The romantic delusion
There seems to be a romantic delusion about the ‘natural’ past. People talk of ‘sustainable’ farming, or creating more wetlands, of rewilding. But the past that people imagine is a painting, not a photograph. They picture the hay wain and forget the hay fever, the ague and the early grave.
Ague, which 19th-century medical texts describe in terms that clearly identify malaria, was endemic in England’s marshes. The Thames estuary was its worst stronghold. Defoe made the point memorably on his 1724 tour of Essex. Marshmen told him they fetched wives from the uplands, the women sickened and died within months, and the men simply went back for another; one might go through fifteen or more. Romney Marsh had such a reputation that Elizabeth I reportedly refused to cross it on her way to Dover. Drainage and cattle drove it out. One study attributes at least a fifth of the decline to rising cattle numbers and shrinking wetland acreage.
Some urge us to drink raw milk and eat more ‘natural’ food. Unpasteurized milk once spread bovine TB widely. Pasteurization was among the great quiet triumphs of public health.
Those who advocate natural childbirth and natural immunity should note that maternal and infant deaths were routine. The ‘natural’ route to immunity was surviving smallpox, measles or diphtheria, which many did not.
There is a myth built around the noble savage, the belief that pre-modern people lived in harmony with nature. Early humans helped drive megafauna to extinction and cleared forests with fire.
Ah, the Maypole and Merrie England. The village green and the cottage garden, minus the cesspit, the typhus, the poor law and the child labour. Life expectancy at birth in the eighteenth century sat in the thirties, dragged down by infant deaths.
In his book “Progress,” Johan Norberg vividly describes the life that a ten-year-old girl could expect at the time.
“Wherever she had been born, she could not have expected to live longer than around thirty years. She would have had five to seven siblings, and she would already have seen at least one or two of them die. The chance that her mother would survive childbirth was smaller than the chance that the present generation will meet their grandparents.
She would have been brought up under conditions we consider unbearable. Her family would not have had access to clean water or a toilet. Chances are that they did not even have a latrine; they would have used a ditch or gone behind a tree. Her surroundings would have been littered with garbage and faeces, contaminating water sources and devastating lives. Her parents would live in constant fear that she would be taken away by tuberculosis, cholera, smallpox or measles or starvation.
This little girl would have been stunted, skinny and short, since she lived in a world of chronic undernourishment and recurring famine, where people did not get the energy to grow and function properly. This would also have halted her brain's proper development. She would not receive any schooling, and would never learn to read and write.”
Like Norberg, I take the view that progress is the prize, not the problem. Nature is not kind. It is merely indifferent, and the countryside only became charming once we had made it safe to stand in. We should look at the spectacle of the past dispassionately, rather than through rose-tinted spectacles.
Madesn Pirie