No brains, please – we’re hippies

SL, JUNE 2002

HIPPIES ANNOY ME. Seriously, I can’t bear hippies. I don’t even mean the kind that sit in Knysna beading their moccasins and calling their children organic names like Walnut or Thrush. Them I would shoot on sight if I had good enough eyesight and a long enough barrel to reach Knysna. Nor do I mean the sort that tattoo the Chinese pictograph for “Unclean” on their lower backs and stumble around on Sunday afternoons with beach sand on their bare feet, still humming whatever tune was last playing at their trance party and paying with daddy’s credit card. No, I don’t even mean them.

These days hippies come in all shapes and sizes. Some wear shoes. Some even have jobs that don’t involve trying to persuade other people with jobs to hand over cash for some aesthetically displeasing item that has been grown, plucked or woven the night before. There are some hippies that are indistinguishable from normal folk. They look like us, they dress like us, they wash their hair with the same frequency, but sooner or later they give themselves away.

Hippies, in my book, are all those annoying critters out there who spout anti-human hogwash. I don’t mean anti-people, mind. Hippies are keen on people. Not as keen as on whales, squirrels, seaweed and whatever small or large animal a macrobiotic creature might be (and if you know, please don’t tell me), but keen nonetheless. No, I mean anti-human. Because the hippy inclination is to sniff at the very things that make us human.

Hippies rabbit on about love and harmony and oneness with all living things. Hogwash, I say (which is a hygienic process entirely wasted on our tasty friends the swine, and altogether more appropriate for hippies of the Cape Town variety). It is not human nature to seek oneness with all living things. Humans survived because we found a way to make sure our interests took priority over the interests of other living things. We eat ’em. We wear ’em. We milk them, whether they like it or not. We hitch ploughs to them and when they harm us, like tapeworms or germs or white ants in our floorboards, we figure out ways to kill them.

If we couldn’t do those things, we wouldn’t be here. If the little furry mammals that we once were had had a genetic predisposition to trying to live in harmony with all living creatures, a sabre-toothed tiger would be writing this column for an audience of woolly mammoths. And that just wouldn’t work. Woolly mammoths don’t have opposable thumbs. How would you turn the pages? You’re not going to pay good money just to stare at the cover all month.

We’re never going to live in harmony with all living creatures, or even with each other. We’re not made that way. We are made to seek advantage for ourselves and our families. I am not suggesting that wars are good and kicking animals is fine. I am saying that we must recognise what we are, and the best we can do is find practical ways to curb ourselves, rather than nonsense platitudes.

Fighting for peace is not always a contradiction in terms. We did it in 1939. We did it because we had to. And it worked. The hippies sang sappy songs decrying the Cold War and the nuclear race, but that worked too. The generals, it turns out, were right. There wasn’t a Third World War between Russia and the West, and there will not be one. There is a message there: peace – even the limited peace of which we are capable – is not achieved by blowing each other kisses. It is achieved by enforcing treaties and no-fly-zones and inspections of nuclear facilities. It is achieved through boring, ugly things like politics. It’s not pretty, and it’s not hippy, but that’s who we are.