Larry's Lunchette

Even for predictability, the garden is an important part of my life these days: spring unfurling into summer.  I sowed sweet peas and cornflowers under glass – now planting them out; tending our plants, we are also gardening our inner space; whatever the biological mechanism, being close to nature makes us healthier and happier.  Carl Jung believed that technological life had alienated us from the “dark, maternal, earthy ground of our being.”  He grew his own vegetables and argued that “every human should have a plot of land, so that their instincts can come to life again.”  Jung was explicit about this grave danger: that science and technology carry the delusion that humans are superior to nature – that we ‘own’ nature – can do with it as we wish.
The historian and philosopher, Yuval Noah Harari, posted an essay in the Guardian recently which Carl Jung would have hated.  Harari says that for most of human history, humans weakly submitted to death – but the modern world has been shaped by the belief that humans can outsmart and defeat death.  Over the last two centuries, average life expectancy has jumped from 40 to 72, across the entire world; he even says “perhaps in a century or two, science will extend human life indefinitely” (which I think is nonsense)  We can certainly anticipate, that through technology, humanity will become ever more powerful; Jung’s point is, that alienation from nature, both around us and within ourselves, means that we have lost our way: even destroying the planet we live on.
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At Davos last year, someone went viral for comparing it to “a firefighters conference where no one’s allowed to speak about water”; the reference was to tax evasion and the speaker was 32-year-old Rutger Bregman – who has a new book called Humankind.  It deserves our attention, because it is a sweeping survey of human existence which argues, that despite all our obvious flaws, most people are basically good.  This core orientation/outlook underpins all we do in life; like anything indispensable it merits continuous nourishment; so, looking for some cheer, I’ll be reading Humankind.  Jonathan Freedland’s review excites.
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I enjoy Simon Kuper’s column these days (FT weekend mag).  He lives in Paris, and this week captures that great city in lockdown; the nature of enforced changes, for better and worse – the places and habits which may be lost forever.  He thinks new patterns of work and transport will now evolve.
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Recently, almost unnoticed, a further provision of the 2016 Land Reform Act was implemented – communities now have ‘compulsory purchase’ rights: Land Commissioner Meghan MacInnes explains.  But land reform will remain glacially slow until Scotland trains and deploys a cadre of ‘community dealmakers’ – working directly for local anchor organisations – to implant a new proactive culture.
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Jon Chamberlain has been researching the influence of social network platforms (Facebook, WhatsApp etc) on the way we communicate during the pandemic. He says it’s faster, more seamless and with greater reach than anything that’s come before. Are social media ‘agnostics’ like myself in denial?
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The Guardian has been clever enough to get economist Thomas Piketty on zoom to discuss the effects of the pandemic on economies, societies and globalisation. His answers have a gravitas of depth of learning; it helps that I agree with his politics – his wealth tax response to inequality.
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These closing lines from George Eliot’s Middlemarch put me in mind of thousands of anonymous medics and carers quietly looking after people.

“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like a river, spent itself in channels which has no great name on the earth.  But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive:  for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts: and that things  are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life …..”.