I don't think this is factually accurate. What it really boils down is a question of scale of societies.

Most of us humans inherently value each other. There are exceptions, and small communities can get nasty. But for the most part, small human communities tend to be supportive and valuing each other.

This really only stops being the case when you get large-scale societies that allow humans to view others through an overly abstract lens. Combine that with an unchecked accumulation of power, and you have the potential for those in power to view the rest as without value.

The concept of fundamental human rights is certainly new, but our notion of intrinsic human value (and intrinsic value of other life and things) arises from our empathy, which at least in its degree is perhaps our most important defining trait as a species. (Our empathy may have been a prerequisite for the emergence of our intelligence.)

Conflating the two is why some people have trouble understanding why religions like Buddhism and Christianity seemed to tolerate so much inequality and violence; or more generally just assumed people writ large were historically more callous and uncaring than today.

Arguably one of the downsides, though, to a focus on rights vs intrinsic value is that rights are typically couched in materialist terms. Most of the time that's probably for the better, but sometimes maybe not.

It's telling how blithely you're missing the point of what the pope(s) mean by human value. Their intended meaning is that far gone from modern consciousness, even among people who meant to champion some kind of human value themselves.

They're not talking about the economic value of humans or even the psychological value of humans as subjects with experiences and a right to liberty or care or something. The idea they're trying to recall and reinvigorate is a sense of human value that transcends that temporal, material noise altogether and that is truly universal. It's the human value that welcomed slaves, prostitutes, wretches, merchants and kings as peers in something grander than economy or state or lineage or tribe or creed.

Now, you can make a well-developed case that that's hogwash and that the human value that matters is the one that alleviates suffering or grants liberty or even the one that grants material reward for some virtue or bloodline or whatever, but that's not what these guys are talking about. They mean a human nature that is always there and always worthy, just as much when it's experiencing temporal poverty/suffering/abuse as when it's basking in temporal wealth/success/freedom.

The idea is that Christian or not, Catholic or not, it does good for everyone to think of human value that way and the critique -- for a long time now -- is that for all the flash and glimmer of technology and its material benefits, it sometimes makes it very very easy to forget.

People really should stop making up history from childrens books. People were valuing people to various degrees and tool seriously the human value question in every single period we have records from.

And varrying degrees apply to post-industrial too - your human value did not meant much in very much industrial third reich fans hands.

If my definition of 'value' was something that was totally contingent on both post-industrial society and an ultracapitalist approach to production, and it made me deduce that human being's lives over thousands of years or in other societies were worth "nothing", I think I would interpret this as a 'reductio-ad-absurdum'. That is, by deducing an absurd conclusion from the premise, that makes a strong argument that my definition of 'value' must be so narrow as to be effectively broken. I would respond by looking for a different, more wide definition of value, among the various ones that have been proposed.

Serfs were of value to the lord, and they were usually not treated that badly compared to many workplaces today.

I also wonder if it’s just harder to rule a much larger population in the modern world than in those times. Any jackass can show up and say that he was chosen to lead by some higher power. But you must still convince enough people that that is the case or at least have a military large enough that you can control.