Happy Monday! Starting this week off with a post from Stephen! Thanks so much, Stephen!!
Disease is, oddly enough, largely a product of civilization. That is not to say that civilization creates disease, but it does certainly aid and abet it’s propagation, transmission and spread amongst the human populations.We would like to think that the developments of civilization provide us with longer lives, greater sanitation, and a healthier existence. We really would like to be able to say that. The problem is that it simply is not true.If you were to take a different perspective on the proliferation of the water ape, I mean humans, and their inclination to live in greater proximity one to another, you will notice that such close proximity generates many unhealthy problems which merely increase the more the population density rises.Humans like to think of themselves as an intelligent, creative, productive, and technically innovative species. On the other hand, most of those inventions and developments of civilization could as easily be viewed as solutions to problems that the creation of civilization itself created in the first place.The real purpose of living in cities, in close proximity to one another, is to facilitate and promote the ease of our existence. It is certainly far less work to farm grain and be subject to the rather predictable cycles of the weather than it is to hunt game for our meals and be less dependent upon the availability of food in the wild and the competition from other people and other predators.Naturally, one of the first problems to develop when people live in communities rather than small family units is the control, disposal, and removal of increasing quantities of bodily wastes. The start of virtually every civilization is the development of some type of sewage and sanitation system from a crude gutter to an enclosed wastewater and treatment system.Failure to account for such crude natural functions leads to outbreaks of diseases such as cholera which can be traced back to the earliest civilizations and continued to be a problem well into the 19th century.Even simpler diseases like colds and flus are passed from person to person, thus naturally the more closely people are packed together, the more readily and quickly such diseases can spread through the civilized communities. While people in rural areas still get sick from such diseases, the disease itself does not have far to spread and quickly burns out running out of new carriers and hosts.However it is not only diseases which plague the civilized man, but the civilized man’s own incivility. Once you start to accumulate “stuff”, i.e. personal possessions, then other people may be inclined to simply take it from you. Ownership begets theft. One must immediately become wary of their fellow man, from thieves in society to invaders from outside the city.The conflicts in history between the nomadic barbarians and the civilized men make up the largest part of our history, it is the very concept of conquest itself. The idea has never left us as that is the very heart of movies like The Magnificent Seven, where a band of bandits plans to raid a village to take their food.Isn’t that the very concept behind our illegal immigration problems now, in America and in Europe, where people from nations which have far less are invading nations with greater wealth to obtain food, clothing, and shelter in a fashion easier than they could create it in their homelands?Whether it is relatively peaceful or violent, the process remains the same, and just imagine how quickly that relative peace could transform to violence if they were denied the free handouts they have been promised.Let’s look at other innovations. Was the wheel created just to transport more stuff from a society which had simply accumulated more stuff? Harvesting of grain is not like hunting a deer, in that all of the grain becomes ripe at the same time, it must be mowed, gathered, transported, threshed, stored, ground, and baked to provide sustenance for the whole year following.This requires the creation of special tools for every stage of production from scythes, carts, flails, mills, and ovens; and that is just the harvesting and doesn’t include the planting and irrigating. All of this technology is not to provide for a longer life but a more stable and certain convenience to sustain a larger population. Or was it the need to sustain the larger urban populations which drove the technologies of agriculture?Many technologies developed to preserve those grains for use throughout the year, such as fermenting those grapes into wine, barley into beer, milk into cheese, and even meats into sausages. What is our modern refrigerator but another technology to preserve food for our convenience?Then other technologies had to deal with the health problems generated by the changes in the people’s diets. Wet weather could cause argot to grow on the rye, or other mold to ruin the grain, so the entire field of medicines, apothecaries, and doctors developed to try to deal with the stomach ailments and other complaints which were often attributed to the changes in the human diet.Tooth brushes and dentistry developed do deal with new modern civilized problems of tooth decay which doesn’t really appear to be markedly present in ancient human skulls as one might expect.When you look at civilization in this way, many of the things we developed as technology are really built around sustaining ever increasing numbers of people, including communications and entertainments. We have developed from the Greek amphitheater to the Roman Colosseum to the televised Nascar races, but the essence remains largely the same.So when humans press together very tightly and compactly, it becomes a situation ripe for the Black Death to sweep across the continent, first Asia then Europe. If you review the histories they note when the plague hit this city or that city; they never really note when the plague came to the small local village. The plague did sometimes hit those small places, but it just wasn’t noteworthy on the grand scale.Disease spreads more easily when people are closely packed together. It is just the nature of a viral or bacterial disease. It can more easily, quickly, and frequently pass from one person to the next the more people are around each other.So comes the latest “pandemic”, or disease spread from population center, i.e. cities, to population center around the world due in large part to our global inter-connectivity which we have largely encouraged for our economic convenience and productivity.Memories of the Black Death or the Spanish Flu come to mind as people are easily whipped up into a panic. People are wearing makeshift masks in the fashion of plague doctors like some magic talisman to ward off the disease despite the scientific evidence showing that it not only is ineffective against infection, but walking around all day with a petri dish on your face actually increases the probability of you getting sick.People are panic stricken to keeping six feet apart from one another tacking on pseudo-scientific jargon of “social distancing” despite there being no evidence to support such ritualistic behavior and no real rational reason to believe it would work. They are putting up plastic barriers to keep an airborne pathogen from naturally following the airflow around those barriers.All this despite the evidence that this pandemic is less fatal or troublesome than many others we have had in the past. There was a time when many more people died every year from common ailments, yet we never took the ridiculous steps of shutting down civilization in order to preserve civilization.Consumption, a.k.a. tuberculosis, and polio alongside cholera, malaria, and dysentery used to be major life threatening diseases which ravaged the populations of the world far more than COVID 19 ever thought, yet life went on pretty much as usual.When you create something like civilization for the convenience of the population, you also accept the risks of disease which comes with that creation of civilization. You don’t destroy all of civilization because of a side effect like a pandemic any more than you would kill a patient who developed a side effect from his medication.
