The "quest for clean" may be doing more harm than good. That's the story line put forward by an article in the February 16, 2016 edition of The Wall Street Journal, asking whether antibacterial soaps are safe.
As earlier noted, I have been doing some reading in a book by Jean-Pierre Dupuy, an "apocalyptic French philosopher" who is supposedly being taken quite seriously by California Governor Jerry Brown.
I am taking him seriously, too, now that I am deeply into his book, The Mark of the Sacred, and I am pretty sure that Dupuy would agree with me that the passion to kill germs is, at one level, an attempt to reject the living world, the World of Nature, and to make a claim that humans should live independently of Nature, encased and enclosed totally within a world that they themselves construct.
As The Journal article documents, denying the primacy of the World of Nature, including its germs, turns out not to be a good idea!
Image Credit:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/are-antibacterial-soaps-safe-1455592023
What does regulating antibacterial products based on medical science have to do with "denying the primacy of the World of Nature"?
ReplyDeleteThis world-view is morally reprehensible.
Would you say curing a child's strep infection is an attempt to reject the living world?
Is it a passion to kill germs that drives doctors to cure tuberculosis, staff infections, pneumococcal pneumonia, etc?
I don't think so.