Point missed, naturally
AFTER years of Bible study the only bit I can remember is from the Sermon on the Mount in St Matthew’s gospel. “Consider the lilies, how they grow,” Jesus says, “They toil not.”
Rather than urging everyone to give up work, the point of the verse, perhaps, is that a kind and all-powerful god is looking after everything for us.
Maybe, though, it reminds us what a huge gulf there is between ourselves and the natural world. The lilies are all right, they don’t have gas bills and long commutes. Same goes for all the furry and feathered beasts out there, living to a different set of rules altogether.
It’s why shows such as ANIMALS BEHAVING BADLY (BBC1) always strike a bum note because they can’t be bad and saying they are is a massive case of missing the point.
We began last night with the Gunnison’s prairie dog, a squirrellike creature found in the American south-west.
Being fertile for one six-hour stretch a year heaps the pressure on these creatures but the females get around it by mating with as many males as they can. More partners mean bigger litters with stronger immunity, so in what way is it helpful to describe a female prairie dog as “unfaithful”?
The mongoose, meanwhile, is the only species alongside the chimp and his less-hairy cousin, the human, to wage war.
The mongoose does this not out of inner nastiness but to avoid inbreeding.
One troop goes and batters another, sometimes losing up to a sixth of its members in the process but mating with the rival females in the midst of the mayhem.
It’s a strategy, not a kind of a mongoose character flaw. The point this cutesy programme really missed was less about animals and more to do with ourselves.
When did war and infidelity become bad for humans and stop being the things we did to survive? Programmes with promises such as LIVE WELL FOR LONGER (C4) are not, of course, being clear what living well means. I like to feel I am living well when I’m on holiday, baking my head in the sun, puffing an annual cigar and downing my own body weight in Corsican cheese and wine.
The “living well” of last night’s episode was a rather bleaker, medical one in which people didn’t burden the healthcare system, mainly by abstaining from things.
You couldn’t really disagree with the point nor did it really need saying. Of course a group of women (or men, or goats) are going to feel better and be healthier if they give up booze for a month.
Of course cannabis, used for more than 4,000 years has health benefits as well as turning people into rambling bores, and of course it’s going to take our law-makers and medical experts another 4,000 years to admit it.
Less obvious was the section on the new “smart drugs” taken by exam-cramming students and stressed executives, and what they could possibly have to do with living well or longer.
If the point was meant to be that you don’t live well or longer if you take smart drugs, well, the jury’s out on that one. The “experiment” meanwhile revolved around the farce of someone taking a genuine brain-booster one day and a placebo on another.
The whole point about drugs, as in the popular drugs people seek out to use and abuse, is you know damn well when you’ve taken one.