about us. But although I think all of us can think of a few tweaks at the margins, we'd all utterly fail fully to replace the status quo most people accept, many try to change, a few succeed at changing and a precious few improve.
We should give the past the same courtesy we expect from future generations. And we should be willing to make some of the sacrifices today to ensure that future generations will endure. (And this includes things like ensuring the effects of climate change or nuclear weapons don't wipe us out.) The past is and forever shall be a foreign country.
Yes, and that's why the labor movement is important (I'd like it to be much stronger than it is still today). Is your view that neither the Industrial Revolution nor the labor movement should have happened?
This view of history as immutable, with the ends always meeting the means is the sort of thinking that I believe is holding us back as a society. Researchers are still studying the impact that the industrial revolution had on not just the environment, but also the mental health of the descendants of the working class in Europe: https://hbr.org/2018/03/research-the-industrial-revolution-l....
We can and should do better.