Many of us live in the age of human luxury, relative to any of our ancestors. The millionaires aboard the Titanic would have envied most aspects of how a middle class American lives today: our diet, warmth in the winter and coolness in the summer, range of clothing options, health care (despite its many issues)...
I've known this for quite some time, though I can't remember how I came to realize it. Much of our comfort is due to the infrastructure we've built up over generations: some government-run, some public utilities, some privately owned. As John Oliver showed in one of his best pieces almost 10 years ago, infrastructure is not sexy, but it's very necessary. Deb Chachra's book How Infrastructure Works — which awaits me on my to-be-read pile — is another great look at the subject.
Charles Mann, author of 1491, 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet, just published a short essay called We Live Like Royalty and Don't Know It along the same lines. "Every American stands at the end of a continuing, decades-long effort to build and maintain the systems that support our lives," he says.
It's a fraught time to publish such a piece, given the current Musk/Trump demolition derby, which will undermine significant parts of the under-recognized infrastructure Mann refers to. But it's good to know what you're losing, even if you lose it. And motivation to keep it, if it can be kept.
1 comment:
It's true! 100 years ago, even royalty couldn't dream of being as healthy and comfortable as we are. Dentistry! Hot showers! Air conditioning!
As Terry Pratchett said, "You can't make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago "Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world's music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, traveling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don't have to die of dental abscesses and you don't have to do what the squire tells you" they'd think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say "yes."
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