This Day in History: 1844-08-29

Edward Carpenter former priest and Cambridge fellow, is born on this day in 1844. Carpenter wrote the 1889 book “Civilisation, Its Cause and Cure,” in which he argued that civilization is a form of disease that human societies go through. The book caught the attention of many reformers, including Mohandas Gandhi. Carpenter wrote:
“Only a vast dense cloud, so thick that I wondered how any human being could support life in it, that went up to heaven like the smoke from a great altar. An altar, indeed, it seemed to me, wherein thousands of lives were being yearly sacrificed. Beside me on the hills the sun was shining, the larks were singing; but down there a hundred thousand grown people, let alone children, were struggling for a little sun and air, toiling, moiling, living a life of suffocation, dying (as the sanitary reports only too clearly show) of diseases caused by foul air and want of light — all for what? To make a few people rich!”