An inspector calls
Gambling our nature is like sacrificing our children to Moloch
Straight up, I’ll tell you: I have nephews and a niece, and I have great-nephews and great-nieces, and my friends have children, and some friends have grandchildren. But I have no children. However, I was once a child, and that is qualification enough.
In 1978, I was studying for my French A-level. I think there would be maybe six or eight of us in the class. We took some periods as conversation classes with a French assistant, a student teacher who was in the UK on work experience from their own university course. Today it was Jacques. As part of his assessments, some sort of supervisor or inspector was sitting in with us this particular day. We didn’t know him, and he didn’t know us.
At one point, we lads were having a bit of a laugh, and Jacques decided to assert his authority—such as it was, he being only two years older than we were—and insisted that, if we were going to laugh, we should laugh in French, at which point I did my best hee-ghaw-hee-ghaw-hee-ghaw impression of Maurice Chevalier, like in Gigi, which I thought to be apropos and germane to the very point Jacques had been making, clever Dick as I am. Jacques’s authority ebbed a little further from his grasp.
The conversation—such as it was—turned towards a new, novel, innovative, fresh, hitherto unheard-of subject: the environment. How remarkable it is in these modern days of climate change, global heating and warming, plastics overproduction and waste sorting, PFSAs and the rest of it, to think that these concerns have all arisen over the course of one man’s lifetime—mine—for, in 1978, we barely knew what an environment was—literally—as what follows will illustrate. The point was driven home by none other than our guest, the inspector who’d come to do a rolling assessment of Jacques’s progress in learning how to deal with obstreperous 17-year-olds.
I learned three things that day, which I have never forgotten. One was how to laugh in French. The second was that why translates differently in French between being a question (pourquoi ?) and being an explanation (la raison pour laquelle). The third is the seemingly tricky translation of the French word la nature. It tends to be rendered as nature in English, in all senses, but, for the idea of trees and grass and stuff, it should more accurately be expressed as the countryside, the wilds, rural England or wherever you are. You can slavishly translate it as nature but it’s not an intuitive translation, and when you start to reflect on what an intuitive translation would be, it starts to get difficult.
“Où est la nature ?” our inspector fellow chimed in, for the first time during the period. Where is nature?
“Hang on,” we thought, “You’re supposed to be assessing Jacques, you’re not in this conversation …” Well, he was now, so we endeavoured to answer his pretty obvious enquiry. “C’est là, dehors,” someone said. It’s out there.
Our school stood slap bang next to the Shipley to Leeds railway line. If ever there was a prime example of something that is not nature, it is the Shipley to Leeds railway line. There were lessons at that school that needed to be suspended for a full minute or more as double-headed diesels chugged past us with goods trains. Having emerged from a man-made tunnel whose construction cost the lives of five navvies, the line continued beyond the site of the former Apperley Bridge Station onto an embankment, one that God had never intended, even if, in its day, the Midland Railway very much had. At the foot of the rugby pitches flowed the River Aire, where just about the only life that braved its murky waters was leeches, some of which were proudly displayed in our very own repository of Linnaean nature, the biology lab.
The inspector motioned with his hand to the window. Où ça ? Là-dehors ? Vous croyez que cela, c’est la nature ? It was not as if he was debating with us, for, in a debate, both sides have prepared their arguments and counter-arguments based on a pre-announced motion: what this house believes. But, this was a seminal moment, and one that 47 years later, I recall in all its detail. It was a counter-argument that had never before entered our minds, at least not mine. The stark realisation that, for most of my life to that point, coupled to the stark realisation that for most of my life to this point, I had, and have, never truly experienced la nature. Some of you will have. Climbing peaks in Wales (once the car park’s out of view), or boating up the Amazon (with Belém way behind you), or trekking across the Sahara (assuming you don’t have a Jeep). But, apart from Bedouin nomads, none of us lives in the Sahara, or wherever Bedouin nomads do live. We are surrounded by natural products, natural wood and natural, healthy lifestyles but nature itself is something that, from one end of our lives to the other, we rarely actually experience, even if we talk about it all the time.
We set up companies, businesses, to extract what we need from nature, be it oil or diamonds or sand to make concrete, or chicken meat for dinner or peas from a farmer’s field. Often, we leave behind destruction: the fertilisers that seep into rivers from the fields, or the scars left by quarries, the 150 million dead chickens incinerated in America due to outbreaks of disease, and so on. We regard nature as the subjects of a painting might regard the world: stylised, marshalled by the artist’s sense of composition, constrained within the frame, and hung on a wall to lend a pleasing allure to what would otherwise be a blank nothing.
I don’t think we ever knew the name of that inspector. He was an inspector who called and left a deep-grained impression, decades before we could really understand what he was driving at. An inspector who called, just like in J. B. Priestley’s play.
By Charles Foster - Illustrators of the 1897 Bible Pictures and What They Teach Us http://associate.com/photos/Bible-Pictures--1897-W-A-Foster/page-0074-1.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11785813
Moloch is a false god, referred to in the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus). Supposedly, Moloch has been worshipped over many eons: before it are laid human sacrifices, mostly in the form of children. People would sacrifice the lives of their children in order to appease the god. Leviticus was written at some time between 500 and 330 BC. That would be about the time when people worshipped Moloch, and, in a way, he is still worshipped today. People worship Moloch—literally: they sacrifice their children to the god with outstretched arms.
I’m going to be selling my house, and yesterday the agent called me to discuss some of the things we’re going to be doing together to that end. She said at one point that buyers need to be seduced to buy a house. They will go online and collate a raft of arguments to lower the asking price, and they must be disabused of these arguments by way of seductive words of persuasion. “And who will be doing all this persuasion?” I asked. “Oh,” she said, “That will be my job, have no fear.” “Good,” I told her, “Because I’m no salesman.” I told her that I cannot sell something I don’t believe in, and that honesty, far from being the best policy, is the quickest way to lose a sale. “But,” I added, “There is a flip side to that. I can pretty much assure you that I am impervious to advertising. There is not an advertisement in this world that can entice me. Tempt me, yes, but not entice me.” With that, I expressed my gratitude that she would be applying her skills of persuasion to this matter, and not I mine.
But there is more to this aversion to persuasion on my part, which can be extrapolated from it: I shun bandwagons. That can make liking Substack posts awkward. I don’t want to be the first; but if 1,000 people have already liked something, then what does my like contribute? Forcing oneself to an independent manner of weighing things up gives you freedom of decision, but requires you to think harder, and that kind of thinking always needs some guidance. So where do you seek guidance if you’re all alone? If not externally, then internally, surely?
I look at environmental damage from two angles. One is all this oil and gas and waste and the rest offers business opportunity. Mobility offers personal development. There are many advantages to trashing the planet, especially if they’re not trashing the planet: if it’s all a hoax.
Well, it’s a crying shame to let an opportunity pass you by, isn’t it? Plenty of people tell me that global warming doesn’t exist, hurricanes are a coincidence and plastic offers so many benefits, we could not live without it today. Meanwhile investors get wealthy from plastic and flying through the skies and from digging for lithium and all these great, non-environmentally-deleterious activities. That’s what some say.
The other view is that we can live perfectly well and just leave all these natural resources in nature. Forego our opportunities, because pursuing them causes harm. To others, whom we don’t even know. Perhaps to ourselves. And perhaps to our children. Perhaps.
It’s almost like roulette: we can wager our investment on a turn of the wheel, and if our number comes up, we are winners. Or we can wager our children on a turn of the wheel. And if our number doesn’t come up, the croupier will reach out with his raclette, and haul our children in, and scrape their futures down into his sorting chute, ready for the next roll of the ball. And the question in the gambler’s mind is whether that win is likely, probable, on the cards; and whether that chute really does eat up our children’s futures as the casino chalks up yet another profit. There are gamblers who gamble buoyed by certainty, and they win, and they come out into the searing sunlight of Las Vegas’s Strip and they are radiant with joy. And there are some who hang millstones around their necks and drown their sorrow in the deepest waterway they can find, knowing they’ve squandered not only their own, but also their children’s prospects. Gambling one’s own fortune is one thing. Gambling our children’s is another. Elle est où, la nature ? Quoi—vous vous en fichez ?
Many are seduced by the wiles of advertisers. They are sucked in by the bla-bla of the corporations: do they never stop to think how much investment in money terms corporations put into preserving their markets and margins? The sums are enormous, and yet, still, the benefits far outweigh the expense. These corporate outlays are simply a cost of doing business.
Well, there are costs of being consumers as well. Sometimes, we rail at having to pay lawyers to preserve our rights, but without lawyers our rights would count as nothing. Either you accept the outlay and keep the right, or you forego the right. And the same goes for our futures. There is a cost: not flying; taking the bus; buying groceries charily, to avoid plastic and additives; supporting local produce instead of goods shipped across the world; not buying cheap, here-today-gone-tomorrow fashions. Standing up to the influencers and saying I am my own influencer, not them.
Recently, in the Netherlands, travel companies have started to push back against legislation [NL] intended to prohibit advertising that promotes fossil fuel consumption, much along the lines of the prohibitions against tobacco and alcohol advertising. They organised a petition, which people could sign and give their reasons for signing, and the best one won a prize. A travel voucher, no less. The winner—Jolanda—had stated as her reason: If we save the planet, then only the rich can fly. To my mind, it’s questionable how valid the views of petitioners are when a prize is dangled before them to induce them to sign. But the petition’s organisers thought that Jolanda’s comment was inspired, and they awarded her the prize. What a great spokesperson.
Fact is, Jolanda is right. The profit that airlines couldn’t make from ordinary workers like her if their sales fell due to not being able to advertise, they would get by upping the prices, until only rich folk could go on holidays. And that would suck. The bloody plane’s flying there with or without me—why can’t I just hop on it? Only costs 50 euros, after all. Hm?
Yes, there is a cost to preserving our environment, just like there is a cost for companies to preserve the right to despoil it. But the big corporations see the benefit in such outlays, for from pollution comes profit. So, tell me: why can’t we, the consumers, see the benefit in such sacrifices? And why can’t we see that, in any case, we are making a sacrifice. We are holding up our children as human sacrifices, into the arms of Moloch, to appease the god pollution, in some vain belief that doing so cannot cause any harm. If you think that the ancient Jews were wagering a gamble in sacrificing to Moloch, what do you think we’re all doing today with our environment? What is our nature?