Detail from William Blake, The Temptation and Fall of Eve, 1808, Google Cultural Institute Public Domain

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Can we be bothered to save the Earth?

by Pete Field

If there is a personal deity then they (non-sexist pronoun) have a well-developed sense of humour. Is the old Testament the ultimate and funniest Jewish joke? Let’s invent people, start by having them nice and innocent then allow them to find out how to distinguish between good and evil. Rather a thorny task for two people who are as innocent as new-born babes, but there’s nothing like a challenge, is there? First, get the man to blame the woman for everything that goes wrong. The big one is, by having knowledge you get chucked out of paradise – learn, children: ignorance is bliss!

Imagine the moaning Eve will have to put up with for the rest of her life: ‘There we were, having a lovely time, and what do you do – you have to go and talk to a snake! Where does that get you? We are chucked out, we have to wear clothes and we are both going to have to look for a job!’ Interestingly, the first thing they realise is that they are naked and they cover up. God’s angle on knowledge is a body-shame sexual awareness number where you have to cover your sex organs. Sexuality is awareness. Why do they need to cover up? There’s nobody there!

So here we go: blame the woman for tempting the man, make everyone cover up – does that sound familiar? So far, God has made a fair bit of mischief among his two human creations, but it gets worse. They have two kids and one kills the other and then gets married – who to? His sister? Does the Judaeo-Christian foundation myth suggest that the human race has sprung from frequent episodes of incest? Church never explained that part clearly, or maybe I was dozing in my pew.

God gives people free will so they can do things He likes or choose to do things He does not like, which is called Sin. If you sin plenty you will go to hell and burn in agony for ever, or at least until your time is up, depending on who you believe. This hardly squares with a perfect God who is ever-loving and ever-forgiving. The Christian God is not forgiving at all, unless you sign up for the religion. Or perhaps buy your way out by building a cathedral. The rich, whom Jesus said would never go to heaven until a camel could pass through the eye of a needle, seem to have struck a great deal with God’s reps quite early on, which is what gave this crazy and intolerant stuff a leg up in the Roman Empire. The pagan world did not know religious intolerance. Of course if the church is, erm, wrong about those cathedrals it could be an expensive mistake.

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In the meantime, up top God is absolutely peeing himself at the hilarious and bizarre activities of his humans who, as Augustine said, want to be good, but not yet. And why not? Because the pleasures of not being that good may outweigh the dubious benefits of holiness which seem to include a) giving up almost everything that is fun b) being on your knees a lot c) having to help a scabby bunch of wasters who should pull themselves together (charity) and so on ad nauseam. The Buddhists, incidentally offer bliss as a recompense, but it seems to involve a lot of cross-legged cushion-sitting and plenty of renunciation and bliss is still not guaranteed.

This brings us to the human dilemma: shall I have fun now, or wait and have my pie in the sky later? This requires belief. A lot of belief. It is like the marshmallow experiment, but worse because instead of waiting two minutes and getting a second marshmallow that you can then eat with the first one you saved, in real life you dither endlessly wondering if the snake-oil salesmen are right about goodness, sin, renunciation and heaven. So what you do? You become a skilled equivocator. You learn bad faith. And you just get the dribs and drabs of fun that come your way. Nothing fancy either way. You settle for a compromise.

I will appear to be good and claim to myself that I am good, but I will not pay too much attention to what is going on. I will not get involved. The Good Samaritan was an independently wealthy businessman. He was not a zero-hours data-entry clerk who would get docked a morning’s pay for being five minutes late and lose his job for missing a morning. Talking of zero-hours contracts, what brilliant wheeze! I am the employer. I guarantee you absolutely nothing, but if you put a foot wrong I will sack you. Leaving aside the question of whether you can be actually sacked from a job which offers virtually fuck all and is merely a legalized form of slavery, we have to ask how Parliament, the Church, the Synagogues, the Mosques, the Trade Unions and all the other people who say they care appear to have had precisely NO effect on the existence of this evil and insulting method of exploiting people. We look the other way. We cannot be bothered. Our true God is Money and in the service of money and self-serving comfort we will not rock the boat. And we all know you can rock the boat of the poor but if you rock the boats of the rich you will be quickly pushed overboard and knocked on the head with a boathook.

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We tolerate appalling levels of injustice all around us. It’s nobody’s business really. We vote for governments which create inequality. Inequality creates poverty and injustice. We look away. Why are we so keen to vote for rich people who despise us? If you are rich in the UK and you want to avoid the heavy new taxes that the European Union is about to impose on you, have no fear! Get some tame demagogues and the frothing right-wing press to teach the masses that IT’S ALL THE FAULT THE FAULT OF JOHNNY FOREIGNER! Kick him out and beat him up. Let’s not take rules from Europe: we will make our own! Several years of pandemonium later the job is done. Rich people’s money is safe. Britain is severed from the EU so now it can finally go ahead and build the Tory New Jerusalem, making its own rules in a race to the bottom in which no standard is left unlowered, no barrel unscraped. With the freedom to act unconstrained by Europe or by shame the government and its buddies then go on to break the rules (see if anyone cares – can they do anything about it – no!) and then to also break the law. We will be free to be governed by a band of incompetent fools who acknowledge no law but their own power. Brilliant!

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Does it matter? Maybe not if you are comfortably off and Covid did not destroy your family or your business. But in the long run our heedless attitude, our willful ignorance and our lack of solidarity with both people and nature is slowly bringing the scissors of Fate closer to the threads of our lives. Nature is on its knees. Climate change is nothing more than a big black box experiment: put these chemical, physical and biological inputs in at one end and you will get those inevitable outputs out at the other! The laws of chemistry, physics and biology guarantee that if you put a fair bit of shit in one end and let it brew for a while you will in due course get a cataclysmic shitstorm at the other. The universe is paying us back in our own coin. It is a judgement. Not the personal and whimsical judgement of the old fella up top who will go easy on you if you build a cathedral: this is the real thing: the actions of the human race throughout its whole existence are being weighed in the scales of the universe, the laws of nature are merely responding to what we put in. Our greatest art is self-deception, but this time there is nowhere to run and nobody but ourselves, the rich industrial world, to blame. What could we do to mitigate this now? Maybe I can hope the doomsayers are wrong. Maybe scientists will put an umbrella is space? Maybe not. How about these concrete actions for starters:

Don’t have children or if you can’t help it, not more than one. Dump the car and don’t buy another. Stop flying. Insulate and triple glaze your home. When clean heating or cooling tech arrives, try to get hold of it or demand we get the government to install it. Have holidays near your house. Use walking, bicycle, bus and train. Wear natural fibres. Eat locally produced food and grow your own. Turn down the heating and wear more clothes in the house. Stop using so much electricity and so many appliances. Come to that, try living like we did in the nineteen-fifties, but without the coal! Need I go on? And of course try to constantly remind the elected leaders that their job is not actually to help rich people make more money.

Smart people are making smart appliances, but nobody really knows whether the world can ever handle the demands our intense and fast-growing over-consumption places upon it. Climate change will hit the world’s poorest – the ones who did least to create it – first. And as their lands become less habitable they will want to where things are still OK. Africa will go north. Will we welcome them as brothers and sisters and apologise for ruining their already wretched lives? Of course not: we will view them as alien invaders and machine gun them by the dozen as they drown in the freezing waters off our European coasts. The final injustice of the colonizing power is to wipe out the very climate that has sustained us all, in the belief that we alone are immune.

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As fires blaze through Australia and the USA even a few on the lunatic right are beginning to wonder if the climate change thing might not be more than just a left-wing conspiracy theory. Having said that, the people who believed in Q-Anon did not seem well placed to have sound opinions but then along came Jeffrey Epstein. Quite possibly, the human race, the one that named itself sapiens, is just too utterly stupid to survive. We will be the only species that killed itself and many others through sheer stupidity alone. Our violent and greedy abuse of our fellow lifeforms has now back come to haunt us all.

There is no-one so arrogant as the truly stupid fellow. Isn’t it that Dunning-Kruger hypothesis: we can’t see what we don’t know or understand so we denigrate and undervalue it. We did not understand nature or our place in it. Or at least not under the Judaeo-Christian set of ideas. Last time we cared about nature and feared it is when we were pagans. We failed to love each other. Our history is merely a record of wars, oppression, slavery and genocides. We failed to love the planet. We failed to appreciate the life-saving virtues of egalitarianism, we failed to heed the message of art and learn to appreciate beauty all around us. Instead we made art a part of the capitalist system. We have failed in so many ways and yet we are capable of more and better.

To survive we need to change. We need to be better people. Kinder, more loving, more deeply appreciative of nature and each other. We need to be frugal yet generous, gentle yet firm and committed. We need only one great ideal: to save ourselves as part of the web of natural life. There are no bunkers, long term, only delayed death in a harsher more difficult world. So we can start now. Bring down the temperature: buy less and do less but make it good quality. Eat only healthy unprocessed food. Don’t buy junk products. How come the Austrian government can legislate to remove ecologically damaging products from the shops? Because they want to. Anything that cannot be recycled or re-used or is not energy-efficient must be banned. Eat less. Avoid rubbish food and drink. Most of what is in the supermarket is unhealthy crap. Make McDonald’s go out of business. Allowing our filthy economy to proceed in its present form will accelerate climate change, which is the equivalent of taking your grandchildren, tying them to a rock and waiting for the tide to come up and drown them.

Status should not depend on financial wealth or possessions. We should accord status to those who do good and help us out of the mess. Start by sacking the government and the local council. Build flatpack democracy bottom up. Insist upon social justice and a more egalitarian society. And stop listening to the snake-oil salesmen. God isn’t going to pop down and save you. Maybe greater awareness, compassion and sensitivity might help, but you will have to stop reading those rubbish newspapers and get off your backside. Only that way can we build both the power and the mindset that we will need to survive, with intact nature, into the next century and, maybe, beyond. The way we live now is not sustainable but the future could be NICER if we ourselves are better people.

Can we be bothered to save the world?

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