The Mercy of Nature

Ben Wildsmith

Scepticism about expert opinion has been the defining trait of politics since the internet atomised us all and removed the need to find consensus in our immediate surroundings.

It no longer matters if your views are considered beyond the pale by the neighbours, you can just log on and find a global community to support them.

During the Covid lockdowns, enforced isolation, alongside a sickly feeling of helplessness, saw an explosion in people ‘doing their own research’, which often meant being led by the nose through a labyrinth of pseudo-science by people with monetised YouTube channels.

To quest after the truth is a very human need, and as with all needs, it can be manipulated by shysters.

‘Lived experience’

In the ‘respectable’ worlds of academia and the arts we have seen a parallel trend. To redress traditional privileges, gatekeepers in these spheres have encouraged the legitimacy of ‘lived experience’ when selecting projects to support.

This is a welcome development which encourages a multiplicity of voices and works against the ossification of institutions around tired points of view. Subjectivity is not, however, a virtue in itself.

The concept of a personal, bespoke ‘truth’ acts against the idea of a shared endeavour to uncover such a golden thread. If I already carry the truth of my existence with me, then what possible bearing can your experience have on that?

I’m writing from Mullumbimby in New South Wales where I, and everybody else, is fortunate to be unharmed by Cyclone Alfred. Twenty yards in front of me, as I sit on my brother’s porch, the Brunswick River flows high in its banks and last night’s rain sounded like a divine effort to burst them.

An hour away on the Gold Coast my elderly uncle has been stuck in his 7^th floor flat with no power and no elevator.

One kangaroo

I’ve been in Australia just over a week but, according to the cult of personal experience, my knowledge of it carries more weight than any fancy book learnin’ you might have accumulated without visiting.

In my experience, it is an exceedingly rainy continent in which the fields lie submerged under water and the roads are strewn with fallen trees.

There is only one kangaroo, which lives near the remote highway between Emerald and Roma in Queensland. All the others are pictures on road signs or in zoos.

The night before we arrived here, the army knocked on everybody’s doors in the town and instructed them to evacuate. The local RSL club was set up as a hub to facilitate the mass migration. Virtually nobody went.

Technically, we were allowed to travel here, but it was in the face of dire warnings from authority.

Now, granted, Mullumbimby is the counterculture capital of Australia.

When we arrived, there was an elderly bloke walking around town, as he does every day, blowing soap bubbles to express his joy at existing. You can barely find anyone wearing shoes.

Flooded fields between Boonah and Canungra

The almost blanket, ‘No thanks,’ to a military suggestion to get out of town, though, strikes me as very much of the times.

Institutional dishonesty

All of us, from Tregaron to Toowoomba, have been subject to institutional dishonesty of such warping depravity that instructions from above are distrusted as a matter of instinct.

One day, though, the cyclone won’t downgrade to a tropical low at the last moment. The coherence that keeps us facing in the same direction, when adversity advances, is more than a stultifying surrender of personal liberty, is the glue that makes the structure of human society viable.

By allowing our civic affairs to fall into such disrepute that we have no common frame of reference, we are putting ourselves at the mercy of nature.