View from the Top!

A thought prompted by the BAFTA awards.

In late July, we can behold the vasty fields of golden wheat across our land. Natura naturans, so the Roman said. To the outsider it looks simply that that is the way things are and always are.

But the farmer knows the work behind that shimmering golden vista: ploughing, planting, tending, and years of accumulated knowledge often in the most unforgiving weather. The farmer is not a figure from history: look and you will see the farmer there right now, today, making it all possible. The field does not sustain itself.

Abraham Maslow described human needs as a hierarchy - a pyramid. At the base sit the fundamentals: food, shelter, warmth. Above that, safety and security. Then belonging. Then esteem. And at the apex, self-actualisation: the full expression of human potential, creativity, purpose.

The pyramid exists because all the levels are required. The lower ones are load-bearing foundations. As we move up the pyramid, we don’t neglect the level below: it is a s necessary for one’s existince in any level above. The higher levels exist only because the lower ones are being maintained and by effort that is largely invisible to those at the top of the pyramid.

What happens when those who inhabit the upper levels of the pyramid lose sight of what is holding them there.

I watched the BAFTAs award ceremony last night. The successful and the celebrated spoke with genuine conviction about creativity, disruption, experimentation; about the importance of being bold, taking risks, refusing to conform. The advice is not wrong on its own terms. But it is advice delivered from those who have only known the golden wheat fields in late July; by those who has perhaps never had to consider what the field looked like in February, or who did the work to make it what it is.

For a person whose immediate reality is making the rent, keeping the heating on, holding things together, week after week, the instruction to be disruptive and experimental is not just inspiring but rather more than a tad condescending. It brings to mind, Marie-Antoinette’s apocryphal, ‘Let them eat cake.’

The deeper problem is not that some people give advice that does not apply to everyone, but the assumption, often unconscious, that the conditions required for self-actualisation at the upper level of the hierarchy are simply the natural state of the world - like the field of golden wheat in July. That level five is the given. The norm. The quiescent form of things.

It is not, of course. For most people, across most of human history, and for very large numbers of people right now, the lower levels are the daily reality. The apex of the pyramid is not the default. It is the exception and made possible by an enormous, continuous, largely unacknowledged effort on the part of people who maintain the lower levels.

When that is forgotten - or ignored, something important is lost: it is the understanding that the conditions for human flourishing are not in themselves self-sustaining. They require tending. The social structures, the safety nets, the communities, the quiet daily sacrifices of ordinary people across all four of the lower levels are required. They are the foundations of everything built above them.

When we mistake the golden field for the natural order of things; when we come to believe that level five is simply where the world begins; we stop understanding what it costs to keep it that way.

There is a bargain, a social contract. We are stupid, but we ain’t stupid and will support and sustain you for we know your talent enriches the human condition. In reverse, do not forget please that if it is not us who granted you your god-given abilities, it is we who have created environment which nourishes you. And when we stop honouring the people whose effort, day after day, makes it all possible, then our civilisation will fade.

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