Ethics Afield

Here is the fourth main section of my recent manuscript, “On Sleeping through the Night: Ecology, Economy and Ethics of a Vital Human Project.”

4. The Economy of Sleep: Arrangements

Luhmann (2017: 7) claims that human beings are alone in being able to “select their environment” to reduce complexity and manage uncertainty about the future. This both overstates and understates the case, however, even in relation to sleeping securely. On the one side, as already noted, many animals besides humans select and change sleeping sites in response to shifting affordances. On the other side, humans are distinctive in the degree to which we are able to alter our various environments – in effect to create new environments – to suit or own projects, placing our trust in the structure and behavior of social and technological systems. 

The difficulty of working out such arrangements and dealing with the resulting trade-offs is the economic problem of sleeping through the night. ‘Economic’ is here used in an especially broad sense, resonating with its original meaning as ‘household management’: it is a matter of gathering resources, rearranging the affordances of the local landscape, and coordinating human and animal activity to support or thwart a given project.

For purposes of analysis, the arrangements people put in place to support the project of sleeping through the night may be divided into social and technological arrangements, against the backdrop of the natural affordances of the landscape. Social arrangements, by which the human activity and habits of character may be coordinated, may further be distinguished into small-scale, personal arrangements and large-scale systemic arrangements. Technological arrangements at any scale are hybrid systems, including technical components – configurations of matter and energy – and social components (see Hughes, 1994: 102-103).

Perhaps the oldest social arrangement, and one shared with many other animals, is sleeping in groups. If the sentinel hypothesis is correct, this arrangement works to the extent it takes advantage of the natural affordances of human physiology, in particular the variability in chronotype across a population. That some individuals are in effect keeping watch, even if not deliberately so, makes the entire group more secure: should a threat roll over the horizon of the future, someone will likely be able to alert the group.

There are trade-offs, however. Sleeping in proximity to others in the open also brings some risk. As already noted, larger groups are more likely to attract the attention of predators or rival bands of hominins. Betrayal from within the group is also a possibility, made worse if the group is larger and less bound together by familiarity and the shared interests entailed by kinship.

But where familiarity and shared interests fail, social sanctions against betrayal may yet allow group members to sleep soundly, based on what Luhmann (2017: 41) calls “the law of meeting again”: if you betray me or mine tonight, you had better watch yourself tomorrow night and every night thereafter! Luhmann notes that sanctions “structure motivations and diminish uncertainties,” but also “they structure the attribution of guilt, and thus the risk of social disgrace and condemnation.”

As human societies become larger and more complex, moving toward larger settlements and more vertical social and political structures, the arrangements that allow people to sleep soundly through the night become more complex and the basis of trust shifts from familiarity to the structure and behavior of systems. For example, the natural watch implied by the sentinel hypothesis gives way to an organized city watch or a police force as a large-scale social arrangement based in trust in the rule of law and in whatever checks and balances are built into the wider political structure.

The earliest and simplest technological arrangements for sleeping securely are shelters of various kinds. A built shelter is a reconfiguration of the affordances of the landscape, in effect creating new affordances. A hut, writes Gibson (1986: 37), is a novel set of affordances which “can be built of sticks, clay, thatch, stone, brick, or many other more sophisticated substances.” In terms of its meaning for its inhabitants, it has “a roof that is ‘get-underneath-able’ and hence affords protection from rain and snow and direct sunlight,” it has “walls, which afford protection from wind and prevent the escape of heat,” and it has “a doorway to afford entry and exit.”

The point of a shelter is to create a more stable and predictable environment for sleeping, even as the surrounding world goes through its daily and seasonal changes and its occasional upheavals.

More recently, questions of where to sleep and with whom have been answered, in many settled human societies, by the establishment of households. Where to sleep is within the walls of a building increasingly secured against outside intrusion; with whom to sleep is with the relatively exclusive list of members of the household, typically with a family at the core of it and, in some contexts and some historical eras, servants or slaves, apprentices and others who participate in the work of the household (see, for example,  Aristotle, 2012: 1252b10ff).

The interior organization of households – the arrangements of walls, doors, and floors at different levels – can be flexible across cultures and historical eras. In England, for example, the innovation of separate chambers exclusively for sleeping – as distinct from sleeping in common living spaces (“the hall”) – came into wider prevalence through the early modern period: “by 1760 it was the exception, rather than the rule, for sleep to take place in the main living spaces of the household, or in their ground-floor chambers” (Handley, 2016: 113). A greater emphasis on the privacy of the bedroom arose in the Victorian period  (Dautovich et al., 2022: 240).

Note also the preference in early modern England of sleeping on an upper floor. Access to clean, dry, cool air while sleeping was almost an obsession among physicians at the time, a matter of “medical principle.” It came to be thought that “bedsteads located on the upper floors of homes had access to cleaner air that was free of the hurtful dampness of ground-floor chambers.” For best results, the sleeping chamber could also be oriented “in an easterly direction so that the morning sun could filter quickly into the room and dispel the poisonous night air” (Handley, 2016: 44).

According to diaries, letters and “guides to household management and physic” prevalent in early-modern England, “sleeping well depended heavily on securing the right location, arrangement, content, cleanliness and sensory familiarity of sleeping environments” (Handley, 2016: 40). Even in present-day studies of sleep health, the “ideal” sleeping environment is thought to be “not unlike a cave in that it is dark, quiet, and cool. Add in comfortable surroundings and a feeling of security and we are close to creating an optimal setting for healthy sleep” (Dautovich et al., 2022: 239).

Wherever one sleeps in the household, some manner of bedding may be arranged to foster more secure and comfortable rest. The earliest known human bedding has been dated to 77,000 years before the present; there is some subsequent archaeological evidence of mattresses, but little else (Bakour et al., 2022: 13). Plant and animal fiber from which bedding might be fashioned generally does not preserve as well as stone or bone.

English-speaking writers on sleep in the early modern period never hesitated to issue authoritative advice on the best, healthiest, and most spiritually wholesome arrangements for sleeping, including precise specifications for furniture and linens. Robert Macnish (1834: 267-269), for example, insisted that the bed should be “large, and not placed too close to the wall,” and the mattress should be “rather hard. Nothing is more injurious to health than soft beds; they effeminate the individual, render his flesh soft and flabby, and incapacitate him from undergoing any privation.” He mentions “hydrostatic beds” then in use at some hospitals as fit only for “bedridden persons,” and regards “air beds” as not worth considering under any circumstances.

The exclusion of potential adverse others is also managed in part through technological arrangements, ranging from heavy doors with dead-bolt locks to keep out would-be intruders to window screens to exclude insect pests. In more recent times, electronic security systems have become more common, hybrid systems that include various detection devices as well as personnel sitting awake through the night who are responsible for contacting public agencies in case of an emergency.

References

Aristotle (2012) Politics. Indianapolis: Focus.

Bakour C, Nieto FJ and Petersen DJ (2022) Sleep in Human and Cultural Evolution. In: Nieto FJ and Petersen DJ (eds) Foundations of Sleep Health. Academic Press, pp.13-36.

Dautovich ND, Dzierzewski JM and MacPherson A (2022) Bedroom Environment and Sleep Health. In: Nieto FJ and Petersen DJ (eds) Foundations of Sleep Health. Academic Press, pp.239-264.

Gibson JJ (1986) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Handley S (2016) Sleep in Early Modern England. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hughes TP (1994) Technological Momentum. In: Smith MR and Marx L (eds) Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp.101-113.

Luhmann N (2017) Trust and Power. Malden, MA: Polity.

Macnish R (1834) The Philosophy of Sleep. New York: D. Appleton & Co.