Book Review: At Home: A Short History of Private Life
by Bill Bryson
Using an old house as a take-off point to address housing, society, developing technology, and science, Bill Bryson guides the reader through each room of an 1851 Victorian parsonage in Norfolk, England—and uses each room as a time machine portal to multiple points of world history and geography, relating them back to the point of departure in the house. Bryson’s dry humor may have you laughing out loud all the way through the book—laughing that is at the downright silliness of human foolishness through the ages, even when it resulted in tragic loss and human suffering. This book serves to put our contemporary trials in anthropological perspective, elevating one’s awareness that people have been very ignorant and stupid for thousands of years—just as much as they are today. There also are instances when ancient civilizations got things very right even with fewer resources and scientific knowledge—for example, this book reveals that some stone age people were a lot smarter about making warm and practical clothing from basic materials than we in our modern conceit may have assumed.
Bryson chronicles in explicit detail the human depravity and cruelty that seem to be a constant throughout the centuries. No historical figure is spared an honest look—Bryson includes factoids such as Benjamin Franklin owned slaves as well as the suffering resulting from Victorian pseudoscience and twisted morality. Although we might like to hope that humanity is getting better at life, it’s unknown whether we can escape this historical cycle of wanton excesses that Bryson so effectively exposes. That seems especially apparent with the recent exponential increase in societal and governmental idiocy, which is outdoing the previously established societal and governmental idiocy (that which is the actual not fabricated kind). The 20th Century Liberal Consensus did much good in the world—it was human greed for wealth and power (things that were external to the consensus) that obscured and diluted it to the point that people born after its peak never fully experienced it.
As something like the California wildfires currently rages through governments and society, it behooves us to think ahead today about what to build to replace that being burned down. After all its needless collateral damage, a bureaucracy wildfire also clears the forest floor allowing the green shoots of good ideas to sprout that were heretofore obscured by those whose purpose they didn’t serve. Housing is a good place to start—classiness and beauty can easily be melded with practical design. Let’s build sustainable physical houses, along with all the other supporting infrastructure—together with a societal house and ecology that avoids all of the tragic missteps that Bryson catalogs. Now is a good time to start drawing up the plans.