Clean

I was listening to a radio programme the other day that was talking about the western worlds obsession with cleanliness and discussing how this is a surprisingly modern trait of the human race. For thousands of years we have generally been a filthy bunch. It has only been in the last couple of decades that baths and showers have become the everyday ritual that they are considered now. I can remember having to heat water on the stove in order to have a weekly bath and that was only in the early 80’s. Today however we have become a nation, neigh a whole hemisphere of obsessive compulsives. We take two or three showers per day, and understand that as being quite natural.

This isn’t intended to be knocking the desire we have to be clean, there are fewer simpler pleasures than spending a little time getting ourselves clean. We all have our own personal ritual we go through it becomes a few moments of the day when we can relax and forget the world for a time. However I do wonder whether this desire is borne from an innate biological need to be clean or is it due to some other external influence.  Surely if it was a base desire we wouldn’t have been the filthy creatures that history has proved we have been.

I guess my question here is a curiosity to know where this has come from, in twenty years how have we managed a twenty fold increase in how often we feel the need to bath. Is it simply the constant availability of hot water twinned with the enjoyment we feel from being clean. I think that a large part of it is to do with that aspect of, but there is also the social pressure of needing to be constantly immaculate. If I went into work this morning and declared that I hadn’t bathed that morning would the reaction be that much different than if I had gone into work proclaiming that I had the plague.

The thing I am curious about is how necessary our new found cleanliness is, if we all took to being a slightly less bathed species would we suddenly start contracting the worst of every virus and bacteria that we came into contact with. It is true that our life expectancy has massively improved over the last century is this due to our better understanding of the human body, or is it true that we have bathed ourselves to health? 

There has grown a huge business out of this desire I am unsure of what the price tag would be on value of the associated cleaning market, once all of the products were included from cloth cleaning to toothpaste but I would guess it measured in tens, if not, hundreds of billions. The problem is that once we have any market worth that sort of money it attracts the attention of very clever business people. It is reasonably obvious business sense that to make more money from a product you either need to sell it to more people, or make people use more of it.

From this simple premise it is easy to see how our logic was used against us. Science tells us the dangers that lurk in the unseen for very obvious scientific reason we all understand the need for a surgeon to scrub up before reaching for a scalpel. From this a very treacherous logic is conceived. We say that if a doctor needs to take such meticulous care over being clean then we should mark that as the gold standard to which we should be living our lives.

However the human body has evolved to fend off most of the microorganisms that would conspire to destroy it. All of the entry points in the human body are very well guarded and when something does get through those defences we have an immune system that is exceptionally we versed at removing foreign attackers. The reason a surgeon needs to scrub up is because they are bypassing so many of the body’s defences.

This is where the treachery comes into play we are so obsessed with keeping the unseen from harming us, that our body’s immune system isn’t getting the practise it needs to keep it efficient. The immune system is a muscle that needs to be flexed in order to stop it atrophying and because we are so clean it doesn’t get to work out very often so when a particularly nasty and virulent bug comes along our immune system lacks the skill and the stamina to fight it. Unfortunately it is now getting even worse than that. Whereas previously we simply used soap and water to wash off and clinging bacteria, now we use antibacterial products which leave a chemical residue behind to wage biological warfare on them. While this stuff used to kill any bacteria it came into contact with, the bacteria is now getting wise and learning to cohabit in these toxic micro-landscapes. When these superbugs get into our systems modern medicine doesn’t do a lot for us because we’ve made them immune to it.

I also wonder what the environmental costs of all of these products are. I wonder how many tonnes of chemicals, carbon dioxide and all of those other nasty things we’re told about are used in the manufacture of the goods consumed by the average person when keeping themselves clean. I’ve no idea what the process is for making washing up liquid, for instance, but I would guess it is made in factories that produces an amount of waste products.

I wonder if it would be such a hardship if we were to keep ourselves slightly less clean, would it be such a bad thing to shower half as much as we currently do. To not automatically throw the clothes we take off into the washing machine, but instead see if they could handle another round of wearing before being washed.

Maybe if we could start to realise that we don’t actually need to be so meticulously clean, and realise that in fact we are doing ourselves, and our a future generations, a great deal of harm by breeding new bacteria that can no longer be killed by a simple course of antibiotics and simultaneously weakening our immune systems so that it can’t fight off these superbugs either. If we could realise that a little dirt is the normal operating environment for the human body. That it is required to keep our immune systems working at full capacity. If we could realise these things and stop believing everything we are told by advertisers maybe we can start changing the world we live in. If we could stop believing everything we are told by advertisers and instead started thinking for ourselves then who knows what other benefits we might discover.

What I am ultimately saying is simply that we should take all things into consideration before we do something. If you decide that your own personal values outweigh your personal gain from missing the occasional shower then don’t change that aspect of your life. The only thing I am advocating is making a personal decision based on your understanding of the facts and where you aren’t just being a sheep and doing things because the TV told you to.