I was struck with this thought while working on the material I presented a couple of weekends ago at a Christian women’s retreat. My actual topic was about the different choices we make about the food we eat, which I placed in the following hierarchy:
| Level 1: Choices controlled by actual health conditions: true food allergies, celiac disease, diabetes, etc. |
| Level 2: Choices controlled by conscience or conviction: vegetarianism because of discomfort with the suffering of the animals killed for meat, keeping kosher either because of personal religious beliefs or because of a desire to maintain connections with family members who hold those beliefs, etc. |
| Level 3: Choices controlled by preference or by belief in the efficacy of a certain diet or lifestyle, often based on faulty information and often harking back to an idealized vision of the past. |
Level #3 is where I spent most of my time, and I thought it was a very important topic but perhaps one that would get me into some hot water if I stepped on too many toes. As it was, that session was up against a very popular one being led by the main speakers at the retreat and I had only a handful of attendees. (My morning session on the Four Tendencies was so full that they had to put up extra chairs.) I want to do more work on that topic and perhaps present the material via video or podcast; I haven’t decided yet on the format.
Here are some preliminary thoughts, though, growing out of that third level:
As the title of the post says, we don’t appreciate what we don’t see. We don’t walk down the sidewalk and think as we pass people, ‘That person could have died of dysentery or cholera from contaminated water if he’d lived 150 years ago,’ or ‘That woman could have died in childbirth if she’d lived 150 years ago,’ or ‘That little boy could be in an iron lung because of polio if he’d lived even 75 years ago.’ We don’t remind ourselves as we carefully wash, treat with antibacterial ointment (or “oinkment,” as my son used to say) and bandage a cut or scrape, ‘I could have died from this small wound 150 years ago if it had gotten infected.’ We assume that the meat we buy at the grocery store is safe to eat; that’s not always true, and not even always true about lettuce. But modern food safety standards have significantly lowered illness or death arising from foodborne pathogens, although you’d never know that from the news coverage that accompanies even the smallest outbreaks. (Not that even one case of E. coli or salmonella infection is acceptable, but we do need to keep things in perspective. If it were my daughter who landed in the hospital for over a week because of tainted lettuce I’d be hopping mad, believe me! Just as if it were my child who developed polio from the polio vaccine itself I’d be up for suing the pants off the vaccine manufacturer. But take a step back–very hard to do if someone you love is part of a statistic–and you see that present-day risks of disease and death are greatly reduced from what they used to be, although nothing is ever completely risk-free.)
So much more could be said on the topic of how we take modern scientific advancements for granted. I knew that the memory of having to deal with the Great Plumbing Disaster would fade quickly, and it has. Does anyone in the US outside of Flint, Michigan give thanks for the clean water that comes out of the tap? Not really. (Some refuse to believe that it is clean, or safe, but that’s a different story.) Do we ever look at the walls that surround us and remind ourselves that we’re not living in a refugee camp with only a tent for shelter and the possessions we were able to carry as we fled ethnic cleansing? Absolutely not. (I was watching a segment on the PBS Newshour just last night about that very tragedy, sitting in comfort on a beautiful leather chair with a purring cat on my lap, listening to an interview with a woman whose husband was shot right in front of her. Also included was an interview with the mother of Stephon Clark, the young man shot in his grandparents’ back yard last week; it was one of the most painful things I’ve ever witnessed. There’s a lot to unpack in that story; I’m just talking about the grief of the mother. I could have lost my own son to cancer several years ago, so the story was particularly moving to me.)
That very son is fond of saying that comparisons are useless, since you can always find someone who’s worse off than you and someone who’s better off. He’s sort of right (much as I hate to admit it), but he’s not completely right. It never hurts to give yourself a sharp jab in the ribs (kind of hard to do), to say ‘I live in the most fortunate time in history. There has never been a better time to be alive.’ It’s true, folks. Really, it is.
Much, much more to come on this topic, including the fabulous new book by Jonah Goldberg which I am so impressed with that I don’t know where to look!
(I know I went crazy with links in this post, but you can always ignore them.)