• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
Walking Commentary

Walking Commentary

Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022

  • ManRom22 Cancelled
  • Latest Comments
  • Archives

‘The Filthiness of Evil’

April 9, 2021 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

‘In the year 3535
Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do, and say
Is in the pills you took today’ – In the Year 2525 by Zager and Evans, 1969.

I can’t tell you why I like this morning’s cloudscape so much. I just hope you like it too.

Lyricist Rick Evans gave mankind 10,000 years. The lyrics of this ballad forecast we’d become toothless during the fourth millennium and be displaced by machines in the fifth. The song suggests it’d take until the ninth for mankind to consume the planet. Time magazine were so astounded by the message they put the duo on a cover. OK, they really put them on the cover because the song topped the global pop charts. But what is truth in these days of reinvention, of opinions and populism?

‘Now, as in Geometry the oblique must be known as well as the right, and in Arithmetic the odd as well as the even, so in the actions of our life who seeth not the filthiness of evil wanteth a great foil to perceive the beauty of virtue.’ An Apology For Poetry by Sir Philip Sidney, 1595.

I wonder what Sidney would have made of our stewardship of the planet in the four centuries since his death. His essay wasn’t even published until some 15 years after his death so perhaps his Elizabethan world of fewer than half a billion people was less pressed for time than ours.

Even as recently as 1969, I suspect Zager and Evans would not have been able to comprehend the pace at which mankind has undermined truth, came to rely on machines and consumed the planet. I’m guessing that Evans, who died in 2018, was pleased by his rallying call as must be Zager, who wrote the music, and is today still in running his guitar shop in Nebraska.

Sidney probably wouldn’t have expected that man would be walking on the moon by 1969. Nor is it likely that he could he have imagined how one song (or poem) would sell 100 million times. I doubt Sidney could have known there were 500 million people sharing the planet with him. His elite didn’t yet know the extent of the world they aspired to rule.

We know that young birds beg for food from their parents. Some observers of bird behaviour surmise that only chicks in dire need should be willing to expend the energy to secure food. Other observers consider that some chicks are better at lying. Evolutionary biologist  John Maynard Smith developed the the Sir Philip Sidney game as a model for begging behaviour. He named it after Sidney who, so the story goes, took off a thigh guard to make his armour equal to that of his soldiers. Then fatally wounded, he declined a drink of water saying ‘thy necessity is yet greater than mine’.

I don’t know what is true. What I read is that subsequent and current studies of chick behaviour indicate they do better by remaining honest.

Perhaps, for chicks at least, the beauty of virtue trumps the filthiness of evil.

Filed Under: Anchoritism Tagged With: john maynard smith, photo, rick evans, sir philip sidney, zager and evans

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe

You’ve been successfully subscribed to our newsletter!

Recent Comments

  • Simon Robinson on 2023 Subscriptions
  • Catherine Dunne on 2023 Subscriptions
  • Lia Mills on Apertures
  • Lia Mills on Limerick Walls
  • Simon Robinson on Via Graffiti

Categories

  • Anchoritism
  • Chapbooks
  • Fake Memoir
  • ManRom2021

Tags

ahmet altan albert einstein bbc birds bird watching booklink bracket books ireland brian greene burma cancer chapbook colum mccann computing Covid-19 dog dun laoghaire fabhappy flowers food geology geophysics hans rosling ireland irish times issued lia mills london movies nobel prize pandemic PEN international photo photography photos photozines plants poetry popular simonscarves the uplift kit travel ungrievable volcano walking walkingcommentary

Recent Posts

  • Rounded
  • Watershapes
  • Machine Driven
  • 2023 Subscriptions
  • Apertures

Archives

  • January 2023 (1)
  • December 2022 (1)
  • November 2022 (2)
  • October 2022 (1)
  • September 2022 (1)
  • August 2022 (1)
  • July 2022 (1)
  • June 2022 (1)
  • May 2022 (1)
  • April 2022 (1)
  • March 2022 (1)
  • February 2022 (1)
  • January 2022 (2)
  • December 2021 (2)
  • November 2021 (1)
  • October 2021 (1)
  • September 2021 (2)
  • August 2021 (1)
  • July 2021 (2)
  • May 2021 (9)
  • April 2021 (30)
  • March 2021 (31)
  • February 2021 (28)
  • January 2021 (31)
  • December 2020 (31)
  • November 2020 (30)
  • October 2020 (31)
  • September 2020 (30)
  • August 2020 (31)
  • July 2020 (31)
  • June 2020 (30)
  • May 2020 (31)
  • April 2020 (30)
  • March 2020 (31)

Footer

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
  • ManRom22 Cancelled
  • Latest Comments
  • Archives

Subscribe

You’ve been successfully subscribed to our newsletter!

Copyright © 2023 · Revolution Pro on Genesis Framework