In a fury of prophecy, I penned the rant below for a private site, Destiny Discussion, of which I am a member. I mention this by way of explanation for its tone, different from my normal blogging style.
[Illustration: a fencepost, eroded by rot and weather.]
“I have an obscure objection to all the layers of exposition (which at worst are preaching) that we are being subjected to these days.
“The raising of our consciousness always seems to be accomplished by you and me being the ignorant children who need to be told by the ecologist and celebrity chef and nutritionist what is good for us and our planet.
“These voices remain minor elements in a society which relentlessly pursues the opposite, giving us the plastic bag when we haven’t asked for it, building landscapes which discourage walking in favour of the private car; taking more and more initiatives away from the individual and making them into laws for our health and safety.
“Let me put it bluntly. As long as someone has to tell us how to live, we are doomed. For we lurch ever more into the status of domestic animals kept in pens.
“If some form of “terrorism” (or natural catastrophe) could selectively destroy three things: the motor car, television and factory-food, it might one day be considered not terrorism but a saviour. Perhaps the Taliban are my allies? Certainly the guns and propaganda set against them would indicate something to be said on their behalf. But I don’t believe in violent direct action. There are laws in this country against incitement to terrorism and I am not such a fool as to pit myself against them. Like every benevolent witness, I see that instant deprivation from TV, cars and factory-food would cause disruption and pain to children and the elderly.
“Every territory or enclave in the world which doesn’t have these totems yearns for them, to its own detriment. I quote them merely as examples of toxins we cannot do without: like heroin, foisted by dealers upon each generation. I can’t see a way back to some Golden Age where they didn’t scourge our lives.
“I resign myself therefore to Nature (Gaia), which as —- [name of friend] reminds us looks after itself somehow or another, even if it has to kill off the human race for its own survival. There’s a great battle going on in the world: Man versus Nature. I find myself on Nature’s side: not against Man but only those nasty addictions which oppose Nature.
“What do I propose instead? Nothing, other than scepticism against the sources of destructive power, and Gandhian resistance to the objectives of big business. At best the marketing-led assault on humanity would wither away as not one would be fooled any more. I don’t see that happening. Nor do I see everyone being like me and hating the motor car. Even I have spent a day fixing mine, giving it emergency surgery after one of its organs ceased functioning. I could have let it die—it’s “on borrowed time anyhow”—but I would have been responsible for burying its corpse, so I have revived it instead, to make it functional once more.
“What I see around me is an artificial and repulsive wealth, even in my own town. The supermarkets, showing all their Christmas bounty, reveal no hint of hunger in parts of the globe where their bright lights don’t reach. Every citizen goes to these supermarkets and cannot conceive of not being able to afford everything: for she can always obtain credit. Gratification is instant, whilst debt stays invisible like a cancer. Through television, she is conditioned to acknowledge only the visible.
“I’m a hopeless anarchist, for I want to have faith in our survival through instinct. I’m convinced that if we can tear ourselves away from the bright lights and shiny colours of the supermarket and the television screen, the seductiveness of the personal travelling-machine which takes us in speedy comfort: then we can feel within us a humane wisdom in accord with Nature and its purposes. I’m a hopeless idealist aesthete who sides with the Catholics (though for different reasons) in hating that ugly thing, the condom, which symbolizes a disharmonious relation with Nature and blunts the possible recovery of our primitive innocence. But no! Instincts which even the Catholic Church recognizes are under attack. Sex is being relentlessly separated from reproduction: the one having become licensed recreation and the other having become an ethically-controlled branch of medicine.
“It has come to this.”
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