Dear Alan Freeman,

 

Reading your contribution to today's Guardian, "Why not eat children?", I realise that your heart is in the right place. But there is something important you haven't recognised: the fact that our socio-economic order is rooted in our "more animal than human " nature.

 

This is not surprising, considering what Darwin taught us about human origins. But we have failed to understand its profound consequences, which explain why all attempts at creating a more just and humane socio-economic order have fallen far short of, when not completely failing, their intentions.

 

Socialism (in its positive manifestations) was the attempt of man's "more enlightened ", human nature to assert itself over his primitive, animal nature. It failed so badly and tragically because no one realised (or was prepared to face up to) just how deep and powerful our animal roots are - in all of us (not just in greedy capitalists).

 

The reaction of many well-meaning individuals (often calling themselves "social democrats", "New Labour" or whatever) to the disappointments and failures of socialism was to accept a free-market, capitalist economy as being in the "natural" order of things. The best that one could do, so they thought, was to help it function as well as possible, allowing it to produce vast amounts of material wealth, from which a sizable portion could then be creamed off in taxes to pay for social infrastructure and the welfare state.

 

New Labour was not alone in believing that it could ride the dragon of a capitalist economy, steering it with all on board towards some kind of social paradise.

 

However, they completely underestimated the power and wilfulness of the dragon, which is now carrying us, not towards any kind of social paradise, but towards global catastrophe.

 

We have to create an alternative, sustainable socio-economic order, with a "moral economy ", based, not on our "more animal than human" nature, as at present, but on our " more enlightened" human nature.