This Article started life entitled Thinking Beats Recycling, then it was renamed Little People, now it’s called Intellectual Evolution. Having failed to find a magazine that wants to publish it, I thought I’d put it here under my newly inaugurated ‘Old Witch’ category, just in case anyone is in this mood…

All the little people, the nice, ordinary people like you and I, are upset by the prospect of polar bears drowning amid melting iceburgs, and islands of plastic rubbish befouling our oceans. We are civilized, we want to save the world, but we are powerless in the face of big, nasty, unprincipled politicians and international corporations, and there just isn’t enough time left to solve our gargantuan problems.

Is that how you see our situation? Has it left you feeling bitter and defeated? Or are you consumed by a secret guilt because you suspect that it’s all your fault, and that human beings are just helpless losers who have lost the art of climbing trees and fallen out of sympathy with our beleaguered planet? I suspect this thing called ‘guilt’, which we have invented, is our worst enemy. Consider the following situation from my life:

I stand in the queue in the Post Office. Three of their six cashier posts are open. That’s market forces. There aren’t enough customers to make it worth their opening all of them. It’s inevitable. Just as it’s inevitable that only three of the five post offices this town once had still exist. Slowly, it dawns on me that one of them is five minutes walk from here – an attractive little seafront shop, a bookshop- come- stationers- come- post- office. I even know the owner. The queue here at the main post office is going to take longer to clear than the walk round to the little shop. I wonder if I can be bothered to drag myself away from my town centre habit and use the little shop.

This happened once, twice, three times in six months. The second time, the queue was long enough to give me time to remember that I’m a rebel, a fighter for the underdog, a supporter of the small, the local and the personal. With an immense wrench, I tore myself from the resentful queue of everyone and took my parcels to the little shop. It was very pleasant. The third time, I didn’t bother because I’d read in the paper that the town’s remaining sub-post offices were closing. I also heard from my mother that the owners of this particular little shop had been having a hard time selling anything at all since the town centre Mall opened, and were more than half pleased to accept the post office’s compensatory package and close down. Shame. Guilt. It was a not bad little bookshop. I should have used it more often. Ah well, inevitable, really.

We have one large bookshop in our town now. Waterstones. How different the world would be if all the people in the queues at the tills in Waterstones had acted on those rebellious thoughts and walked the two minute walk to the independent bookshops in the town. And if the jostling people in the queues in Morrisons had crossed the road to the little grocer’s that used to be open from 6.30am. You can’t shop on the way to work any more. The little shop has gone. Such a shame. The lady who ran it knew what her customers wanted, ordered stock with specific people in mind, and more often than not would see you coming and have what you wanted on the counter ready. I do miss her.

I hear you sighing, I hear you telling me it’s inevitable. Little people can’t buck market forces. You can’t swim against the tide. Your little walk won’t make much difference because everyone else won’t do it. But why not? I’m one of the everyone I’m complaining about, and I know how hard it was to leave the post office that day. Why have we swallowed this cant about the pointlessness of…. doing what we really want to do?
So, we are down to one large bookshop in my town. Waterstones moved into the town centre Mall, took over our old Ottakars, worked hard at selling a few hundred fastsellers cheaper and louder than the little shops did until the little shops gave up and closed. It was easily done because everyone obediently queued up for those fastsellers. Those few who knew they wanted something more unusual were the only ones to make the effort and walk round to the little shops out in the main street in the weather – but they only walked that walk on the odd occasion that Waterstones let them down. Not often enough to keep the little shops in business.

I believe big chain stores will let you down more and more often once the specialist shops have gone, in just the same way as supermarkets drop their standards and raise their prices once they’ve killed off the local competition. You can’t blame them. Market forces demand it or, to put it another way, they will do whatever we little people allow them to do.

Has it happened in your town yet? To find out, try asking for any small press book in the high street bookshop. If it’s not stocked by a major distributor, it probably isn’t on their computer. The shop assistant will look at you with puzzled eyes and tell you they don’t think the book exists. If you then roll your eyes and go round to the little shop for it, the owner of the little shop may well look up the publisher and find the book for you. But if the little shop has gone, you’re stuffed. Inevitable, you say. Because queuing in big shops is what everyone does, you say. Because shops like Waterstones have to compete with the supermarkets who were threatening the entire book industry with their stocks of a few dozen discounted titles.

I swallowed that idea when my local market gardener gave up selling eggs in the face of government regulations that only big egg farms could cope with. I swallowed it when our local bakery closed down (I was already buying most of my bread in the supermarket – just went to the bakery when I wanted really nice stuff). Inevitable, I said.

But then I came across a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke about ‘easy options’. He pointed out that evolutionary pressure leads the herd to the easy option but that as humans, we are driven by intellect as well as blind instinct. That if we are to exploit our evolutionary advantage – our intellect – we must stop and think about the ‘difficult’ option. It may well be the better choice. And, he suggested, because we have pathetic eyes, ears, hardly any claws etc etc, we’d jolly well better use the one advantage we have got if we hope to survive. So we are quite wrong to quote Darwin’s evolutionary theory to prove that going against the herd is futile, and to conclude that independent thinking will get you nowhere.

The reverse is true: Our intellect is now our only Darwinian advantage. We should rather say that if we don’t make use of our only Darwinian advantage, we will inevitably fail. The point we seem to be missing is that this intellect, this ability to think about possible futures and make informed choices is an incredibly powerful thing. Wouldn’t it be better to get into the habit of using it, rather than just pining because our teeth and claws aren’t good enough to allow us to escape ‘back to nature’?

As an example, let’s apply some intellect to rubbish recycling. At the moment, I grumpily make an effort towards recycling because everyone says it’s a good thing. What’s good about it then? I used to take my dad’s beer bottles back to the brewery, put milk bottles out for the milkman to reuse, give egg and vegetable boxes back to the market garden lady for reuse. I used to darn socks, make cushions and bedcovers with the good bits of discarded clothes, and use the worn bits for cushion-stuffing and cleaning rags (J-cloths to the uninitiated). I used newspapers as templates, insulation and packing material and I burned or composted most of the rest of the household waste – not that we called it waste. I love my compost heap and ashes are useful in the garden.

Now, our town council has produced a complicated variety of plastic sacks, containers and by-laws in line with the modern recycling industry. Companies justify their production of vast amounts of plastic packing by the fact that it is ‘recycleable’ (that is, it can, in theory, be used to make eczema-inducing clothes that soon look shabby and old but are no use for patchwork, or it can be used to make smelly, unattractive surfaces for paths and road crossings.) The market garden lady who brings my vegetables isn’t allowed to use recycled cartons any more – in fact she doesn’t sell eggs any more. She was defeated by laws designed to stop big farms spreading diseases. Newspapers are no longer acceptable for food wrapping or indoor insulation, and we are told that the type of ink they use these days is bad for the garden soil. My neighbours hate my compost heap and want me to use a plastic ‘recycling unit’, and they complain if I every burn anything. They say I’m being unhygienic and anti-social. (I say, “well what about your beef-and-paraffin-stinky barbeques, and the way you dive into your stinky cars and try to kill me every time I go out?” – but that’s just me being anti-social again.)

So – brain in gear. Rubbish recycling is not a good thing. It’s a sop to guilty consumers. It persuades them it’s still okay to buy all these unnecessary, poisoned products. I could make myself very unpopular by refusing to co-operate.

I could decide that it’s pointless to swim against the tide – everyone else is going along with it. Or I could do some thinking of my own. “I’m a rebel, I want to save the world!” Lots of people say it and, inevitably, give up the crusade. Why? Because one person can’t save the world. Wait, wait – don’t switch your brain off yet! One person can’t save the world but it would be ridiculous to be disappointed or discouraged because you fail in such a gargantuan task. If you swim against the tide, don’t do so to save the world. Defeat would be inevitable. But, here is the subtle point: If you swim against the tide, the people immediately around you will see you doing it and so discover that it’s possible. If you can manage to swim against the tide without behaving like a scary mad rebel, people who see you will discover that nice people can swim against the tide. (Ah – I’d better stop being rude about my petrol-blarting neighbours!) If you can swim against the tide without being uncouth and visibly enjoy it more people might want to join in. That’s an achievable goal and a realistic and valuable one. It is the antidote to defeatist belief in ‘inevitability.’ I could quote David Edwards of Medialens, and say the only useful way to prevent excess rubbish is to stop shopping. To stop earning, or needing, lots of money for shopping. In short, he said:

If you don’t earn it, you don’t have to spend it.
If you don’t spend it, you don’t have to earn it.

I could quote Noam Chomsky. When challenged with the futility of political activism in the face of modern media techniques, he said it isn’t impossible to change things. It’s just impossible to change things easily. You have to do some work, do some thinking, make some sacrifices. But I don’t think that last bit is quite right. ‘Making sacrifices’ suggests being hard done by, going without. I know most people won’t do that because I’m one of everyone, and I won’t do it. It is not in my nature to promote sour-faced abstinence. But I don’t need to – I really enjoyed the feature in The Independent recently about the woman who got her kids involved in a plastic-free shopping experiment. They were learning, and having fun. After all, what kind of sacrifice is it to go without plastic rubbish, dodgy credit accounts, ever more complicated mobile phones and appliances? Why demand the freedom to stand miserably in queues to buy substandard goods and services from large companies who will thwart you with prefabricated ‘customer services’ when their products let you down? I am swimming against the tide here, but I’m doing it for fun, for a better life, and because I would be miserable if all the polar bears drowned and it was my fault.

Has the recent anti-plastic bag campaign by the Daily Mail your enthusiasm? Are you, just for a moment, thinking you’d like to be the worm that turned? Are you thinking that you would, if only we little people weren’t so helpless, if only we weren’t at the mercy of a bunch of unprincipled, corrupt politicians? Well, let’s think about politics then. Let’s apply our unique evolutionary advantage – our intellect – to the problem of unprincipled politicians.

Most people agree that we should endeavour to preserve our democratic system. Okay, well let’s think about that: Modern democracy is a system that appears to be run by unprincipled, ruthlessly self-interested, unimaginative herd-following party animals called ‘politicians’. If you doubt me, look at the smoking legislation. For years, the House of Commons was wreathed in smoke and the politicians happily made laws that favoured tobacco barons, not one whit concerned about the number of our citizens who died horrible deaths in a state of penniless despair. It was inevitable – they were addicted. Etc. But once a sizable and vociferous section of the population began to object to the smoke, and spend their money in smoke-free restaurants and bars, the unprincipled party animals rushed to claim the moral high ground and passed laws banning smoking all over the place.

Politicians, just like big media companies, watch the little people, and do what will make them popular. The Daily Mail has got itself involved in the anti-plastic bag issue at this time because it is now what people want.

At the moment, the government generally makes laws that favour big corporations and international producers and retailers but, I believe, once a sizeable and vociferous portion of us start objecting to this, and withdrawing our custom from retailers we don’t like, they’ll rush for the moral high ground once more, say they always preferred local, sustainable, customer-oriented retailers and they will start making laws to favour them.

So there you have it, there are no little people. However old fashioned it may sound, we are the people; and we don’t need a revolution. We have the power – brainpower and spending power. All we need to do is apply some thought and then use our voices and our money intelligently to lead our politicians where we want them to go. And here’s an encouraging thought – if we use our power – our intellect – to lead our politicians and our media chiefs to make good, social, humane choices, they’ll start being nice people again. That’s evolution for you!