'A Far More Agreeable Venture'

My youngest son called on Sunday to wish me a happy birthday. He’s in Peru with the Peace Corps, living with a family near Lima. After talking with me he planned to do his laundry, washing his clothes by hand and hanging them outside on a makeshift line, a process that takes about two and a half hours. Few lower-middle-class Peruvians have washing machines and dryers. Earlier, David had sent me a photo of what looked like a long spiral of pasta in a bottle of yellow liquid. It was a parasitic worm excreted by another volunteer and preserved in formaldehyde. The young woman had probably consumed unwashed produce. Tap water is unsafe. Volunteers learn to drink only bottled water, brewed tea or alcohol. Quotidian acts done effortlessly in the U.S.A. often require more planning and an extra step or two to accomplish in Latin America. David is young, healthy, strong, appreciative of his life in Peru and grateful for what he has here in the States. He is a good reminder: we’re damned privileged. 

“[I]f there is anything certain in history it is the fact that the average man of today finds life a far more agreeable adventure than the average man of any other age. He works less and he has more pleasure. He lives longer, and he is happier and cleaner and more of a man while he lives.”

 

That’s H.L. Mencken, writing on this date, October 27, in 1910. Mencken is refuting what he calls “empty pessimism.” One-hundred fifteen years ago, Mencken is reminding us how good we have it as Americans. In fact, we’ve never had it so good. Critics of his day complained that Americans were being exhausted by the pace and intensity of life. He writes:

 

“No fallacy, indeed, is in better credit at the moment than the fallacy that human life is growing more fatiguing every year. Upon it depends all of the latter-day nonsense about neurasthenia, hysteria, nervous prostration and other such terrible diseases. It is assumed, as a matter of course, that civilization is reducing the human race to a frazzle, and there are even persons who advocate a frank return to barbarism as the only means of preventing the extinction of the genus [H]omo.”

 

We still hear such rubbish. “All nervous disorders, great and little,” Mencken writes, “are far less prevalent today than they ever were before. Hysteria, once an almost universal plague, is now rare. All save a few maladies are decreasing rapidly. The death rate is falling every year. The average man of today lives fully five years longer than the average man of but two generations ago.”

Plenty of neurotics and solipsists out there, but most suffer from disorders of their own choosing. Mencken goes on:  

 

“But men have ceased to read, to meditate, to live the larger life. Balderdash! The common man of the eighteenth century didn’t read Homer and Milton. Instead, he read the newsletters on weekdays and Baxter’s Saint’s Rest on Sunday.”