Toilet Paper: Out of Stock, 3/22/20

By Vijaya Nagarajan

As most of us have been, I, too, was at a store a few days ago getting my essentials for a three week “shelter at home” six county-wide directive in the SF Bay Area, the first in the United States. I had heard about the run on toilet paper and I couldn’t believe the news at first. How can we run out of toilet paper here in America? But when I was at the store, I, too, couldn’t get more toilet paper. A shock ran through me. What would I do? What would my family do? I knew we probably had enough, but I wanted to make sure we had enough for the duration.

In the shadow of empty shelves without toilet paper, I began to think of toilet paper as the quintessential item of modern civilization.

I remember a related question a new friend asked me in the mid-1980s. She had just come from India to America for the first time. In a quiet moment when our mutual Indian friend had gone to get some tea, the new friend lowered her voice, looked at me, sighed, and asked me, “I have to ask you a question. How much is enough?” I looked over at her puzzled, “Of what? How much is enough of what?” She lowered her voice even further almost to a whisper, “You know, toilet paper. There are these sheets that are separated by a dotted line. So how many do you use? I never feel clean enough. I am so used to thinking of water as a cleanser, the way we do it in India. I do not know if I can get quite used to this in America. It seems so strange and so unhygienic.”

I told her, “It depends on what you think feels clean enough. You will figure it out, by and by.”

The toilet paper, in many ways, symbolizes the relationship modern people have to their bodies; it is paper that is seen as the ultimate cleanser, in terms of our personal wastes, not a limited amount of water as it had been traditionally used for many millenniums. I know this is distasteful to think about for many, but the invention of toilet paper and the toilet are critical to understanding how the social construction of waste plays out in modern societies. How we see waste is highly significant for how we even comprehend the massive industrial waste of carbon, the roots of our climate disaster.

Ivan Ilich’s book, H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness (Dallas Institute for the Humanities, 1985) is one of the most profound philosophical explorations of the history of waste. Illich argues that our relationship to what we think of as “waste”, how an object becomes imbued with the notion of waste when it may not have been before, all contribute to our individual and collective decisions on how we define and deal with waste. The toilet bowl releases our waste into the vast unknown, as if by its very disappearing or flushing, encourages all of us to think that it has been well taken care of. We don’t see where it goes and we no longer need to care. I believe it is the same with carbon, whether it is our cars, our airplanes, our refrigerators or our air conditioners.

We need to rethink our relationship with the social habit of toileting, of the toilet bowl filled with water, of the toilet paper. We need to remember our histories, of how we coped in a world without excessive toilet paper and in a world without excessive carbon and waste. This isn’t to say we need to go back to the past and relive some false romanticized notion of a pre-modern relationship to our personal waste. But we do need to ask ourselves the question: Is there a Middle Path to our historical journey that led us to the toilet? Can we imagine a way that makes us use less water, less toilet paper, and less carbon? It sometimes does come down to this, doesn’t it?