The title refers to the 1980 film by the South African filmmaker Jamie Uys. The film tackles the subject of what happens to a culture when new technology is introduced without the consent of those who are going to use it. The technology here is an empty coca cola bottle dropped from a passing bi-plane onto the Kalahari desert where it is discovered by the indigenous bushmen. They find it a very useful implement for its hardness in pulping large vegetables, and in smoothing snakeskin. They also use it as a wind instrument and a plaything. But it soon becomes clear that it is a disruptive force due to this usefulness, and that it has unsettled the hitherto quiet and peaceful settlement. It's not long before the bottle's hardness is exploited once more, this time in line with modernity, in hitting someone over the noggin with it.
The film is of course a comic allegory about the encounter of two wildly incongruous cultures, and what happens when new technologies are imposed upon a culture.
In fact, it quite quickly shows us the difference between the two cultures:
The characteristic which really makes them different from all other races...is that they have no sense of ownership at all. Where they live, there's nothing you can own… These Bushmen have never seen a stone or a rock in their lives. The hardest things they know are wood and bone. They live in a gentle world, where nothing is as hard as rock, steel or concrete.
Only 600 miles to the south, there's a vast city. And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier...the more complicated he made it. Now his children are sentenced to ten to fifteen years of school, to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt... every hour of the day to his self-created environment.
On the one hand, you have a tribe that unites with its environment, recognizes the intrinsic worth of said environment not in terms of money or goods but in terms of life and living. Life and living is work, and vice versa. Life and living is all there is. And it is enough. As such, organism and environment appear to co-exist as a single evolutionary phenomenon, with the necessary mutual respect that this situation merits. On the other hand, you have a tribe which has been so dislocated from its environment that even their word for it appears to connote some 'thing' that surrounds them (and hence, does not enter). This dislocation as well as the artificial 'bush' that modern man has constructed is predicated upon the idea that there has to be more than just life and living, or that somehow man is actually a god who has dominion over Nature and all entities therein. In other words, modern man in his search for more has become pathological. He is a perversion of the tribal man. His life is so complex and stressful, so utterly de-natured, that he simply does not know where he is anymore. His attention to the local, under the mandate of globalisation, is not required. His attention to his own locomotion, under the mandate of progress (of 'making his life easier'), is no longer needed. And as I've already intimated before in this blog, 'knowing where you are' (attention to the local), and 'knowing who you are' (attention to the locomotive), are the keys to being human.
As the forgotten Scot Dugald Semple, a man whose own education was nothing more than 'a form of conscription for our soulless and war-like commercialism', once wrote:
Thoreau too had shown me in his famous Walden that the simple life was no mere dream or theory but a practical solution to the complexity of our social system... I began then in earnest to simplify my life, believing that if the present system was wrong one should live by it as little as possible. That is to say, he must conform a little and reform much... It is noble to die for one's principles but it is much nobler to be able to live for them.
And the principle here in case you missed it is in Living.... with a capital 'L'.... Living in harmony with nature and not out of kilter with her. In the former we have peace and respect and conscience, in the latter we have violence and deception and science.
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