Streetwise

          People are repopulating the streets, tentatively, though there is one group in particular that remains conspicuously absent: Jehova’s Witnesses. Over the last few years, they have quietly colonised every intersecting thoroughfare in the city yet presently, at this time of heightened temporal and spiritual need, there is no Watchtower on offer to provide our troubled, misguided souls with a comforting explanation of their god’s plan for us all. Are they “shielding” themselves from the virus? Or have they made a cynically tactical decision not to bother proselytising until there is more footfall?

          Actually, there has been a captive audience for proselytisers – and buskers – throughout lockdown: the queues outside supermarkets and, unexpectedly, banks. I go frequently to the shops, but I have not been into a bank since the day it became possible to transact all finance remotely. I am curious, therefore, to know why people still queue for financial services and, though I have been tempted to stop and ask some of them, I am deterred by my disposition to consider it impolite to enquire of other people’s affairs, so I just give them funny looks instead.

          The easing of lockdown restrictions has a whiff of economic expediency about it, against which it is difficult to argue. Yet those of us who are fortunate enough to have a choice in the matter need not rush out to mingle and spread. We may make our own risk assessments and act with due responsibility for the safety of others and ourselves. Reflecting on government advice to “stay home” (since downgraded to “stay alert”), I surmise there have been unforeseen consequences. Isolating and communicating only via social media is an unnatural situation for social beings like us. It is likely to induce a state of frustration which, alleviated though it may be by booze, drugs and Netflix, is fertile ground for the incubation of the kind of paranoid, curtain-twitching behaviour on which conspiracy theories thrive, the most ludicrous example of which might be that the virus is spread by 5G masts. If there is a conspiracy, however, it is not so much weird as obvious. While we are all safely tucked up at home, our sort-of-elected masters are pursuing their neo-liberal agenda on the quiet, passing legislation that will oblige us to import chlorinated chicken and sell off our few remaining publicly owned assets for the enrichment of tax-avoiding billionaires and monopolistic corporations. There, I’ve said it!

          Not that I stayed home so much, anyway. I took my daily exercise, safely, in the deserted streets, but now it is more interesting. I take the view that nothing happens unless you get out and interact. So, here’s what happened to me yesterday as I walked with a rucksack slung over my shoulder. Towards me came two large, boisterous young men. My streetwise senses told me to keep a distance from them but my way was blocked by a bloke unloading boxes from his van. As the distance between us narrowed, I sought a way to pass with correct social distancing But the others showed no signs of giving way and, as we drew near, one of the men said to me “Are you alright?” I construed this as a sort of “Why are you looking at me like that?” moment and worried that my expression had betrayed my anxiety? “Yes,” I said but, before I had chance to elaborate, he pointed at the way my hand, with its thumb looped through the rucksack strap, was resting over my heart. “I thought you might be in pain,” he said, kindly. Relived, I laughed and thanked him for his concern. It’s nice to see people back on the streets, looking out for each other. Rousseau would have said, “I told you so.”

Staying Home

          We have given up on the trip to Finland. Having previously decided to eschew unnecessary flights, we had planned to travel via campervan, two ferries and several European border crossings but, under the present covid-19 restrictions, this would be too complex, hazardous and tiresome to be either safe or enjoyable. Besides, there is still the question of whether the resulting carbon emissions would be acceptable.

          Staying put is fine. Apart from the vexation of having to endure a dysfunctional government, the UK is a great place to be. It has a deep well of culture to draw upon and the weather has been warm. Too warm, of late, resulting in thunderstorms and the appearance of pesky fruit flies. Actually, I suspect the flies were attracted by the melon that had sat in the fruit bowl a little too long and developed a soggy bottom as a consequence. Anyway, I disposed of the melon, put the remaining fruit in muslin bags and covered the bowl with a tea towel gaily printed with a colourful fruit motif. But the flies are persistent and I later found a few of them had returned to sit hopefully on top of the tea towel. It may have been the print that attracted them, but I suspect it was more likely the scent of ripening bananas underneath. Actually, I have been feeling bad about bananas for a while now. Partial as I am to the ubiquitous, oft-ridiculed yellow delights, there is no denying that they have a have a massive carbon footprint and, like Peruvian asparagus, ought to be shunned.

          Of course, I know that the logical conclusion of this argument is hard to swallow – that many foods and goods would become either unavailable or more expensive – yet progress towards a sustainable global economy must be made or else we are doomed. A decision to buy no bananas until the true cost of them is reckoned would, therefore, be a step in the right direction. Act now for, to quote Anne Frank, it is “wonderful… that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world”. I harbour the hope that lockdown has brought the idea of a sustainable world economy into focus – there is much discussion about a green revolution to drive recovery and control the extractive industries – but the first signs are not encouraging. The ‘non-essential’ shops opened this week and long queues formed outside Primark stores, the flagship of cheap, disposable fashion. Either customers don’t care about sustainability or they are just keen to shop, especially as some of them, paradoxically, have healthier bank balances as a result of lockdown.

          Yet Britons were not always so insatiably acquisitive. That all began with the imposition of Christianity, with its dismissal of ‘natural’ spirituality. It is a curious fact that, when the Romans left Britain after almost 500 years, their “civilising” effect on the locals fizzled out. The native Celts and the incoming Anglo-Saxons shunned the towns and grand villas that the Romans left behind preferring, instead, their own traditional lifestyles and beliefs. Professor Brian Bates puts this down to the innate spirituality of those peoples and their pagan belief in the forces of nature, which kept them committed to the forests, rivers and other features of the landscape. Mother Earth was their connection to creation, not the Johnny-come-lately Jesus Christ. They did not put value on hard-edged stone buildings with central heating and alien decorations; nor the military roads that ran so disrespectfully straight through the ancient landscape, offending the spirits of the place.

          Traces of that early British idyll remain – if you look for them – deeply rooted in our cultural relics. A revival of those values would be worth adding back into the mix of a new and sustainable approach to living. And it would add a unique touch of piquancy to staycationing.

Social Tendencies

          Tuesday was a bad day. I woke up out of sorts. My spirits were low, my mind was dull and my actions clumsy. At the organic shop, I lacked the verve to banter with the staff and, while I was refilling our re-useable laundry-liquid container, fumbled at the tap and left a slimy puddle of overflow on the floor. “Sorry,” I said, blushing, “I’m having an off day.” We all have them, don’t we? There once was a fad for attributing them to biorhythms, a theory which proposes that one’s emotional, intellectual and physical prowess waxes and wanes in regular, calculable cycles. I now know this to be bunkum, yet still I turn to it instinctively.

          Since Tuesday, I have kept out of other people’s way (not difficult under the present circumstances) mainly reading Humankind by Rutger Bregman. His premise is that humans are inherently kind (as Rousseau proposed) not nasty (as Hobbes suggested). It’s a difficult argument to win, given the cruelties of which we are all too often capable, yet he sets about it methodically and I found myself willing him on. His main hurdle is that of our preconceptions, which he tackles first by comparing the fictional Lord of The Flies with a real life equivalent, the Ata Island marooning in 1965. The behavioural outcomes were completely opposite, yet most of us prefer to believe in the inevitability of Golding’s imagined Hobbesian dystopia. Bregman’s explanation for this is that we have been conditioned – by our prevailing culture – to believe that civilised, social behaviour is merely a thin veneer that disguises our base natural instincts. The fact that scientific behavioural studies may prove otherwise counts for nothing when weighed against contradictory myths that have become so embedded that they are accepted at face value and lies that have been repeated so often as to attain the status of truth. Occasionally there is a breakthrough – a happy concurrence between science and popular myth – as in the experiment that demonstrated something we all know to be true, that BMW drivers are the most selfish of all. But this only causes us to say, “I told you so!”

          If I’m not careful, this period of lockdown could sway me towards the Hobbesian view of things. All the world’s woes seem to be projected through the lens of sociopathic leaders who have been elected on the populist vote. Can the majority be so wrong? But then again, I might be experiencing a mild case of the lockdown blues, so I take heart from the fact that there are some good things happening as well. Like the recent outbreak of statue-toppling, a refreshing development in so far as it represents a rebellion against acceptance of history as white supremacism and the resulting skewed status quo. While some of our public statues have been erected to commemorate worthy persons or heroes, others are nothing more than selfies in stone (or bronze), yesteryear’s equivalent of social media self-promotion, in which wealth – however acquired – is passed off as merit. Better they be placed in a museum (at their owners’ expense) with a full account of their “achievements”.

          Bregman looks for the origins of human behaviour in pre-historic times with an attempt to explain how homo sapiens prevailed over the other hominid species. His conclusion is that our winning formula is a combination of sociability, trust and a GSOH, all policed by conscience and our unique propensity to blush (qualities absent in sociopaths). If he is right and we are essentially good, kind and considerate there is reason to be optimistic. Unwanted it certainly is, but the corona virus pandemic is obliging us to change our way of life and future expectations, like it or not, and I see this as an opportunity for Rousseau to prevail.

Storytelling

          My partner has drawn me into a televised drama, streaming now on a screen near you (no subscription required): the hatching of three osprey eggs in a nest somewhere in the Scottish Highlands. At first, I was merely curious, then I became fascinated, caught by the obvious difference between ospreys – who have but one purpose in life, procreation – and people, who strive not just for existence, but for dominance over everything and everybody. Despite our bigger brains, we have taken a path that has led us, via war, cruelty, subjugation and greed, into an environmental disaster that threatens our future existence. How did we get here?

          Plato contended that storytellers rule the world, by which it is inferred that if you can persuade people to accept your story, they will allow you to take control. Simple stories are easier to follow, so charlatans soon learned to reduce theirs to mere slogans, obscuring nuance, so as to convince those who are either unable or disinclined to see through their sophistry. In our times, President Bush’s story was “war on terror”, whereby vengeance took precedence over reconciliation; Trump’s was “let’s make America great again”, in which the US, the generous leader of the free world, gets wise to being leeched and fleeced by all other nations; and Johnson, with his “get Brexit done” campaign, enabled an opportunistic narcissist to pass himself off as the decisive leader who will save Britain, the exceptional mother of parliaments and champion of free enterprise, from being hamstrung and side-lined by unelected European bureaucrats. I recently came across the word ‘ambivert’ – a person who is neither an extrovert nor an introvert – and found myself thinking about why it is so little used. Now I see that it is because it is too confusing to introduce nuance to a world where dichotomy is the best way to get results. Freedom fighter (good)/ terrorist (bad); capitalism (good)/ communism (bad); nationalism (good)/ federalism (bad).

          For now, populist demagogues appear to have gained the upper hand by using such stories to their advantage. The voices of reason and nuance – and they are many – are drowned out by the clamour of greedy, elitist, self-aggrandising rhetoric. But reason and nuance may yet prevail, given that the extremes of suffering, privilege, poverty and wealth are widening and increasingly visible to all. Never-ending wars – usually fought over natural resources – and the inequalities of wealth wrought by the excesses of neo-liberal capitalism have resulted in the destruction of the ecosystem, the latest and most universal manifestation of which, covid-19, has emerged from the animal biosphere because of human interference. A reassessment of capitalism has been under way, even since before its self-destructive crash in 2008, by economists and socio-political analysts alike – Chris Hedges, Mariana Mazzucato, Rebecca Henderson, John Elkington, Raghuram Rajan and Rutger Bregman, to name a few. In their publications they take a cool look at facts and statistics that demonstrate the ways in which we have been and are being hoodwinked by the stories fed to us about, for example, how private initiative is good and government interference bad. This is a false dichotomy and a false story. All the facts indicate that a mix of the two would be the best way to achieve economic growth that is green, sustainable, inclusive and affordable. They present no simple dichotomy, which is perhaps why their stories have less traction than they deserve.

          It is frustrating and infuriating to see greed prevail over generosity so, to soothe my passion, I watch the ospreys. Or the nasturtiums sprouting from seeds that I sowed in a pot on the windowsill. These are lives with predictable plots. They are born, they are nurtured, they replicate their genes and then, they die. Meanwhile, we humans listen to stories in preference to facing reality.