Planet and PEOPLE

THis Latin phrase comes from the poet Juvenal, about 100 BCE. (Satire VI, lines 347–348). It means, who guards the guards themselves?  Who administers the administrators?  Who holds the authorities accountable?

It’s a very good question, and it arises from the idea of ‘power over’ I looked at previously.   Who has power over those we give power to?    If not us, then how do we protect ourselves from them? First, let’s look again at the idea of ‘power over’, and how this might have developed.

Until the arrival of farming ( if modern anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer societies are any guide)  there was a general recognition that humans were a part of a natural ecosystem.   Competition between people was contained by maintaining populations within the perceived limits of the local life support system.   Often elaborate social structures would determine who might marry whom.  The seasons, the movement of the sun, moon and planets were closely observed in order to observe their effects.   

As people started to intervene more and more in their environment they found that their food security and population could be artificially increased – so long as nature was respected and propitiated.  The idea started to arise that nature was separate from  humans, and it existed to serve our needs.    This idea grew very slowly at first, as a healthy, respectful recognition continued that nature has the power to make us suffer and die.   But gradually humans, then functioning as kindreds or tribes rather than individuals, became addicted and dependent on the idea of power over nature.  Because we were successful in creating tools, managing herds,  growing crops,  it became a battle of wills.   This (to me at least) is the real meaning of ‘original sin’.  

Farms, land clearance, roads and towns, disrupted and changed existing ecology.   In some cases the growth of farming added to biodiversity – slash and burn agriculture created charcoal rich forest clearings that provided a wider range of habitats.  Regular grazing patterns created species-rich grasslands and long-lived coppiced or pollarded woods.  Managing herds could improve their overall  health and resilience.   

However, in many others cases, natural predators of humans were destroyed and biodiversity in cropped land began to reduce.  Drainage improved crop yields but at the expense of wetland habitats.  The perception of nature by people divided more and more into ‘tame’ (controllable and useful) and ‘wild’ (dangerous and a challenge to tame).

Farming requires exclusive control of land.   You plant your crops and tend them, and aim to harvest them yourself.   They are not available for foraging – they are your ‘property’.     Initially this would be at a kindred or tribal level – people identified with their community or kindred which held its lands in common.   Right up to the 18th c it was normal for a community to farm co-operatively, allocating fields as strips, and agreeing on their cropping and management.  The townlands are your security, your life support system.    But the more land and livestock you claim, the more you have to protect, or lose.  Gradually as more land and hunting rights are claimed by different groups, more fixed boundaries develop;  within these boundaries,  in a good year, you store your harvest for use later rather than share it; in a bad one, if your crops or herds fail, it’s solely your problem because the neighbouring resources all belong to others.   So you might have to beg, borrow or steal from them to survive.  When co-operation proves unsuccessful, competition arises. And with it, a growing idea of ‘us’ and ‘them’.

This is no doubt the origin of cattle-raiding culture:   it was more or less accepted that a neighbouring tribe or clan, when in need, would raid your cattle.   Another year, you might have to do the same to them.   Until greed, or scarcity for both of you, set in. 

All living beings wish above all to survive and be healthy, but the idea that we are all part of one living system gradually faded.   From a separation of mankind and ‘nature’ , grew the concept of the human-centred universe.  And from this comes the idea of hierarchy, with those able to provide protection from hunger, wild animals or other humans moving up, and those unable to do so moving down and becoming more dependent.   But all humans are ultimately dependent on nature. As perceptions coalesced around dominance, both people and nature became divided into ‘predators’ and ‘predated’, the ‘strong’ to be feared, and the ‘weak’, to be despised and exploited.   The strong demonstrate their strength by striking fear into opponents. It becomes a sort of protection racket.

That concept has grown exponentially with the development of power-giving technologies, until today we have reached the point where the whole system of ‘power over’ has reached the point where it can only implode.

Anyway, the advent of farming enabled human populations to increase at the expense of nature and other humans.   Protection of your kindred’s life and life support systems is needed.   A war-chief may provide protection against physical attack; but against the awesome power of nature,  which could not be tamed by physical means, a cognitive, psychological, ‘spiritual’ approach was needed .    Who holds the tribal chief or king to account? The people can depose him if he fails them. But people cannot hold nature to account.

Medicine men or women, studying nature and the heavens, claimed to be able to intervene.   And because planet and people are one, they also studied human psychology and discovered the power of cognitive approaches.    They could even claim a power over the war-chief, whose accountability to nature and the planet was through them.    But even here, if the shaman or priest failed to protect against disaster, they could be abandoned as useless.  

The rise of centralised, powerful Empires depended on individuals (and their retinues) who claimed both physical and spiritual power.

An Emperor’s ‘divine’ or semi-divine status asserted an exclusive power over people and nature and it secured their position.  Their power however depended on their success in enforcing this.  A major disaster, an ‘Act of God’, including a major defeat by an enemy were indications of failure and destroyed  support for both spiritual, psychological and temporal, material authority.   There would be never be a shortage of potential challengers waiting for just such an opportunity to take over.

Roman Emperors found that their ‘divine’ status did not protect them from those who did not believe in their ultimate power.   They were therefore directly threatened by early Christianity.  Constantine recognised that Christianity could not be defeated, but it could be co-opted:  ‘In this sign, conquer’ 

The Roman Emperors then had to share power in some way with the church; which came to claim that as the spiritual power, holding the keys to heaven, it was supreme.   The Pope claimed the authority as Christ’s representative on Earth to offer ( or withdraw)  legitimacy to Kings and Emperors .  But only God could hold the Pope to account.   

Kings and warlords of all kinds were attracted by the offer of legitimacy.  If God was in your side, who could defeat you?   They were also reassured by the medieval doctrine of the ‘two swords’ – the spiritual and the temporal – working together and supporting each other.   So relics were carried into battle, and the church’s authority was sought.  William the Conqueror invaded Britain with the Pope’s blessing.    And conversion of tribes to Christianity was a form of cognitive warfare.   Persuade the king to adopt Christianity and the the people would have to follow.  The church would then establish itself.  And of course the Pope and the Catholic church represented the image of the might of the Roman Empire.   Everything from the design of churches to the hierarchy to the vestments worn reflected late Roman civil administration.  By joining the church, petty warlords and chiefs could become ‘Romans’.   Oswald of Northumbria’s coronation in York in 600 CE is a good example.

The church would preach obedience, and provide a rudimentary civil service, in return for physical protection.   It would offer God’s help in battle – prayers, magical relics to carry before you, and the blessing of priests.   Also, by offering a career choice to younger sons of aristocrats it helped reduce challenges to power and secure elder sons in their inheritance.  It was a bargain which could be enforced to mutual benefit by spiritual sanctions such as excommunication and threats of hellfire, and material ones like loss of land, violence and death.   

However the two swords constantly clashed with each other as each tried to gain the upper hand.    The church secured privileges for priests and offered sanctuary to rebels.   Popes, trying to maintain some sort of peace in Europe, asserted their authority, and tried through crusades to get the warlords to unite under their own banner against a common ‘enemy’.      

From the 12th c,  the growth of a market economy and trading contact with the wider world led to challenges for both ‘swords’.   Contact with Byzantium and especially Islamic civilisation drew attention to Roman and other writers.   Literacy and knowledge of Latin, Greek, Arabic started to spread beyond the church’s previous monopoly.   Movable wealth in the form of money derived from commerce was undermining the land-based feudal system.   Feudal obligations could be bought out.   Money could be lent and debt created.  The urban merchants grew rich and kings and lords grew increasingly dependent on them.

The power of both material and spiritual ‘swords’ was in decline and both tried with increasing desperation to assert themselves.   The Lutheran Reformation asserted the rights of Kings and princes to rule the church within their domains by direct ‘divine right’ rather than through the Pope; the Calvinist one asserted that the rising merchant and professional classes demonstrated by their worldly success and their education that they were ‘predestined’ for salvation.   But they all opposed the Quakers, Levellers,  and other free spirits who challenged them by extending ‘divine right’ to individual freedom of conscience, and trying to hold ‘authority’ to account.

‘Let the frame of things disjoint’;  ‘The centre cannot hold’  … however you put it, the medieval power structures were collapsing.   

In ‘Christendom’ the traditional spiritual sword ceased to provide an ‘opium for the masses’.  Wealth and power had to be  asserted by creating a new form of ‘opium’.  God was clearly unable, or unwilling, to hold the powerful to account.   Their pursuit of wealth was therefore its own justification.   In fact, according to Bernard Mandeville in his Fable of the Bees, (which has strongly influenced modern economic theory) ethics were really just hypocrisy, ‘virtue signalling’.  Selfishness and greed were their own reward.  It is the basis of 19th and 20th c ‘materialist’ ideology and  economic theory.

In such a world the richest and most powerful cannot be held to account because whatever they do is its own justification – regardless of the consequences for others.   In fact wars, corruption, exploitation, totalitarianism are all justified  because they create jobs and opportunities to make money.   Which in theory ‘trickles down’ to us all ( but in practice the wealthy fo their best to prevent this).

This nihilist philosophy has largey taken over from traditional belief systems.   It underpins Darwin, Marx, Freud, colonialism, and the ‘dismal science’ of economics.  However, it keeps that convenient, core idea of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that there is a natural hierarchy with the chosen people (now fabulously wealthy, white males) at the top, proceeding down through white Europeans according to wealth to people in abject poverty, refugees with nothing, who deserve no compassion or understanding, and then to non-Europeans, animals, plants, biodiversity in general.  Everything exists simply as a resource for the wealthiest and most powerful to exploit.   The only meaning in life is therefore a fight to the death for dominance.  And wealth and power are their own reward.   If you do not take part in this struggle, you do not deserve to live.   

‘King’ Charles represents the ancien regime. He has been born and bred to rule supposedly ‘by divine right’.   The poor chap is a prince, from a long line of princes; and to kings and princes, democracy is always a threat.   He certainly doesn’t see himself as a mere ‘tourist attraction’.

While Charles himself believes in kingship, and its spiritual and temporal power,  times and ideas have changed.   Since the monarchy has clearly failed to protect us from physical or spiritual threats, or to provide us with unending spoils of war,  it has lost its authority and no longer impresses anyone apart from a few romantics.   It is irrelevant in the 21st c.

Rishi Sunak on the other hand represents the nihilistic, ‘materialist’ philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries.  His fabulous wealth is his only ‘justification’ for ruling us.   But he is as fearful and contemptuous of democracy as any king.

We urgently need to move on from all this.    Technology has brought us full circle.   We can see that planet and people do not need centralised power and wealth to protect us from each other.  In fact, it has become the principle threat to our continued existence.  The only future is to reconnect with our ecosystem, listen to it and work with it for mutual benefit.   

Quis custodiet …?  

Who but us?  ‘Power over’ is just a concept. It only exists at all if we believe in it.   Wealth and power are a mirage. They can never be their own justification.

The planet and its people are ultimately sovereign.     We have nothing to fear but fear itself.