THE THIRD WAVE
In terms of health, one need only read The Age of Agony by Guy Williams or Death, Disease and Famine in Pre-lndustrial England by L. A. Clarkson to counteract those who glorify First Wave civilization at the expense of Second. Christina Larner, in a review of these books, states, “The work of social historians and demographers has highlighted the overwhelming presence of disease, pain and death in the open countryside as well as the noxious towns. Life expectancy was low: about 40 years in the 16th century, reduced to the mid-thirties in the epidemic-ridden 17th century, and rising to the early forties in the 18th. … It was rare for married couples to have long years together … all children were at hazard.” However justly we may criticize today’s crisis-ridden, misdirected health systems, it is worth recalling that before the industrial revolution official medicine was deadly, emphasizing bloodletting and surgery without anesthesia.
The major causes of death were plague, typhus, influenza, dysentery, smallpox, and tuberculosis. “It is often observed by the sages,” Larner writes dryly, “that we have merely replaced these by a different set of killers, but these do leave us till a little later. Pre-industrial epidemic disease killed the young indiscriminately with the old.”
Moving from health and economics to art and ideology— was industrialism, for all its narrow-minded materialism, any more mentally stultifying than the feudal societies that preceded it? Was the mechanistic mentality, or indust-reality, any less open to new ideas, even heresies, than the medieval church or the monarchies of the past? For all we detest our giant bureaucracies, are they more rigid than the Chinese bureaucracies of centuries ago, or ancient Egyptian hierarchies? And as for art, are the novels and poems and paintings of the past three hundred years in the West any less alive, profound, revealing, or complex than the works of earlier periods or different places?
The dark side, however, is also present. While Second Wave civilization did much to improve the conditions of our “fathers and mothers, it also triggered violent external consequences — unanticipated side effects. Among these was the rampant, perhaps irreparable damage done to the earth’s fragile biosphere. Because of its indust-real bias against
nature, because of its expanding population, its brute technology,
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