Double Happiness

by Joe Bennett

  Bullshitters know this. And the irony is that they know it rationally. The bullshitter makes a rational decision to suppress rationality in others. It is hard to sell anything to Mr Spock, or to convince him to vote for you, or wage war for you, or to get him along to sing on a Sunday morning. Kirk is an easier target.

  10

  It’s natural, see

  Arthur the beekeeper lent me a mask but he drew the line at gloves. ‘You can’t work bees with gloves,’ he said.

  He smoked the hive, prised the lid off and told me to lift out a frame. It was heavy with honey and thick with bees. The whole thing thrummed. A bee settled on my wrist. With my hands holding the frame I tried to blow it off. It stung me. ‘I’ve just been stung,’ I said. Arthur laughed and urged me to ignore it. More bees had settled on my wrists and the backs of my hands. I was tense with fear. Another one stung me. I thrust the frame at Arthur and ran. It was a poor decision. As I ran, swatting wildly, I collected perhaps a couple of dozen stings.

  That evening my arms and hands swelled and the flesh hardened. Nausea rose in my throat. I grew hot and sick. I didn’t sleep that night. The next morning the doctor gave me something, I forget what, but it was still several days before the stuff was flushed from my system and I came right.

  ‘Bee Venom Mask …’, runs an ad for Abeeco, ‘has taken the beauty industry by storm with reports of royalty and other well-known celebrities using NZ bee venom.’ For $89.95 you can get a 50-gram pottle of the Bee Venom Mask. Or for $38, you can acquire 9 grams of Bee Venom Lip Plumper, for ‘beautiful plump, luscious looking lips’.

  Now I do not for one moment doubt that bee venom does wonders for the appearance, that it plumps the lips, that it takes years off you and that, as the Abeeco website avers, ‘it was credited with making Camilla, 63, look years younger’. After all, it plumped my own skin very nicely. What interests me, however, is that Bee Venom Mask ‘has been hailed as Nature’s natural alternative’ (to Botox apparently). Ignoring the passive verb which fails to reveal who’s doing the hailing, and ignoring also the spectacular redundancy of ‘Nature’s natural’, which implies that Nature is just as liable to produce unnatural stuff, I draw your attention to the word Nature.

  The capital letter suggests personification. We are invoking that benign goddess, Mother Nature, a sweet old dear who has our interests at heart and who could not be cruel to us. What she does is good, simply by dint of being what she does. If something is natural it implicitly follows that it is beneficial.

  Now, the topical application of minute quantities of bee venom may indeed be good for your appearance. But the subcutaneous injection of not much more of the stuff made me as sick as I have been in the last ten years. The stuff was undeniably natural and it was equally undeniably poisonous. So poisonous indeed that if I’d suffered another few dozen stings I might well not have been here to write about it. I’d have been killed, naturally.

  Natural is one of the hardest-working words in the bullshitter’s lexicon. It has become effectively a synonym for good. It is bullshit because natural does not necessarily mean good. If we define natural as meaning something that occurs without the intervention of humankind, then anthrax is natural, earthquakes are natural, the great white shark that killed an Australian surfer yesterday is natural, and both cold-blooded and warm-blooded murder is profoundly natural. The entire natural ecosystem is founded on organisms murdering other organisms and eating them.

  Furthermore, to define natural as meaning all the stuff on earth except people is absurd. Only the wilfully blind deny that we evolved in the same way as everything else. We are as much a part of the fabric of nature as anthrax is, or the great white shark, or the kowhai tree in my garden or the bellbird that sucks the nectar from its flowers. I presume that a bellbird’s nest would also be considered natural. If so, then why not a human being’s house? And if a house is natural, then the same ought to be true of a skyscraper, a car, an atom bomb, an iPhone, and anything else that human ingenuity has devised in the same way as a bird builds a nest.

  But the bullshitter’s use of the word denies this. The implied antithesis of natural is artificial, in other words man-made. Thus it suggests, though never quite states, that if we could only return to a state of nature, could rediscover harmony with the natural rhythms, or some sort of similar ill-defined notion, all manner of things would be well. They wouldn’t. As Thomas Hobbes observed in three memorable adjectives that have outlived him by 300 years, humankind in a state of nature lived a life that was ‘nasty, brutish and short’. What has enabled you and me to live a life that is nicer, more civilized and longer are the discoveries and inventions brought about by the exercise of reason, in other words the artificial stuff, from polio vaccines to a sewerage system. All of which is excluded from the bullshitter’s implicit definition of the word natural.

  That definition is sentimental. It could only be foisted on a public that has lost sight of the actual world it inhabits, the Darwinian world where only the fittest survive and where 99 per cent of all the species that have ever evolved have become extinct, just as we will.

  In short, the term natural as commonly used is without meaning. It is merely a noise, designed to evoke a sentimental response. That response bypasses or numbs the faculty of reason. Natural has become what A.J. Ayer called a hoorah word — no one knows quite what it is but everyone’s for it. As a result it gets pinned to a host of things for sale: bed linen with magnets sewn into it, strawberry-flavoured yoghurt, ventilation systems, frozen dog food … The list is endless.

  I have in front of me a bottle of moisturizing shower milk. The puffery on the back announces that the maker ‘uses simply the best ingredients from nature to leave your skin clean and noticeably softer’. Here are those ingredients: ‘Aqua [how’s that for bullshitterish chutzpah?], sodium laureth sulfate, cocamidopropyl betaine, fragrance, sodium chloride, styrene/acrylates copolymer, cocamide MEA, sodium benzoate, sodium salicylate, citric acid, polyquaternium-7, glycol distearate, tetrasodium EDTA, lactose, honey, milk protein, CL 19140, CL 16035.’

  And the name of the range to which this shower ‘milk’ belongs? Naturals, of course.

  It wasn’t always so. Four hundred years ago, Shakespeare had a far more accurate image of the nature of nature. ‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess,’ announced Edmund in King Lear. ‘To thy law my services are bound.’ Edmund was the bastard, or ‘natural’, son of the Earl of Gloucester. When he said these lines he was proclaiming that he was going to act like the bastard he was. He would traduce his loyal (and legitimate) brother, deceive his gullible dad and act purely in malicious self-interest. He’d get as much power and wealth for himself as he could. He didn’t care whose fingers he stamped on. Pity, sympathy, kindness be damned. This was how nature worked, without compunction and without conscience. And the bastard was bang right.

  Contrast this with the song that in 2001 was voted New Zealand’s official top song of all time (well, since 1840). It was written by Wayne Mason and it was called ‘Nature’. Its refrain is ‘Nature, enter me’, which is more or less the same request as Edmund made. But between Edmund the bastard and Mason the songster there lies a romantic revolution that began the process of inverting and falsifying our view of the natural world.

  Just as Edmund did, Mr Mason personifies nature, but unlike Edmund he considers her (she’s always she) to be benign and gentle. ‘Up in a tree a bird sings so sweetly’ runs one line of the lyrics. These words suggest that the bird is merely voicing the sheer joy of being alive. But this is to misrepresent it. The bird’s ‘song’ serves two purposes. One is to proclaim its territorial rights — a sort of aural ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’. The other is to attract a mate in order to reproduce. (The second of these purposes is also true of pop singers.)

  The common contemporary attitude to nature is essentially religious. Lurking behind the word is a suggestion of a mighty yet benign spiritual entity who is on our side. If we do not stray from her ways she wil
l look after us, cure us of our ills, make us happy, love and nurture us. She won’t. For evidence spend one night alone in the Amazon jungle without such artificial encumbrances as clothes, tent, gun or light. Nature will enjoy the encounter.

  (There is one particular Amazonian beastie that I have long admired and which you might like to keep an eye out for. It’s an amphibian that hangs around in the river’s backwaters, waiting for a passing mammal to urinate. With a single prodigious expenditure of effort the critter somehow projects itself up the stream of urine and, having reached the source, takes hold and starts burrowing. A while later it lays eggs that hatch inside its mammalian host. The darling offspring then exit the way Mother entered, to spend their lives splashing happily about in the Amazon until they are grown up and fertile, whereupon they will lie in wait for the next passing mammal with a full bladder. Nature, enter me indeed.)

  As with many religions, the soppy veneration of sweet Mother Nature includes an element of self-hatred. Nature is nice and we bugger it up. The notion is a staple of the tourism industry, which tempts us with juicy images of virgin forests, lakes and beaches, unpeopled, Edenic. And the adjective it reaches for with tedious predictability is unspoilt. These places are as they were meant to be. What a glorious, scenic wonderland the world would be if only we weren’t part of it. So hurry now and enjoy one of the few remaining bits of wilderness before it goes.

  One obvious irony is that by selling the place to tourists the industry furthers the spoiling. Tourists need hotels, and a sewerage system and nice safe walkways in order to get the authentic wilderness experience. All of these things play their part in changing, or spoiling, that same wilderness. Whereupon the tourism operators find somewhere else that’s pretty and start again.

  A further irony, of course, is that most people want wilderness only on their terms. They want to photograph it from a distance, dabble a little at its safe edges, and then withdraw to precisely the comforts of civilization they believe they’ve come there to avoid. Were the place actually and unrelievedly natural they wouldn’t like it at all.

  There is also a flip side to the soppy veneration of nature. I was reading the ads in a real estatist’s window in London Street, Lyttelton. I had my dog on a lead. Also reading the ads was a youngish mother who was holding hands with her daughter aged perhaps six. Unnoticed, the child reached out and patted my dog. His tail wagged and soon there was such a love-fest going on between them that the girl giggled. Mother looked down, yanked the girl away with a ferocity that threatened the child’s shoulder joint and said, ‘How many times have I told you? Animals are dirty. We’re going home to wash right now.’ Hauling the child off at speed, the mother nevertheless found the time to turn and give me and my dog a look so filthy I felt in need of a wash myself.

  Her actions nicely illustrated not only how to hand on a neurosis to the next generation, but also an inversion of the nature-is-nice delusion, to wit, the belief that nature is unrelievedly hostile. It is a less common form than the soppy version but it is every bit as much a delusion. And it, too, can be put to commercial use.

  There’s a television programme called How Clean Is Your House? or something similar in which white-coated busybodies take swabs from under the sink or behind the toilet and discover, to the horror of the householder, that the place is shoulder deep in germs. Quite why the householder submitted to the intrusion in the first place I have no idea, nor have I watched enough of the programme to discover how it winds up. Perhaps a SWAT team is sent in wearing masks and overalls, armed with spray guns of a disinfectant that will blister paint, and thus saves the householder from death by germs and everyone is happy ever after. Indeed I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the show was sponsored by a maker of such ferocious disinfectant, because they often do something similar with their advertising.

  A toddler crawls towards a plastic toy. The camera zooms in on the toy and suddenly it’s as if you are looking through a parody microscope — it’s science, see — and the surface of the toy is shown to be crawling with, well, with germybuggy sort of things, coloured fluoropurple. The microscope camera tours the room discovering fluorescent germybugs on the lips of the adorable border collie, on the telephone, on the side table, until Mum, svelte, loving and wise, arrives with an improbably clean sponge and a bottle of branded disinfectant and the germybugs disappear with a single stroke of the improbably clean sponge and thus life is made safe for junior.

  Or in a different version the camera takes us down into the carpet across which junior is so adorably crawling and discovers down there among the cut pile a Jurassic Park of miniature beasties with nibbling mandibles and far too many legs, all of them eager to latch onto junior’s unblemished puppy-fat. Enter Mum once again, defender of the weak, armed this time with a branded vacuum cleaner and the sort of smile we all wear when vacuuming. Up the pipe goes Jurassic Park and with it the threat to junior’s wellbeing.

  As with the sentimental view of nature, the implicit assumption is that humankind is distinct from the natural world. Only now the natural world is not our friend but our bristling remorseless foe. Were it not for the vigilant forces of hygiene and technology it would soon be gnawing at our lifeless bones. Which is every bit as dishonest, as untrue to how things are, as the syrup of Disneyfication. The natural world on which we are entirely dependent, and of which we are so evidently part, is neither for us nor against us. It is simply indifferent to our welfare.

  11

  Be afraid

  One winter’s evening, when I was about seven, I had been playing at Kevin Toohey’s house and left my return a bit late. As I set out for home the light was fading and I decided to take the short cut up Orchard Lane. At the near end there were a couple of bungalows and the comfort of a street light. But then the lane kinked and I was in darkness. There were trees to either side. I could hear leaves swishing. I looked over my shoulder.

  I did not then know Coleridge’s lines:

  Like one, that on a lonesome road

  Doth walk in fear and dread,

  And having once turned round walks on,

  And turns no more his head;

  Because he knows, a frightful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread.

  But I doubt that they’d have helped.

  I had perhaps 400 yards to go to reach the cutting through to Wilmington Close. I started to run but the sound of my feet merely added to the fear. I think I was whimpering. When I reached home I found I had soiled myself. Abundantly. It was the first and only time since infancy, up till now at any rate. And it was fear that did it.

  Thomas Hobbes, he of the nasty, brutish and short, saw fear as one of the two fundamentals of human, and presumably animal, behaviour. The other was desire. Desire impelled you towards things, fear held you back. Every action you performed was the outcome of a tug of war.

  Fear is rooted in the most primitive parts of the brain, the pre-linguistic bits, the bits that we share with other mammals and that go back to our evolutionary roots. When my dog is scared the signs are obvious — the flattened ears, the hunched spine, the cringing posture, the tail whipped between the legs like an inverted question mark. The sight evokes pity in me, an urge to console.

  The effect of fear on our own bodies is similarly drastic: the shudder, the gulp, the tingling uprush of nausea, the quickened pulse, the widened eyes, the withdrawal of blood from the face so as to concentrate its resources where it matters; these effects are physiological and quite involuntary. The very mechanism of the body is compromised. We become literally different. For as long as fear lasts, which is until its cause is either destroyed or avoided, fear governs what we do. It supersedes everything else, for the very good evolutionary reason that those of our ancestors who were fearful stood a better chance of surviving. Those who weren’t tended not to be around long enough to become ancestors.

  The most potent fear is of the unknown or unseen. The known or seen can be faced, the consequences dealt with. I would hav
e been grateful in Orchard Lane, for example, if the bogeyman had actually materialized and tried to do whatever it is that bogeymen do. (My thinking, arrested by fear, had not considered the bogeyman’s possible intentions. If it had, I might have calmed down a bit.)

  But the bogeyman remained in the shadows and so fear kept its grip and my bowels relaxed theirs. I was gibbering and feeble, desperate for succour, and quite beyond reason, a condition that would cause any purveyor of bullshit to salivate. Which is why the exploitation of fear, and especially fear of the invisible, has been a favourite weapon in the bullshitter’s armoury since bullshit began.

  About 3 miles from Orchard Lane, near where the London to Brighton railway ducks into a tunnel through the South Downs, stands Clayton Church. It’s the standard English parish church, evocative, enduring, endearing. On its walls are murals close to 1000 years old. They depict, among other things, the Last Judgment. They lack the gory inventiveness, and the sadistic delight, of Hieronymus Bosch, but I can remember an image of two hopeless arms flung up in self-defence by a sinner who is being trampled by the hooves of a horse — the medieval equivalent of god running you down in a Humvee. The message is simple: be afraid.

  These would have been the only images that Clayton’s illiterate peasants saw from one week to the next. The only literate person in the village would have been the priest, the only book the Bible, of course, and it would have been in Latin, a language as remote to the peasantry as Sanskrit. And that was it. That was learning. That was truth. That was how things were.

  It suited the church very nicely. The clergy did not have to work. They lived off the work of their ‘flock’, whom they could tax and over whom they sat in judgment. Understandably the church’s one fear, a remote one most of the time, was that the flock might question the authority of the shepherd. The purpose of the murals was to minimize that risk. Keep the people afraid of the consequences of rebellion, or of questioning religious authority, and the job was effectively done. So scare them with hell.