The Raw and the Cooked

I plead guilty to being one of those people who can fall into romanticizing an imagined “earlier time.” And I don’t think it is entirely crazy (although it may be entirely fruitless)– the rapaciousness of our technology does seem to have the potential to make the earth unliveable; the balance between the constructed human environment and nature does seem to be off; the scale of killing in the conflicts of colonialism and the twentieth century is truly monumental and unheard of in the past; consumerism does seem rather poor at giving meaning to life – etc. But one thing being here reminds you of over and over again: Life without the health and safety measures we have developed over the course of the past few thousand years is no picnic. The skin infections, the funguses, the blindness, the withered limbs, the burns that lead to contracted, barely useable legs, the pus-y abscesses, the insect-borne diseases, the diarrhea, the inability to drink water without risking getting sick – man, it is hard. It’s possible that subsistence life prior to contact with a market economy was a little easier (population density was smaller, nutrition better, and meaning-systems presumably more intact), but I doubt it made a lot of difference, regarding this sort of thing. It reminds me of the impression of peasant life you get from late 19^th- and early 20^th-century Russian writers – destitution, squalor, and few if any options. Very often, I can’t tell if the woman sitting with a child is his mother or grandmother – she seems to be the mother, but she looks so old. The wear and tear of life that leads to that – it’s not something that anyone reading this is likely to have even tasted.

Although…a little voice in my head points out that some (certainly not all!) of the above reaction probably has to do with a good old American fear of – dirt. What do you think – if you’ve never had a daily shower, do you miss having a daily shower? If you’ve never had a house with a door that keeps the dust out, do you mind having dust in your house? Certain issues are objective (do you have the resources to keep a wound clean? Can you keep domestic animals out of your water source? Is your air clean enough that you don't get serial respiratory infections?). But beyond that – is there anything objectively unpleasant or unhealthy about not being able to keep things to the cleanliness standard of an American suburb? Is distaste for dirt more akin to a habit? I honestly don’t know. I can tell, however, from the frequency with which I reach for words like “squalor,” and from my discomfort with the judgment such words imply, that at least part of my sense of how hard life is here comes from a squeamishness about “uncleanness.” Which may largely be beside the point (?).

Okay – next time I'll get to the promised musings on the people I'm meeting!