The Minor Matter of Survival.

I was reading this morning about the famines that are starting to bite in some parts of the world in the wake of Covid. Possible starvation looms for millions, apparently. And it struck me as absurd that this is happening while I’m complaining about having to get top brand breakfast cereal instead of Sainsbury’s own brand which is cheaper. The stark gap in priorities can be more than a little scary sometimes.

And then I fell to wondering – not for the first time – whether there might be some way in which the food reserves could be shared on an international basis. The idea has been mooted before, of course, and the objection usually comes down to a matter of logistics. (‘Where there’s a will there’s a way’ is frequently trotted out when it suits, and equally frequently forgotten when it doesn’t.)

But suppose the will was there to do it. It would still be unacceptable to most people because the cry would go up: ‘We must take care of our own first,’ closely followed by ‘charity begins at home’ uttered smugly and proudly by those convinced of the wisdom contained in what is actually one of the saddest of sad platitudes.

But maybe we should be thinking beyond charity. Maybe we should be taking seriously Daniel Quinn’s assertion that human society cannot go on forever in its present form, based as it is on the pre-eminence of money, the obsession with variety, and the imperative to consume. He postulated that if the human race is going to survive in a sustainable form it needs to get back to small scale living based on self-supporting communities. And maybe he’s right. I think history has largely shown that societies which get too deep into hedonism usually fall eventually (and I did offer in my own novel the possibility that the story of Atlantis was not a prehistoric fable, but a prediction for the future.)

So could we follow Quinn’s advice and do that? It seems unlikely because we’ve spent the last few thousand years forgetting how to do it. There are still a few people spread around the globe who remain practiced in such ways, those in remote areas relatively untouched by the hedonistic agenda, those whose land we steal and who we occasionally murder so that the likes of McDonald’s can continue to thrive and grow, but the rest of us wouldn’t have a clue. And so I’ve no doubt that we will to do our very best to carry on worshipping money, variety and consumption once the latest plague has retired into the background.

But the real cause for concern here is money. We all know that it doesn’t exist; it’s just a theoretical exchange mechanism based on trust and consensus. So what happens if things get so bad that trust and consensus fall and money becomes worthless? What then?