The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [105]
Appraising contradictory information about hygiene has become one of the everyday conundrums of modern life. At times, the quest for cleanliness at the end of the century’s first decade echoes Stephen Leacock’s panic-stricken horseman, who mounted his charger and rode off in all directions at once. Some people are attempting to live in laboratory-clean conditions, as far from contact with anyone else’s germs as possible, while others urge a more laissez-faire approach. We are concerned about the environment, but we avoid thinking very much about the gallons of clean hot water we use every day and the toxins in our cleansers that we pour down the drain. Living up to our hygienic standards takes huge amounts of energy, but cleanliness is such a sacred cow that to be told “cut down on your washing” would be even more repugnant than being urged to restrict our driving. In his London shower, the hero of Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday reflects on the everyday extravagance we take for granted and the probability that we won’t be able to sustain it:
When this civilisation falls, when the Romans, whoever they are this time round, have finally left and the new dark ages begin, this will be one of the first luxuries to go. The old folk crouching by their peat fires will tell their disbelieving grandchildren of standing naked midwinter under jet streams of hot clean water, of lozenges of scented soaps and of viscous amber and vermilion liquids they rubbed into their hair to make it glossy and more voluminous than it really was, and of thick white towels as big as togas, waiting on warming racks.
Both dependent on large cultural and natural forces and intensely personal, because it concerns the body, cleanliness is always debatable. The ancient Greeks argued about cold-and hot—water bathing, sixteenth-century Europeans shunned water as much as possible except for the fortunate few who immersed themselves in spa waters, and nineteenth—century peasants (who now look like early believers in the Hygiene Hypothesis) clung to the proverbial powers of dirt as sanitarians tried to mend their ways.
The way a culture approaches and achieves cleanliness always says something interesting about that culture. The French often seem to have a perverse national pride in their own unconcern about cleanliness. As Alain Corbin, the French historian of aroma, describes his compatriots, they enjoy a “somatic culture” that appreciates the strong smells and sensory communications of the human body. Even while the French reformers called for better hygiene, their claim that their people washed less than most Europeans has a whiff of something self-congratulatory. It is as if they were saying, yes, more washing would be good, but our taste for bodies au naturel is another example of our Gallic relish for the earthy and sensual.
How differently the Americans do cleanliness. The middle—class North American has never had less need to wash beyond the wrists and has never scrubbed more obsessively. Horace Miner got the Nacirema’s vanity and fear of disease right. He didn’t dwell on their Puritan beginnings, their extreme individualism and their conviction that they can control every aspect of their lives, but those too mark the American definition of cleanliness. Comparatively new at hedonism, we North Americans are throwing ourselves headlong into our own, peculiar version of it. Unlike the French, we are still leery of our visceral, animal side and prefer to smell like tea or cupcakes.
Little is fundamentally new about cleanliness, and yet its definition shifts constantly. In 2007, as in most of the years since our ancestors pulled up an abrasive plant to scour their teeth or waded into a stream, clean is a moving target. There’s no upward line of progress to be graphed here. By fretting and deliberating for a century and a half, from the end of the eighteenth century to about 1950, agonizing over full immersion versus piecemeal cleaning, over soap or not soap, over almost every aspect of hygiene, we managed to get ourselves back to roughly