Anti-Human Reflections on the Red-Billed Leiothrix

Leiothrix lutea

 

 

I. 

 

In a country in which insect numbers have fallen a staggering 65% in the last twenty years and other factors, such as agricultural intensification and habitat destruction, are all making survival increasingly difficult for our feathered friends, it's surprising that any foreign bird species would decide to try its luck and make the move to England.

 

However, that's just what the red-billed leiothrix - known by some as the Pekin robin or the Japanese nightingale - has decided to do; much to the horror and outrage of those who fear this brightly-coloured subtropical songbird will colonise our gardens, threaten native bird populations, and change the dawn chorus for ever ...

 

It's a familiar tale: the same people who hate ring-necked parakeets hate these little birds. And they always justify their opposition to the invasive species on the same grounds; namely, a desire to safeguard the survival of native creatures, although they don't seem to have done a very good job of that over the last 50 years, during which time tens of millions of birds have disappeared from our skies.  

One might have imagined, therefore, that they would welcome these newcomers, who have been recorded in several parts of the country. 

 

But not so: a tiny number of red-billed leiothrixes spotted in southern England and thought to have escaped from captivity - not flown here directly from China and not known to be successfully breeding - has got them worked up into a frenzy: Non-native species are never a good thing, sometimes they’re neutral, but they're never positive, as one expert put it.

 

II. 

 

Meanwhile, I heard today on the news that ten thousand human migrants have (illegally) crossed the Channel in small boats and set foot on British shores so far this year (after 28,500 arrived in 2021), ever increasing the UK human population and transforming England into the most overcrowded (and nature-depleted) large nation in Europe.   

 

Personally, I'd like to see far more birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and insects and far fewer people on these islands and would happily support an extensive programme of rewilding and depopulation in order to increase biodiversity. For frankly, the latter isn't going to happen without the former. 

 

Ultimately, I agree with Birkin, there's no thought more beautiful or cleaner than a world empty of people and full of birdsong.   

A Town Called Prato (Notes on Sino-Italian Relations in the Age of Coronavirus)

I. 

The Italian city of Prato has a long and noble history that commenced with the ancient Etruscans and is home to many museums and cultural monuments. Lying north-west of Florence, it is Tuscany's second-largest city and an important industrial centre, particularly associated with the textile sector and the production of luxury leather goods that are sold all over the world and stamped with the names of the great Italian fashion houses.

Many factories and workshops, however, are no longer owned by local people. They are owned, rather, by wealthy Chinese investors (and often operated by criminal gangs). And they mostly employ tens of thousands of Chinese workers from Wuhan and Wenzhou - some of whom are working legally, many of whom are not.

New direct flight routes were established between China and Italy. Those who couldn't get official work visas paid people smugglers huge fees, which they then had to work off; a form of modern slavery enforced with the threat of violence. Those not making designer goods for the rich produced fast affordable fashion for the poor, eagerly sold via the high street retailers.   

There have been a number of police raids on these premises, but mostly the authorities turn a blind eye to what's been going on since the 1990s and the EU have also remained silent on the flouting of their own labour laws. For as one local official pointed out, the economic performance of his region is significantly better than in the rest of the country thanks to Chinese capital and cheap Chinese labour, so it would be crazy to intervene.

Of course, many Italians resent the Chinese immigrants, accusing them of undermining working conditions and lowering wages* - but what can they do? This is the brave new world of globalisation that the liberal elite promised would lead to opportunities for all. Don't mention organised crime and corruption, or rising tensions between the two communities, just enjoy the cultural diversity and order some kung pao chicken to takeaway.        

II.

On 31 December 2019, the Health Commission of Wuhan, Hubei, China, informed the World Health Organisation about a cluster of acute pneumonia cases with unknown origin in its province. On 9 January 2020, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported the identification of a novel coronavirus as the cause.

The first cases of coronavirus in Italy were confirmed on 31 January 2020, when two Chinese tourists in Rome tested positive for the disease. Six weeks later, and Italy has the world's highest per capita rate of coronavirus cases and is the country with the second-highest number of positive cases (as well as deaths) in the world, after mainland China.

On 8 March 2020, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced that all of Lombardy and 14 other northern provinces were being quarantined; the following day, this lockdown was extended to the entire country and nearly all commercial and social activity has since ground to a halt.

At the time of writing (12 March), Italy has had over 15,000 confirmed cases and over 1000 deaths. On a brighter note, there have also been 1,258 recorded recoveries. 

Ironically, the Chinese authorities have offered medical assistance and supplies and, according to a Beijing news agency, China and Italy have reaffirmed their close bilateral ties in a phone call between respective foreign ministers; Luigi Di Maio apparently congratulating his Chinese counterpart for the robust action taken by China in preventing the spread of the disease and saying that Italy can learn much from China's successful experience in combatting the virus. 

Notes

* It's vital to note that just as Chinese migrants aren't responsible for the negative consequences of globalisation, nor are they to blame for the spread of coronavirus in Italy. In fact, in Prato, where there are at least 45,000 Chinese citizens (including those there illegally), there are so far no recorded cases of the disease. Something that those who would seek to politicise this health crisis in often racist terms might like to consider.

See: D. T. Max, 'The Chinese Workers Who Assemble Designer Bags in Tuscany', The New Yorker, (16 April 2018): click here. Note: this essay originally appeared in the print edition under the headline 'Made in Italy'. 

Under the Radiation of New Skies: On the Spirit of Place and the Question of Migration

D. H. Lawrence: Untitled ink sketch (1929)

They walked a new earth, were seized by a new electricity, and laid in line differently. 
Their bones, their nerves, their sinews took on a new molecular disposition in the new vibration.

      They breathed a savage air, and their blood was suffused and burnt. 
A new fierce salt of the earth, in their mouths, penetrated and altered the substance of their bones. 
Their subtlest plasm was changed under the radiation of new skies, 
new influence of light, their first and rarest life-stuff transmuted.

I. Genius Loci

One of the great ironies of Lawrence's savage pilgrimage was that it taught him the importance of a homeland. For it seems that the freedom to wander around the world isn't ultimately as fulfilling as belonging to a people "polarized in some particular locality".

Despite what some ethno-nationalists claim, Lawrence isn't simply subscribing to a völkisch ideology of blood and soil. He is rather affirming the Romantic belief that different places have a different vital effluence and are aligned with different stars.

The British Isles, for example, possess a "wonderful terrestrial magnestism" (over and above "the indisputable facts of climate and geological condition") and it is this which has made the British people what they are. Thus, for Lawrence, race is ultimately more a metaphysical question of spirit, than it is a biological one to be discussed in terms of heredity. 

But the spirit of place doesn't only determine customs, beliefs, behaviours, etc., it also fatally undermines attempts at globalism and the dream of an ideal, homogenised humanity living as one. In this respect it might better be thought of as a kind of malin génie:

"The spirit of place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens ..." 


II. On the Law of Transubstantiation

What, then, of the millions of migrants from Africa and the Middle East who are driven northwards by invisible winds?* Even if they can be assimilated into European society, can they ever feel comfortable subject to a demonic spirit belonging to an alien continent and beneath the radiation of new skies?

Probably not. There is an unthinkable gulf between them and us and crossing the Mediterranean in a little boat isn't the major problem they face (deadly as this journey can prove to be). And it doesn't really matter how they think and feel about things, or what they do, once here.

Ultimately, however, the malevolent reality of Europe will disintegrate their old way of being. Thus, it's not our values and human rights that will triumph, it's the inhuman spirit of place. Uprooted from their native lands, planted in new soil, they can do nothing but become-other.

Become, that is to say, future Europeans, who will be as different to their present selves as their present selves are to us today. This is Lawrence's law of transubstantiation and it offers the hope that from out of Völkerchaos a new order and a new people will slowly emerge, as "through hundreds of years, new races are made [and] people slowly smelted down and re-cast."

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Spirit of Place', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). I am quoting from both the final version of the essay (1923) and the first version (1918-19); see pp. 13-19 and 167-179. 

D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1997). The paragraph that closes part I of this post is found on p. 57 of this work.

*Although most commentators insist that migrants come in order to escape violence and poverty, Lawrence argues that it is inadequate in times of great crisis and upheaval to accept such a plausible explanation. The desire to improve one's material circumstances is never enough in itself to uproot a people that is strongly attached to its home and way of life. People only migrate en masse when gripped by the vital magnetism of a faraway land, and do so without knowing why or whither: 

"It is our fatal limitation, at the present time, that we can only understand in terms of personal and conscious choice. We cannot see that great motions carry us and bring us to our place before we can even begin to know. We cannot see that invisible great winds carry us unwitting, as they carry the locust swarms, and direct us before our knowledge, as they direct the migrating birds." [SCAL 170]. 

Some readers will almost certainly object to this; seeing it, for example, as a mystical attempt to dehumanise migrants and strip them of their agency. But - with certain reservations - I think there's something in what Lawrence says here and that it behoves us all to make a greater effort at perceiving the inhuman (or daimonic) forces that control us and ultimately shape our fate.