I’m talking about rural Mexico up through the 1960s, within the living memory of elderly people (with some of the features I mentioned persisting today or only recently changing). The US South was like this at least through the first few decades the 20th century (after WWII the US Federal government made a tremendous effort to bring jobs and infrastructure to underdeveloped parts of the country), as were many parts of Europe. Some places around the world still look largely like my description.
People quickly forget many of the hardships their own great grandparents faced.
Source: my parents are anthropologists and I spent a substantial amount of time as a child in the 1990s visiting an indigenous peasant village, sleeping in a dirt-floored hut with a hearth fire nearby, with no electricity and water carried on people’s heads from half a mile away, high infant mortality, belief that diseases are caused by witches (vs. germs), etc.
The past was fairly horrible, of course, but we've definitely lost elements of it which were good. For example, commerce where both parties know and care about each other on some level like you might find in a farmers market or similar. Remnants still exist, but the mass market replacement, supermarkets, are missing a lot that was once better in the past. We've certainly vastly exceeded any previous material lifestyle, I don't feel like we've exceeded a lot of the cultural aspects of the past. Not, of course, that I want a return to conservative rural culture or something, but there's definitely something uniquely atomised about modern life in the West.
I really enjoy real markets. They can be found in many parts of the world including in developed metropolises, and still existed in many places in the USA within living memory.
Their illegalization and displacement by supermarkets has been at least partly a deliberate political choice, and I don’t think it’s an inevitable part of modern life.
(Working as a vendor in a market stall is not necessarily a great career though.)
> For example, commerce where both parties know and care about each other on some level like you might find in a farmers market or similar.
There are farmers market around my area and my impression is that, if anything, people selling there can be more dishonest than the big chain stores - i.e. they will try selling a batch of bad apples, because they're not wealthy and they just need the money. Whereas big chains have quality standards and will just throw away bad food.
I think that's because at a farmers market you're still trading with somebody completely foreign to you. Pre-industrial societies were smaller, and based around tighter knit communities. Much harder to rip somebody off if they live 3 houses down and look after your kids twice a week, compared to some random person off the street.
@Theorentis said "a few hundred years ago", not "up until WWII".
I mean, @Theorentis is correct, in a way, about what's good about less-industrialized societies. Though it was more true of medieval serfs and classical societies than it was of "a few hundred years ago". But also @jacobulus is correct about the down-sides.
And when you say "pre-WWII", that makes me think of 1850-1950, which I suggest is, overall, literally worst-of-both-worlds. There's virtually no decent medicine until 1928, but industrialization and capitalism are in full jackbooted swing. You get all the psycho-social disadvantages of modernity, with virtually none of the benefits.
I did indeed have medieval serfs and particular feudal society in mind in my comment, and meant 500-600 years ago by "a few". I probbaly should have said "several".
The feudal system is often given a bad wrap, but after reading "The Servile State" (a critique of modern capitalism) I actually think we have much to learn from it that we have lost.
The feudal system (summary: rule by gangs of heavily armed thugs who force their local peasants to work by threatening to kill them otherwise, and take whatever liberties with them they like, including theft, kidnapping, rape, murder, ...) is given a “bad rap” because is was and is horrendously exploitative, leading to very bad outcomes for nearly everyone.
It persisted because there was not sufficient economic surplus or a sufficiently broad distribution of economic/social power to break the control of the armed thugs running things, except sometimes by other groups of armed thugs.
