BY JOHN NASH
We humans are cave people – we have been since we were stood up on two legs, and today our modern cave is a really complex metaphorical cave that we call civilisation. It evolved from our need to protect ourselves from the violent and uncaring competition of nature in order to nurture our kind, and to reproduce in safety. It has worked so well that there are now nearly eight billion of us.
Outside our human cave, nature is uncivilised – there are no rules in nature and although many things live by co-operation or symbiosis, most things end their lives badly – eaten alive, either from the outside in by predators, or from the inside out by bacteria and diseases. It’s not the nice bits we had to defend ourselves from – it’s the nasty bits. Civilisation is our protection from the nasty bits of evolution.
Our protected, indoor human civilisation requires two things – the resources necessary to maintain life and reproduce, plus rules that ensure a nurturing indoor environment. We grab stuff from outside nature, shove it into our cave and then inside, we consume the stuff to look after ourselves and reproduce.
Everything that we use and enjoy inside our cave comes from outside. In order to get the stuff we need, we have to go out and get it by competing with nature. We are not civilised when we are competing for stuff outdoors – we become predators. Our primary industries, quarrying, forestry, fishing, farming, building, mining for metals, clay and fuels, civil engineering, clearance – for roads, dams, towns and industrial sites – all and everything we use requires us to violate nature. The primary industries win the stuff, then bring it back to the cave where the secondary industries convert it into useful stuff and the resulting profits support the tertiary (service) industries that nurture us.
We have no choice about being predators. Everything comes from outside, regardless of how benign it seems. Last week, for example, my wife considered a £500 mini-break, travelling by coach to attend a concert by a very popular violinist and conductor. For a start, let’s say 15,000 people have to find, perhaps, £200 each to attend. That’s £3,000,000. It will come from people’s earnings – earnings that are derived from primary, secondary or tertiary sources. But it all comes from nature, even indirectly.
My wife would travel on hundreds of miles of road, built from stone and tar, festooned with streetlights, cameras and signs all powered by electricity, in a coach made of steel and other metals, wood, plastics and cloths, running on diesel fuel. The hotel and later the concert venue, built on land that once was the home of nature, with thousands of tons of concrete, wood, metals, electronics and other materials. I could go on, but it would be tedious. All of this incredible volume of stuff, taken from nature, just to listen to £500,000 worth of musicians (all playing instruments made of even more stuff) playing waltzes. I could say the same about Glastonbury, with its £70 million in tickets and £40 million in costs (plus some 55,000 plastic tents made from crude oil) – all taken from nature, just to listen to music.
Just two examples of a huge consumption of resources and none of it actually necessary for human survival. But don’t go and glue yourself to a road about it – both are celebrations of human creativity.
My point is that a few members of the same younger or older respective audiences of those two concerts can be found protesting about “big oil” or “extinction” or suffering some other equal eco-hypochondria.
It’s all very silly. Or pathetic. Moaning about oil consumption when all of your healthcare, fresh water and sewage disposal relies on plastic pipes, for example, shows a fundamental myopia, a lack of discrimination based on common sense. Common sense is grounded in practical reality. These people are cut off from reality.
The problem comes from living inside the cave. If those who go out of the cave to get stuff do so very effectively, they feed the residents of the cave too well and make them far too cosy. The residents lose sight of the natural world and the reality of the primary industries. They become institutionalised, like the poor unfortunates who were once locked up for life in asylums. They lose all common sense. It gets eaten by incarceration.
It is not a good state of health for the cave residents either. Without common sense, they are easily preyed upon by false prophets and charlatans. We see it in anti-establishment, anti-science, anti-capitalist, anti-technology, anti-hunting, anti-military, anti-farming, anti-field management and a host of other synthetic “anti” rackets. We see it in the blatant racism of anti-slavery wokery – moaning about awful historical crimes while ignoring the estimated six million slaves owned by Africans in Africa today.
Our human cave is like the capital letter “C” with a doorway at the right. Those whose job it is to go out and take from nature all the stuff we need tend to cluster on the right, the right wing, near the door. The better the right feeds the residents of the cave, the more the residents inside move to the warm comfort of the left, well away from the door. This inevitable drift to the left is what Karl Marx intuited, but he had no common sense because he was supported by Engels rather than earning a living, so he got it back to front – the drift comes not from the failure of capitalism, but from its success.
And that is the great problem for the UK right. Thanks to capitalism and capitalist farming, we have never had it so good, but now the electorate is hooked on material comfort – they want common-sense-free sweeties and yum-yums, not pragmatic dietary advice. They want the material comforts of unending stuff and cheap money, but not the common sense problems of supply. They didn’t like it when a nasty disease got into the comfy cave and shut down the flow of stuff. Now they are accustomed to the disease, they want the good times back. Unfortunately, so does everyone in the world, so the supply can’t cope and prices go up. Added to that, a Russian nutter has caused a cut in the flow of fuel and grain, so now his fuel and grain will have to be bought from middle-men. More prices go up.
It’s all common sense.
The electorate don’t understand.
The Conservatives were always the party of common sense, but because modern comfort has eaten the common sense of a large proportion of the electorate, Boris tried pretending that modern life and consumption could go on without nature paying the price. Then we had Liz promising everything to everyone, pretending you can have consumption on the never-never.
The real problem is that common sense, nowadays, is not so common. It’s scarce.
John Nash grew up in West Cornwall and was a £10 pom to Johannesburg in the early 1960’s. He started well in construction project management, mainly high-rise buildings but it wasn’t really Africa, so he went bush, prospecting and trading around the murkier bits of the bottom half of the continent. Now retired back in Cornwall among all the other evil old pirates. His interests are still sustainable resources, wildlife management and the utilitarian needs of rural Africa.