What keeps us alive

After a morning in which we watched a young anchor of France-24 television grow faint before our very eyes, put her forehead on the newsdesk, and say I’m ill – I’m very ill… I think I’m going to be sick after showing the footage from Haiti, I went to the wing of the Louvre where the Mesopotamian and Egyptian antiquities were, thinking hard about human beings and civilization.

To have civilization in the first place, there needs to be surplus: there needs to be organized agriculture on such a scale as to produce surplus to set aside against disaster, and to create enough wealth to build the things that make for organized agriculture. There must be wealth, and then there must be reinvestment of wealth for the continuation of that wealth. Wealth must be expended upon canals, dikes and seed, upon ploughs and harrows and mules, then upon roads and carts and soldiers to guard the roads and carts, then upon cities to market and store the wealth, to train the intellectuals to ensure the correct time to harvest and how much of the stored wealth to lay out on improvements – and already we see where civilization falls apart, if we can’t trust the soldiers to protect their charges but instead rape or murder or steal from them, or that the officials in charge of the fields take the wealth meant for canals and dikes and seed and spend them on good living for themselves, or choose to destroy the whole structure with war.

Without a sense of sacred duty and the knowledge that to be corrupt and self-centered is to destroy the world, quite literally, the very ground we stand on to saw off the branch we sit on, there is no civilization. The farmers whose lives are taken up in making the basis of wealth cannot be expected to do all the rest of the work of civilization, as well. Give the farmers what they need: let them have some joy in their constant labor; let them see at the end of a long day that nothing has washed away all their work, that something is growing. They are the goose that lays the golden eggs: if they are not held as sacred in their busy poverty, the wealthy will never eat, the whole pyramid remains a flat desert. Kill them, or take away their canals and roads and the knowledge of when to plant and reap and store, and you’ve cut off your branch to life.

In Haiti the wealth flew out long ago, and with it everything the farmers need, so that they have had to eat their seed corn, eat their mules, cut down the trees that held down their soil, and now they beg from one another, and from the world. When you are spending all your life just staying alive, there is no time or energy to make it any better. It seems to me that it is only a sense of the sacredness of our pact with one another that has kept us alive as a species, whether it is the division of duties among those who hunt and gather or the division of duties among those who create and distribute the wealth of agriculture: superstitious dread of the gods went a long way to keep the Egyptian system intact, as did a dread of the Emperor among the Romans, but in the end it is a sense of the God in each of us, of the sacred obligations of the God in me to the God in you, and the sense – as the Romans learned when the plebs seceded from the patricians – that even if we cannot all be at the glamorous top of the pyramid, those at the top should know and worship what is under their feet: without the stomach, as Menenius Agrippa told the plebs, the hands and head of the body die – that is, the merchants and the leaders die without the farmers – but without the hands and head, the stomach is dead as well. The stomach is not as pretty an organ as the eyes or hands, he assures them, but it is every bit as necessary for life as the means to find and bring to the stomach what is needed for life. The organs should not argue among themselves who is the most beautiful or necessary, he told them back in 503 B.C., according to Livy (you may also have heard echoes of this in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus), they should just get on with the business of helping each other out, to let the whole creature live.

To live again, Haiti will need to replant its trees, rebuild its roads and water systems or build them new, rebuild and staff its schools, replant its fields, and then it must have leaders with a sacred sense of duty to their people, and then perhaps rebuild its presidential palace: without that greater vision and unbreakable bond of mutual responsibility – really a love of the whole structure and a sense of service to it – civilization is lost, and humans are doomed. We need each other as surely as we need water, food, sunlight and air. Those privileged to order the workings of the body of civilization must see that they have no choice but to serve, and to serve fairly.

Or that’s what I learned today at the Louvre.