I think Western society was able to fend off for so long thinking about and integrating the evidence of alcohol by marginalizing medical thinking and the analysis of the human body as a mechanism. Not just the mind, but the whole body. I mean, ours was a society that pretty much criminalized the study of anatomy. Consider humor theory and blood letting: one of the neat features of humor theory is that it allows for attempts to understand and redress human sickness without having to conceptualize the body in terms of organs; bloodletting, which follows from humor theory, is a therapy that requires absolutely minimal conception of what is happening under the skin.
I surmise that until the modern era, most medical knowledge of the body and medical, materialist perspective was constrained to medical doctors, who were a small, elite population. That sort of contained the problem.
So, in effect, I think Western society handled it by saying, "Yes, this evidence of the meat machines model is rubbing against our nose, but we're just not going to think that way, la la la, we can't hear you." And that what changed is that Western society couldn't get away with doing that any more: the Enlightenment; the productive development of early modern medicine; the growth of the middle class; the absolute population growth causing an absolute growth in the size of the doctor population and the overlapping intelligentsia population which triggered network effects.
And, as fabrisse points out below, Protestantism. Some flavors of it.
Not just marginalizing *medical* thinking. This may be part of why so many religions demonize the human body itself, or even consider the material world to be inherently evil.
I think Western society was able to fend off for so long thinking about and integrating the evidence of alcohol by marginalizing medical thinking and the analysis of the human body as a mechanism. Not just the mind, but the whole body. I mean, ours was a society that pretty much criminalized the study of anatomy. Consider humor theory and blood letting: one of the neat features of humor theory is that it allows for attempts to understand and redress human sickness without having to conceptualize the body in terms of organs; bloodletting, which follows from humor theory, is a therapy that requires absolutely minimal conception of what is happening under the skin.
I surmise that until the modern era, most medical knowledge of the body and medical, materialist perspective was constrained to medical doctors, who were a small, elite population. That sort of contained the problem.
So, in effect, I think Western society handled it by saying, "Yes, this evidence of the meat machines model is rubbing against our nose, but we're just not going to think that way, la la la, we can't hear you." And that what changed is that Western society couldn't get away with doing that any more: the Enlightenment; the productive development of early modern medicine; the growth of the middle class; the absolute population growth causing an absolute growth in the size of the doctor population and the overlapping intelligentsia population which triggered network effects.
And, as fabrisse points out below, Protestantism. Some flavors of it.
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