[LMB] Rise of the Medications was OT: if civilization fell

[Elizabeth Holden]

--- Marna Nightingale <marna at marna.ca> wrote:

> I'd be one of the dead ones too. Which, frankly, I'm okay with. I LIKE 
> civilisation.

Since I was born three months prematurely, and was very, very small, it's likely I would have died
then and there were it not for hospital care in infancy.  Assuming I had been born alive at all.

That aside, I haven't had many alments in my life that were treatable by the modern medical
establishment. A few - tonsilitis once, and, just recently, high blood pressure.  But generally my
ailments have been things that modern medicine can't do much for: scleroderma, candidiasis,
epstein-barr.  Innoculations were good - I never got smallpox or TB or any of those other things
that used to be around and could be again.  Wouldn't be much different in a low-tech society: the
difference being in knowledge, not technology or drugs or threatment. Acupuncture helped me more
than drugs did. If the knowledge remained - I'd be in luck.  Drugs did get me through a bad
depression, but I might have survived and recovered anyway.  There's no way to know.

I can't help feeling that oral transmission of knowedge, or at least, knowledge through words, is
more valuable than having information on computers, or having intact broadcast media.  Because we
lose that when the power fails. In that case, knowing *how* to get the power is irrelevant, if the
sources of power are non-existent or unavailable.

There are different meanings to the word "civilization" and we tend to use it to mean "a high-tech
society" but there are plenty of low-tech civilizations, and have been for several millennia now.
I could probably be reasonably happy in such.  Even productive.  Yes, the barbarians might swarm
over the wall and slaughter or enslave me - depends what scenario we're picturing.  We've seen so
many in fiction, movies, games and TV.

I also believe that we tend to learn what we need to learn, so even if we don't at the moment have
the skills of farmers, hunters, and do-it-from-scratch survivalists, we could and would learn
pretty quickly, and we'd find our individual place in the new society.

namaste,
Elizabeth