Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which is found in his magnum opus The Republic, is used to illustrate how humans are ignorant of ultimate reality. It was written as an imagined dialogue between Plato’s brother and his mentor Socrates. According to Socrates, humanity is like people who are chained in a cave in a position that forces them only to see a wall. The people watch shadows projected onto the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them. They name these shadows and believe they are the real world, but they are fragmentary representations of it. If the people were released from the cave and able to see those objects by the light of the sun, they would see directly the true forms of objects that can only be perceived indirectly by means of reason.
In their wonderfully readable and incisive book, Dear Townies, Dominic Wightman and John Nash also make use of a cave allegory to represent a kind of pervasive ignorance on the part of the cave-dwellers about the nature of life beyond the cave. For Wightman and Nash, the cave is a metaphor for civilisation which is governed by the moral axiom of ‘sharing and fair exchange without violence.’ Civilisation’s cave is a defence against the mortal dangers of the natural world that lurks outside, and which has neither rules nor morals and where only the fittest survive.
The dichotomy of civilisation and nature, according to Wightman and Nash, has created other dichotomies. It is a female role to work inside the cave and nurture humans whereas it is a male role to go outside of the cave, compete to win against natural forces and gain resources through the primary industries of hunting, fishing and farming. There are exceptions to this of course. There are male office workers who are cave dwellers and shepherdesses who brave the wilds, but the exceptions tend to prove the rule. It is the dichotomy between townies, who are cave dwellers and countrysiders, whose livelihood is one of competing and cooperating with nature, which is Wightman and Nash’s concern. This relationship is characterised by the dominant townie population’s ignorance of the countryside’s way of life and its attempt to dictate to rural folk how to manage the countryside.
Wightman and Nash are surely right. We are all aware of the stereotypes that are the lens through which urban dwellers view those who live on farms and in villages. Who has not come across in popular culture the gin-guzzling, corrupt squire, the farmer who pays his labourers a pittance and the village idiot sitting on the village green and dispensing folk wisdom’s risible platitudes?
These satires may seem funny to some, but the matter is more serious. Due to the ignorance of townies who make up the majority of Britain’s legislature and so-called eco-friendly pressure groups, laws have been applied to the countryside that endanger it and the vital businesses of those who make a living managing it. Wightman and Nash therefore are doing us all a favour by bringing this to our attention.
They provide many examples of disastrous interferences which are too numerous to describe in total here, but a few examples will suffice. Animal rightists object to hunting and yet hunting is part of the culling of animal populations that is also conducted by gamekeepers, and which preserves those populations from starvation and nastier deaths through natural predation. The introduction by misguided environmentalists of natural predators through rewilding in order to promote the natural diversity of species leads to devastating predation on farmers’ livestock. Banning the burning of overgrowth to encourage the land’s fertility has exacerbated forest fires which are fuelled by that remaining overgrowth. Wightman and Nash’s message is stark: leave farming and land management to the experts namely the countrysiders, otherwise the agricultural sector and the food supply will suffer.
Dear Townies is not only consciousness-raising but seeks solutions. Towards the end of the book, there is an invitation to townies to sit down, perhaps over a cup of tea, and talk with countrysiders. For this to happen, townies must ditch their eco-chuggers who dominate environmental charities, public bodies, think tanks and the Media. They must also rein in the supermarkets who buy low and sell high farm products. The countrysiders, for their part, are obliged to halt the activities of wrong’uns in their ranks who damage the environment and subject their animals to unnecessary suffering.
So, if you are a townie who has only ever lived in the cave, buy this book. You will learn a new respect for those who work with the land and the flora and fauna that occupy it. If you are a countrysider, buy it too for a renewed sense of self-worth, for it is by your work that the townies are fed and dressed.
Dear Townies is published by Western Press and is available to purchase here.
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
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Townies perceptions of country dwellers? I suspect for most urbanites, and especially those from outside the UK even second or third generations, they have no perception or indeed any interest in those who don’t live among dense streets and buildings (plus probably think greener outer suburbs are the countryside).This of course then plays into the hands of the urban elites to accuse the countryside of being racist and so ripe for extending the urban sprawl into the green belt.