Freed to be sloppy
In pre-industrial ages and early industrial ages the upper class of people, the wealthy and noble and educated, were much cleaner and kempt in their ways—they overdressed, over-covered their skin with ointments, and shunned manual labor and other things. Between them and the laborers and peasants of the lower classes was a distance not just socially but hygienicly, that cannot be over-exaggerated. It is because of this distance that the word “dogs” could take on the connotations of debasement and dirt that for the Elizabethan educated it did take on. And for this reason the common peasant, and gypsy, could be looked upon as coarse and dirt-ridden, even morally corrupt, just as they were looked upon. So that a member of the noble class wouldn’t dare consider as a possibility mean labor with his hands. Perhaps further, this attitude can give us a clue as to how educated men of the gentry could say “all men” deserve this or that political or social right, and yet not mean all men, but just gentlemen.
Today with our democracization of the masses of common people, and our admitting them to the group of “all men”, we have generally considered ourselves to have taken on the hygienic concern and cleanliness of the old upper class of people, and for evidence of this we point to our long life span and relative freedom from plagues and at our improved medical care—things which presumably the common sort of men in those old days never had, but which the educated and genry at least to some extent did.
But all of these indications of good hygiene are because of the advance of technology and science only, because of our having plenty to eat, and clean convenient machines to disinfect our dishes and our clothes and our air, and because we have made advances in medicine that make wounds and injuries much less dangerous things to incur. It is not because the masses of people have taken on the careful hygienic habits of the old elite: for we have done nothing of the kind. Rather, science and technology have freed us to be sloppy and careless. We havehad scientific revolutions in the making of cloth, in the making of building and floor materials, in the making of comfortably termperatured air, and (this is an important and) a revolution in what jobs, what types of work, most men need do. So that we have been freed to be sloppy. In fact, so much so that we live longer and have fewer diseases (maybe) than the old nobility. But certainly our hygienic habits are much more akin to the “debased” habits of the old serfs and peasantry, than the strict, careful hygienic order of the ruling classes.
We have been freed to be sloppy and debased.
