The lessons of The Field

Where we are Now

I spent most of August living in a field. Or rather, several fields hosting, variously, an off-grid festival, a hippy camp and a coastal campsite. And it strikes me that a field is a good motif for where we are now, between the old order and something yet-to-come.

In previous times, I would have been tempted to call this space ‘liminal’. But the connotations of the descriptor sound too luxurious now, stemming from a middle-class poetics redolent of complacency and denial. It signals the cultural mindset that has got us where we are in the West, oblivious to the connection between choice and consequence, blithely assuming that things will get better no matter what we do.

Given the starkness of the issues facing us, I want a term that is plain and realistic. 'In-between times' is too suggestive of waiting and passivity. Perhaps the best I can do is the provisional ‘Now Time’ – a phrase which, like all productive fields, is muddy and messy, with life taking different forms and at various stages of development. The authoritarian trend that began in 2020 has not gone away and the alternative society dreamed of by many has yet to be created, so it's clear that we’ll be in this Now Time for a while. And it is rather like a field, a place both connected to our past yet holding paradisial associations of a brighter future, especially for part-time New Earthers like myself. What could be nicer than a big green space free of bureaucracy and paraphernalia, affording a chance to be closer to nature and focus on what really matters? Yet humans don’t live permanently in fields, and there are good reasons for that.

But here we are, in The Field.

Living on the hedge

II

On a bus going into the centre of London earlier this summer, I had a lot of time to think about the nature of this Now Time. Although there wasn't much traffic on what was a familiar route, the journey took about a third longer than it used to and I was hugely late to meet a friend. The bus trundled along main roads where the maximum speed had been reduced to 20 mph, making protracted pauses at traffic lights and bus stops. Outside, the roads and pavements of the capital were pretty empty. Could this really be the city I knew so well? It took me a while to identify the prevailing mood, so familiar yet out-of-place here. Then I had it – it was the lack of urgency that characterises poorer countries I've visited, a sense of purposelessness without much aspiration for the future.

Moving between different fields in August involved negotiating a network of closures and restrictions the like of which I've never seen before. Britain's town and cities, and the A-roads and motorways linking them, are full of bollards, plastic fences and temporary traffic lights. Lanes are cordoned off and roads are closed. The reasons given are various and include water works, broadband installation, road repair, extension or conversion into a cycle lane. Sometimes no explanation at all is given and often there's no one at work as the congested traffic crawls past the space behind the bollards. Fellow travellers I've met along the way confirm that it's the same in other parts of the country. Whether the proliferation of works are a sign of Britain's failing infrastructure or a sudden enthusiasm for upgrading, the phenomenon suggests a new disregard for road users.

I return to a London where the controversial expansion of Ultra Low Emissions Zone has come into force, whereby drivers of vehicles deemed 'non-compliant' from villages in Kent to the M25 north of the capital are levied a daily tax if they want to drive to work, see a relative or do some shopping. The scheme is part of a wider trend to restrict mobility embraced by politicians of all parties and at all levels of government. The Labour Party has expressed a desire to extend ULEZ to every town and city in the country while government officials, including the Mayor's office, are exploring the possibility of charging people for every mile they drive. Such measures evoke a future in which moving around is rationed for all but the wealthy.

I'll state this briefly because it is so obvious. Freedom of movement isn't just about the rights of individuals. It isn't just about economic prosperity. It's about our ability to act, create, and see each other. Restrictions on mobility quash community, social and cultural life, as well as limiting personal relationships. They've been tried in authoritarian countries, whether through bans on private car ownership or laws against travel. A more covert way of restricting movement makes getting around so expensive that people cannot afford it. Whatever the mechanism, the results are the same: a dispirited, impoverished society in which not much happens.

Britain is de-developing, embarked on a course of decline partly or largely due to policies pursued by government which are supported or tolerated by much of the population. It's a curious thing to observe: historically, under-development has been viewed extremely negatively in the West: we tend to see under-developed countries as lagging behind on a clearly defined Path of Progress, causing their peoples unnecessary suffering. To have a Western country decide to go in the other direction has never happened before.

So I got to thinking: what would a post-developed society look like?

III

This is a question about which I have genuine anthropological curiosity: most of my travel has been in countries that are neither the world's poorest nor richest but somewhere in-between, places where development that would otherwise have taken place has been blocked or stifled. The reasons for such stagnation range from ongoing low-intensity conflict and geopolitical interference to internal corruption and cultural apathy bequeathed by authoritarianism. You could call such countries under-developed or Second World, but I like to think of them as the Stuck Countries.

Stuck Countries are surprisingly interesting. They're like petri dishes which reveal how humans react when frustrated on a social and political scale over time, places where negative conditions draw out our natural resourcefulness and adaptability. Life finds a way. And as well as poverty and suffering, societal responses to the thwarting of natural human behaviours include an array of perverse outcomes never envisaged by the leaders who set them in train.

While they vary in their histories, geographies and climate, Stuck Countries tend to share certain characteristics. They include:

• an absence of a functioning infrastructure linked to a lack of national wealth and sense of possibility. On the whole, the country cannot ‘do’ much.

• high levels of emigration by those with the youth, skills or money to go in search of a better life elsewhere.

• strong conflicting feelings among the remaining population expressed in terms of love-hate towards their own country.

• endemic corruption and non-compliance as people do what it takes to survive, sometimes taking a benevolent form as they co-operate to get round oppressive regulations.

• A widespread inability to plan for the longer term afflicting the whole of the country but affecting ordinary people the most.

• a kind of madness embedded in the country's way of life which is clearly visible to outsiders but only discernible to a minority of the native population.

Although it's impossible to know what form a post-developed society would take, the features of Stuck Countries provide some useful clues; some of the early elements are already present in Bollard Britain. In recent months I've been hearing a new kind of talk from a group you could call 'desirable immigrants', qualified and skilled people with access to multiple visas and passports. Suddenly they are looking around at the high prices and low pay, the bureaucracy and poor public services with fresh eyes and a pressing question. (Yes, the weather is also mentioned.) Is it still possible to have a good life in Britain? Wouldn't they do better elsewhere? Even that most loyalist of publications, the Telegraph, is running pieces that recommend Brits still young enough to emigrate should leave the country.

Talk of non-compliance, whether about future public health measures or in the face of growing requirements imposed in the name of Net Zero, is becoming an established part of public discourse. With respect to ULEZ, non-compliance has shifted into direct action, with stories about the dismemberment of the new cameras populating Greater London appearing regularly in the media.

As a Stuck Country-in-the-making, Britain is entering some interesting times.

Probably best to go backwards

IV

While de-development may be part of the Now Time, it's only part of the picture. The dissonance of my recent bus journey through London also lay in the advertising along the way (we were going so slowly I had time to study the billboards). Faces stared into smartphones, entranced by the promise of ever-more pleasure and convenience from the digital world. With the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we are a new place. Whatever happens, we won't be 'going back' to a simpler way of life; our situation is more complicated than that.

One of my fields was the site of a stressful illustration of these complexities. I was about to leave a clifftop in West Wales when my car key fell apart in my hand. Resolving the problem was far from straightforward, because new generation car keys require programming by someone able to bring expensive equipment to the vehicle. Yet most of the humans involved weren't able to deal with the situation: the RAC wouldn't help with a key problem and the dealer who sold me the car mistakenly believed finding a solution would take weeks. I was on a steep learning curve involving duct tape and an auto locksmith.

Technology is moving faster than our ability to develop the structures, habits and values to keep up with the pace of development. When I say 'we', I mean ordinary people and many of the organisations that provide the services we depend on. Meanwhile, large corporations and governments are working fast to make sure they get the benefit of humanity's technological advancements. Witness the way in which politicians and financiers are rushing to create Central Bank Digital Currencies. They’re only doing what comes naturally to those whose purpose involves accumulating power and money. If you were one of them and had a new-found ability to control people’s spending and behaviour through programmable currency or their access to certain places and resources through smart technology wouldn’t you use it?

The fork in the road beyond The Field has a lot to do with the technological society. Outside The Field, and quite close by, lies another kind of field, where the farmer can pen you in and inoculate you at will, like so much livestock. Then there's the other kind of field most of us would prefer, a place (like my summer camps and festivals, for the most part) of cooperation, choice and connection. This is the one we haven't yet worked out how to create, a process that will involve not just going against the dominant trends but doing the hard, creative work of envisioning what it is that we do want.

In this respect, the spectre of post-development is the background against which important choices will be made. A useful analogy comes from The Field, where one of my neighbours told me about an experiment she and her husband had conducted to deal with a plague of wasps.

They set out the traditional wasp-trap – a narrow-necked jar filled with sugary water – and then, because they felt a bit mean, decided to offer the wasps another option. They piled a plate high with fruits and set out a breakfast of what they imagined to be the wasps' favourite foods. So the insects had a choice: they could nourish themselves on the fruits of nature and fly away, or they could gorge on the sugar and drown.

I asked what proportion had chosen which option. Was it fifty-fifty?

My field neighbour shook her head. Sadly, most people (her word) had gone for the instant gratification of pure sugar and perished.

That seems to me to be the most important lesson from The Field. Right now Britain, like other Western countries, is in a fallow period – yes, a fallow field – as we mull what we, as self-determining creatures in a beautiful world, want. At some point, and maybe quite soon, we need to get clear about what kind of life we're going to lead when we leave The Field. Will we accept the instant gratification and convenience handed to us on a plate or will we make the effort to gather the fruits of nature? Pure sugar or sweetness with fibre?