Lord of the flies but a pauper on the planet

There’s a fly on my keyboard. It’s on its back and not moving. In this heat I know how it feels.

It’s lying between two keys that I’ve never used. One says Home, with an arrow pointing backwards, and the other End, with an arrow pointing forwards. If you wish to consider that significant, be my guest.

What killed the fly I don’t know and there won’t be an inquiry. We view our own lives as sacrosanct, and we offer some legal protection to animal species that we find either companionable or delicious. But flies fall into neither category so a fly’s death goes unlamented and unrecorded.

What sort of a fly it is I can’t tell you, but it isn’t the sort of fly whose presence in my living room can start the comic imbalance routine. This features a 120-kilo man stalking a fizz with a onegram fly in it. Occasionally the fizz comes to rest on a window whereupon 120 kilos holds its breath and advances on the single gram as if playing Grandmother’s Footsteps. With infinite stealth he raises his plastic fly swat and then sets off again after the fizz.

Nor is the fly a high-stepping mosquito whose needling whine can dive bomb the ear in the middle of the night like a Stuka coming down on a line of refugees. That whine can induce the equally comic spectacle of 120 kilos taking refuge from the one-gram attacker by withdrawing entirely under the duvet and holding down the edges like pastry on a pie rim.

But as I say this fly is neither of those. It is the silent non-biting type, a generic fly. With a magnifying glass I can make out the tracery of the fly’s wings, like leaded glass, but a thousand times more delicate.

The fly’s head is the size of a full stop on this page, and most of that is given over to the eyes, yet within that full stop is enough computing power to turn what the eyes capture into an image, to operate those wings and to manoeuvre six filament legs each tipped with a foot that can cling to a ceiling. Like everything alive, the fly’s a miracle of engineering assembled by the slow blind drive of evolution.

If this fly has a name it will have been bestowed by some meticulous entomologist, poring over his drawers of specimens laid out in rows with a pin through the thorax. And that entomologist was just carrying on where Adam left off.

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

There’s a truth in this fairytale, which is that language is our way of taming the world, of making order from its limitless variety. Once we have named something we know it and own it. Things unnamed don’t exist. Our world is created by language.

And that world is the anthropocentric one of all the popular religions. The lord god gives us dominion over the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, whom we may kill and eat with impunity.

The planet will still be here in a million years. It's us we're worried about. For we are as flies.

But the ordered anthropocentric world is as delusory as god himself. The world will not be tamed or ordered.

Life carries on carrying on without any regard to human beings, always in flux, always evolving, never stationary. And rather than being above it all, as our religions and our language suggest, we are very much part of it.

An article in the paper last week suggested it was time to stop worrying about the extinction of species. Extinction happens, said the author. It is the natural way of things. 99.999 per cent of all species that have ever evolved are extinct.

To try to save the ka¯ ka¯ po is to be like Canute, holding back the tide by force of will. We would be wiser just to accept the inevitable.

What the author didn’t stress, however, is that this isn’t the first mass extinction of species. But all the previous ones had natural causes – volcanoes, meteors, climate change. The only cause of this one is us. We’re responsible.

So our bid to save the ka¯ ka¯ po or the humpback whale is partly guilt. But it is mainly fear. For though we talk of saving the planet, the planet needs no saving. The planet’s just fine. The planet will still be here in a million years. It’s us we’re worried about. For we are as flies.