A Dead Cow in the Ganges

Princess-and-the-Pea Syndrome as modern hypersensitivity

[My apologies for the lack of posting for a few months. This was going to be a post for early September, after I came back from summer vacation, and was intended to tie in with the theme of ‘holiday experiences’. But then the fallout from a family crisis put all writing activity in hiatus.]

My late mother had a best friend who had gone to India on one of those guided study tours - arts, history, culture (but not the popular kind) - so beloved of a certain type of middle-aged, middle-class European. In fact, Germany seems to take the lead in these sorts of expensive study tours, as the sheer number of German tour groups at any UNESCO World Heritage Site are witness to, and it so happens this friend of my mother's was indeed a German lady. The incident occurred some 15 or so years ago, but for some reason I have been thinking about it recently. I was visiting my mum's house not long after this lady had returned home, and did the polite thing of asking my mum how her good friend had enjoyed her trip. What followed was not a travelogue of the Punjabi scenery, the splendours of Keralan temples, the majesty of Rajasthan palaces, the culinary delights, or even the orientalist 'exoticism'. No, the first thing my mother's friend told her on the phone debrief, and the first thing then relayed to me, was how terrible the trip had been, how traumatically awful, due to one unique incidence which cancelled out every single last one of the positive experiences. And that was the sight of a dead cow floating in the Ganges.

Apparently the lady in question had decided to take an evening stroll after dinner at the nice four-star hotel which was of course de rigueur for this kind of guided tour. Maybe the incident occurred in Varanasi, which would have been on the itinerary, maybe elsewhere in another city along the Ganges. It does not matter, but on the riverbank of the Ganges it was. Maybe the lady had a slight esoteric bent, and hence a mythic expectation of the fabled Ganges, but certainly the sunset over the river would provide an excellent photo opportunity. All of that was instantly shattered when the lady spotted the carcass of a dead cow, all four legs sticking up in the air, drifting impertinently downriver. How dare the photo moment be ruined by the intrusion of such a shocking sight! How lackadaisical and thoughtless of the locals not to remove such an offensive thing! Suddenly, in that one singular instant, the dead cow stood for all that was wrong with India and the study trip: the dirt, the smells, the poverty, the unhygienic conditions, the sickness, the fatalistic attitude to death. So unEuropean, uncivilised, uncaring even. From the second-hand narration I was given I gathered there was even a smidgeon of sheer and utter disbelief and incomprehension that no one else seemed to notice, which made the matter even worse. And to think that people bathe and wash in, never mind drink from this river!

As my mum relayed the story of her friend's trip to me I could tell that my mum, too, felt sympathy and hence nausea and incomprehension at the dead cow episode. I tried to rationalise things, by citing a piece of ecologic evidence, namely that most sizeable rivers are pretty much self-cleaning every 200 metres or so, and therefore a dead cow, or any other foreign - but natural - material was not really polluting and so nothing to be particularly concerned about. No, mum was having none of it. The fact that the really nasty pollutants and truly dangerous things dumped in rivers, like chemical spills, are often completely invisible while things that look dreadful but are biologically harmless, because over millions of years nature evolved and refined the interaction of organic matter, was a point that mum and her friend would just not have comprehended. It was purely the sight of the dead cow that trumped all rational analysis of the scientific evidence.

I have related this episode at length because the events of the past three years have, for obvious reasons, made me ponder a lot about how our modern Europeanised societies could react the way they did. Plenty is now being written, from all sides of the debate, about the harms versus the supposed benefits of lockdowns, masking, vaccine mandates and other measures. There is a kind of Big Stocktake going on. With my interests being more of the historical bent I am thinking about how other cultures might have reacted prior to the dominance of the Western and European mindset.

Or let me rephrase this as a question: Is there something particular to the modern European mindset that made the pandemic reactions possible? Again, other people, here on Substack and elsewhere, are doing great work in looking at the political, pharmaceutical, medical and administrative-managerial factors that contributed to the more-or-less worldwide shutdowns and other measures. Psychological and sociological analyses of the Covid Moment are, to the best of my knowledge, also looking at things from a contemporary perspective, in other words from the standpoint of how things are now, and if reflecting on how we got here, then doing so by comparisons that stretch back at most a decade or so. These are important pieces of work going on, and valuable insights can be gained. My favourite one is the supposition that without the technological developments we have seen in just the past ten years, the lockdowns would not have been possible because without a reasonable number of people having access to laptops, smartphones and sufficient broadband bandwidth to run Zoom the entire Work from Home episode would not have been possible. Even as recently as 2009, when the WHO last declared a 'pandemic', none of the Covid measures would have been feasible. So, sure, technology is a massively important factor. But as a historian I always wonder if what we take for granted now, what we think is 'normal' now, what we consider 'right' or 'true' or even 'important' is comparable with past societies. Basically, I have been for a long time interested in the history of mentalities.

And this is where the dead cow story comes in. As a snapshot of a certain mentality, the dead cow in the Ganges can also be read not just as a family anecdote, but an historical event subject to historical analysis in the same way, say, a medieval text about the ravages of the plague in a fourteenth-century town can be read and analysed in such a way that the single episode can shed light on social mores and dominant mentalities of a given culture as a whole.

What then does the dead cow in the Ganges exemplify?

First and foremost, the dead cow was a visual signifier. It was the sight of it that prompted my mum's friend to react the way she did. For all I know, and for all she knew, there could have been dozens of dead cows in the Ganges at that time, but it was only this particular dead animal that was visually perceived that aroused such a reaction. Similarly, it was the visualisation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus via 'tests' (PCR and lateral flow) that made this particular virus 'real' to ordinary people; and similarly to the hypothesised dead cows there actually were, not just 'could have been', dozens of equally (not-so-)lethal viruses merrily circulating around the globe. We were just not told about them, or if we were told, as in the example of the ubiquitous influenza viridae, we were told they had suddenly become unimportant, irrelevant, or in the case of 'flu had simply and inexplicably vanished. SARS-CoV-2 became our dead cow, and a holy one at that. All attention was on this one thing (dead cow or virus respectively), to the detriment of everything else going on around, be that the full experience of a trip to India or the knock-on effects and fallout from the measures taken in pandemic panic.

Secondly, the nauseous reaction to the dead cow highlights a particularly modern, middle-class mentality: the extreme aversion to all things considered 'dirty'. Cleanliness is next to godliness, after all, according to the (in)famous Puritan mindset. The lumpenproletarian underclass are the Great Unwashed masses, spreading disease - both actual and moral. Hygiene and moraline go hand-in-hand. The ritual impurity of the disease-spreading 'unvaccinated' was more often than not ascribed to their lack of hygienic awareness, in turn due to their lack of education; the superiority of middle-class moral high-riders manifested itself in media portrayals of the vaccine-refuseniks not as sceptics who questioned things, but as embodiment of unwashed, recalcitrant ignorance. (The fact that surveys and studies showed that it was actually both the very uneducated and the very highly educated who questioned things most, and those in the middle who were most likely to follow orders, seems to have slipped by our good middle-classes.)

The obsequious application of hand sanitiser that I witnessed daily at the entry to stores and other public spaces was a good indicator of the devout, or not, adherence to the Covidian Credo: the more, longer and deliberately the hands were scrubbed, the greater the absolution of the adherents, since in their purified state they could not possibly be blamed for any spread. The fact that most these potions and lotions were labelled 'antibacterial' and hence completely useless against viruses did not seem to bother the devout one iota. Dirt is bad, and hands carry dirt, so hands must be scrubbed - regardless of how logical or effective. Similarly, as I wrote above, the dead cow was a natural pollutant, whose impact on a big river like the Ganges was so minimal that to describe it as a pollutant is barely justifiable. But since other more dangerous pollutants were below the radar because invisible, they did not matter to my mum's sensitive lady friend.

And thirdly, here with 'sensitive' we have the final key word. The cosseted, pampered, materially secure, average denizen of the Western middle classes is so far removed from the gritty, visceral, dare I say it 'dirty' elements of life and death, as to be living in a kind of virtual bubble. But a very fragile and ephemeral bubble. In middle-class Western daily life the food consumed is devoid of the dirt of the ground from where it was grown or the blood from how it was slaughtered. Once eaten and consumed, our digested food excreta are flushed away, not our problem to dispose of. The household waste of the average urbanite is taken away, out of sight out of mind. (How many people actually follow up what happens to the waste they have dutifully sorted into the required recycling categories?) Our homes are - generally - warm and watertight without the occupant having to pay much attention to how this is achieved. And most importantly, the ultimate fixed points in everyone's lives, birth and death, are on the whole discretely screened away in institutions. Like the characters in Jane Austen's first novel, Sense and Sensibility, most middle-class Westerners have become afflicted by an overly emotional and super-sensitive reaction to everything outside their 'comfort zone'. Even the words 'comfort zone' imply a duvet-wrapped, infantilised security blanket for the mind, where rational 'sense', what was once called 'common sense', is now perceived as a micro-aggressive threat.

We have drifted increasingly towards a princess-and-the-pea idealisation of sensitivity, whereby the true hallmark of a middle-class, right-on attitude is the ability to notice the smallest digression, to be affronted by the mere sight of 'dirt', and to compulsorily complain of it publicly. I think it is this mindset that partially explains some of the reactions and acquiescing attitudes of large parts of the Western world to the pandemic measures. With more and more people now among the latte-lapping laptop classes, devoid of the 'real' experiences that even a generation ago were part and parcel of simply being alive, the fear of dirt, of illness, of death, has taken on pathological proportions. Perhaps it is time to discover more sense and accord less privileging to sensitivity.