You may think I live in a rural idyll of peace and tranquility, but actually I live in a jungle war-zone worse than anything a Vietnam vet could have nightmares about. Let me recount the events of the last three days.
Yesterday morning I walked down to the barn where I keep the tractor-mower, and on the way discovered the remains of a large, water-landing bird. I could identify it as such because of skeletal wings and the webbed feet. Everything else had been devoured. Mind you, the four million feathers scattered in all directions were a bit of a clue as to its avian origin. The victim had landed quite close to the noisette tree, and failed to notice Mr Fox waiting for him (or her). Such trees are bushy down to the ground, and thus a perfect place from which to pounce without warning.
For two weeks now, a battle has been raging between a sparrow-hawk couple raising chicks near the top of an ash tree here, and a buzzard who’d obviously like to eat said chicks. As Dad hawk goes out to hover above, dive upon and then kill small rodents, hawk indoors stands guard. When the buzzard decides to swoop in, she lets out this 1980s electronic erk-orr-erk-erk-zaw-erk, and Dad returns to buzz the invader. The two then chase him off, and he in turn tries to double back to the nest before they can. So far, the sparrow hawks are winning ….or at least, last time I stood below the tree I could hear the insistent squeaks of chicks just gagging to eat poor unsuspecting voles with broken necks pecked to death by their father on his way back to feed them.
In the next door field, M. Houdousse’s hound sniffs about in the fallow tangle, regularly digging out moles and then thrashing them this way and that. The endless feral cats in the neighbourhood also crouch in the long grass, ready to devour any hoopou or house martin foolish enough to make groundfall for longer than three seconds. At the far end of the property, the so far foiled buzzard circles gracefully above the rabbit burrows – knowing well enough that light and naive young kits will go hoppity about when their parents aren’t looking….and wind up in a pair of claws prior to the dinner pot.
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Seen in this context, the life of contemporary Western Man looks pretty tame. But as recently as 10,000 years ago, this was exactly the life we had too: “nasty, brutish and short” as Thomas Hobbes had it. It was kill or be killed, stand together or die, and think yourself lucky to reach forty.
Now don’t get me wrong: I have no desire to return to anything like that. On the whole I’m quite glad that there are no more sabre-tooth tigers lurking around every corner, and to be fair to Man just this once, we have managed to achieve a quality of life and longevity that is exponentially better than it was even a thousand years ago. But I think over the last fifty years, we’ve gone backwards again.
One reason for this is hubris: Man’s overweening belief that he is more than just another intelligent species. We think today that we can do anything: even eternal life, we believe, will soon be in our grasp. Another (related) reason is that we have ditched belief in elements more powerfully divine than ourselves. We used to control one of our most unpleasantly unique features in the animal kingdom – the ability to kill and be cruel for the fun of it. Now we indulge it….and the indulgence becomes more unrestrained with every year. Having done so, a further factor is our fascination with all things material: boys’ toys, shop til you drop, talking over mobile devices, constantly reading magazines about the latest thing, buying stuff shiny things for lovers….contentment with one’s lot has all but disappeared.
An understanding that this is our problem as a species is nothing new. 120 years ago, Wilde wrote that the two tragedies in the world were not getting what we want, and getting it. 1500 years before that, St Augustine opined, “Man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible”. 600 years earlier Epicurus wrote, ‘Poverty, when measured by the natural poverty of life, is great wealth; but unlimited wealth is great poverty.’
Money and power give people the ability to protect themselves from real life. This is why all Western political Überklassen have lost the plot about what really matters. Old lessons must, it seems, be learned over and over again by each generation. In 2013, we have the same old lessons going unlearned – and nothing more than new idiots ignoring them.
The Slog 