Life & Wisdom Quote by Brian Aldiss

Aldiss drops the pretenses of progress straight into the toilet bowl, then asks you to keep calling it “advancement.” The line is funny because it’s crude, but it’s sharper than shock value: it compresses a whole critique of modern self-mythology into a single, bodily measurement. Civilization, in this view, isn’t primarily art, law, or enlightenment. It’s infrastructure and denial: sewers, etiquette, perfume, architecture, language itself - all the technologies that let humans pretend they aren’t animals who leak, stink, and die.

The specific intent feels distinctly Aldiss: science fiction’s knack for deflating grand narratives by pointing at the hardware underneath. By defining “distance” as the unit of civilization, he makes development literal and measurable, not moral. The subtext is that our prized refinements are often just elaborate systems for moving unpleasant truths out of sight. Distance becomes metaphor: physical separation (plumbing), social separation (servants, sanitation workers, caste), and psychic separation (the cultivated self-image that refuses anything messy). It’s a one-sentence reminder that “clean” societies are built on hidden labor and hidden waste.

Contextually, it fits a 20th-century British writer watching postwar modernity sell itself as rational and hygienic while remaining capable of filth on an industrial scale. The joke lands because it flips the usual hierarchy: instead of the soul rising above the body, the body becomes the yardstick. Aldiss isn’t only being obscene; he’s diagnosing the polite lie at the core of being “civilized.”