The Politics of Sweat
How long have humans been sweating?
Well, how long have humans been around? 100,000 years? 1,000,000 years? Longer? We come from a long line of sweaters. When warm-blooded mammals decided to separate themselves from their up-til-then dominantly cold-blooded compatriots they got themselves into all kinds of hot water over the need to keep cool. Unlike the cold-bloods, whose principal concern was getting warm enough to run around.
How long have humans been trying to figure out ways to avoid sweating?
This is a question with a shorter scope of time, but an infinitely broader scope of culture. It takes, I expect, a certain amount of capital, whether it be in the current form of currency or the more ancient modes such as silos full of grain or amphoras of wine, before one can even conceive of staying dry in any but the driest or coolest of climates. Even later, after the agricultural revolution was in full swing, the culture, at least in the form of the early Christian writers, recognized the essential nature of man, whom god condemned to perpetual perspiration ("by the sweat of his brow") when he was ejected from the Garden of Eden. Seems that ever since then, and probably well before, humans have idolized the idea of a sweat-free existence. Clearly no one in the ol' GofE had any need for an anti-perspirant.
I'm willing to bet that the notion of a no-sweat life followed rapidly on from the beginning of the agricultural revolution, when enough excess had been accumulated, and somebody had to control it. Once you are in charge of the bank (be it bucks or barley) you inevitably spend more of your time sitting around and less of it plowing up the sod and irrigating it with the slightly salty water dripping off your forehead. Sweating is uncomfortable (comfort? what's that?), it stains your clothes (clothes? stains?), and if you leave it alone too long it makes you stink (aah!...the bath...the fountain...baptism!). Of course before the opportunity presented itself everyone was pretty much used to all that. Constant odor, like constant noise, is quickly tuned out by our brains - no survival value in paying attention to a universal, harmless condition. But as anyone who has watched the chief will tell you, being an indian isn't all that much fun.
So the bosses sit behind their desks, in their air-conditioned offices, while the workers sweat away down in the factory. And even the workers can comfort themselves with dreams of better days, dousing themselves with anti-bacterial, anti-perspirant, anti-peon products, so when they are called into the office they won't embarrass (em-bare-ass) themselves with that tell-tale dampness.
We've come a long way (oh, baby!) from the days when the blacksmith's brow was "wet with honest sweat," to the modern era, whose catchphrase might well be: our work will produce no sweat, our sweat will produce no work, for exercise, the body's need for physical exertion, is increasingly confined to entertainment (sports, vacations) and to special houses of workship ("health clubs") where the expended energy, which formerly would have tilled a field or brought an antelope to earth, may be dissipated in the almost entirely useless pursuit of the kind of body that nearly everyone had back in the days when if you didn't find it or catch it yourself you didn't get to eat it. Indeed, we have to put energy in (lights, air-conditioning, exercise machines...) before we will allow ourselves to put energy out. (It would be interesting to calculate the contribution of health clubs to global warming.)
Why won't Americans ever acceed to the sacrifices necessary to the kinds of reductions in greenhouse gasses that science suggests will save us from global warming? You need look no farther than the politics of sweat for the answer.
In other words, so that each of us may avoid sweating separately, we're all going to sweat it out together.