Mark Forstater's Blog

Give a Man a Fish

August 30, 2021 at 10:27 am Leave a comment

Maimonides wrote,

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day,

Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

This is a truth about  education and opportunity. Teaching is education, and without education you have no skills to find food for yourself. But opportunity, the freedom to use the skills you have acquired, may not be there. Unless jobs are available (not McJobs) then why bother getting an education. This is the situation in many parts of the country, and its that kind of deprivation that led many people to vote Brexit.

Will the government try to fix this? It’s doubtful they will really try, because to really try means to change utterly the way society operates at present.

How does society operate at present ? Ask our fishermen and women . Their rotting fish will tell you . And in 50 years there may not be any fish to catch . We are destroying wildlife in an unprecedented way and that destruction breeds conditions for more viruses to emerge.

Gaia, the earth, does not need us . It will recover its health if we are gone, like removing a cancer from the body. But we don’t have to go, we don’t have to disappear ( like the Neanderthals) if we decide to change . Because it does seem that the choice is self-destruct or survive. But to survive we have to change . And now, after a pandemic which has already changed many settled customs, is the right time to make these changes , to follow through on creating a kind of life that will sustain the planet and all the creatures on it , including us.

As Auden prophetically wrote “We must love one another, or die.”

Entry filed under: Age of Anxiety, Uncategorized. Tags: animals, Brexit, climate, destruction, environment, fish, Gaia, health, Maimonides, Neanderthal, pandemic, survival.