We have described many of the unhygienic practises common to-day as direct results of upsetting Nature’s equilibrium. Others are indirect results. These latter practises may be described as attempts to remedy the evils of the former, the “remedies,” however, being often worse than the diseases. Much of our drugging, some of our wrong food habits and not a little of our immorality are simply crude and unscientific attempts to compensate for disturbances or deviations from a normal life. We wake ourselves up, as it were, with caffein, move our bowels with a cathartic, induce an appetite with a cocktail, seek rest from the day’s fatigue and worries in nicotin, and put ourselves to sleep with an opiate. In these practises we are evidently trying in wrong ways to compensate respectively for insufficient sleep, insufficient peristalsis, indigestion, overfatigue, and insomnia—evils due, as previously explained, to upsetting Nature’s balance, between work, play, rest and sleep.
So also our overeating is largely an unscientific effort to compensate for overconcentration of diet,—that is, an effort to get bulk. Again, too much protein is in large measure due to the need of compensating for rapid eating, for as has been remarked, protein is the one kind of food which can be eaten fast with impunity.
Again, a large part of our moral derelictions is due to an unbalanced life from which amusements are largely omitted. The “bad” boy in the city streets is usually following his instinct for amusement, of which the lack of playgrounds has deprived him. Dissipations of many kinds are explained in a similar way. It is largely because workmen are so often drudges and lack normal recreations that they seek amusement in the concentrated form they find in saloons, gambling places, dives and dance halls.
Finally those economic and social conditions of civilization which have resulted in deferring marriage beyond the best physiological age, lie behind prostitution and its terrible train of consequences including the venereal diseases.
The worst of it is that these wrong remedies, instead of helping, aggravate the disease. They become part of a vicious circle, which continues in an endless round.
Shortened Human Life
The combined effects of all the unhygienic modes of living are undoubtedly greatly to shorten human life. Most other mammals live about five times the growing period. In man, this would mean that the normal life-span should be about a century and a quarter, an age which is now reached only in one case out of millions.
No Return to Nature
Yet it would be foolish, even if it were possible, to attempt a complete “return to Nature” by abolishing all the ways and conventions of civilization. This would be throwing away our social inheritance and returning to barbarism. We must go forward, not backward. Just as the cure for the evils of Democracy is said to be more Democracy; so the cure for the evils of civilization must be more civilization. The equilibrium of Nature having been upset by civilization, science, one of the great products of civilization, must now work out the remedies. Just as the waste of the soil which civilization has brought is to be compensated by that great product of civilization, scientific agriculture, so the waste of vital resources is to be compensated by scientific hygiene. The saving of civilization depends on following not those who repudiate it, like Thoreau, but those who make use of it, like Pasteur. What the world needs is not to abolish houses, but to ventilate them; not to go naked, but to devise better clothes, which have all the advantages and none of the disadvantages of those we now wear; not to return to the diet of the anthropoid apes, but to remodel that which we have; not to give up chairs, but to improve the form of chairs; not to abandon reading, but to employ corrective eyeglasses and clear printing; not to abrogate division of labor, but to shorten the hours of labor and provide wholesome recreations and special compensating advantages when needed. When, in future centuries, these come to be reckoned among the great triumphs of civilization, we may expect human life to be longer and perhaps stronger than in any primitive state of Nature, just as where modern scientific forestry has been applied we find longer lived and better trees than ever grew in Nature’s jungles.