IN 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote a prediction for the future. By 2030, he prophesied in his essay , technological advance will have largely displaced human labour, leaving the standard of living so high as to free us to discover, for the first time, ways to live well. Then, “the love of money as a possession” will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity”. It would be seen as a “semicriminal, semi-pathological” propensity.
It is only, Keynes said, when the accumulation of wealth is no longer the central impulse of humanity that we would uncover in ourselves what has lain dormant.
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“We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues,” he wrote.
He was no oracle, Keynes: he was too optimistic about us. But he was right that a dramatic recalibration will be needed, a decoupling of desire and conspicuous consumption. It may be impossible; history so far makes it appear so. But we live under an inescapable imperative: faced with our own swift destruction of the living world, we will have to find a new kind of treasure.
Such treasure does abound, if we could agree at a vast, global, political level to see it. The world is full of living gold. There is, for instance, the jewel scarab beetle, which looks like the work of a gifted artisan. It is thought to use its gold for camouflage, as sunlight casting off its iridescent back may be dazzling to predators – its beauty literally blinding.
The gold of a golden snub-nosed monkey’s fur is a more orange shade, bright against its sky-blue face. These are profoundly social animals, forming troops of up to 600, which would be a sight worth giving a great deal for: 600 golden streaks moving in tandem across treetops. Their gold is thought to aid in mating rituals – as part of their sexual dimorphism, the males’ golden hairs are more luxuriantly plentiful.
There is the gold, too, of the golden-rumped elephant shrew, which shines boldly in the rear quarters. Red-capped robin-chats have evolved a symbiotic relationship with the shrew, following their golden behinds through forests, eating the detritus of invertebrates they leave in their wake as they forage.
All of these creatures are gold for a reason. But the golden mole is blind. It is also the only truly iridescent mammal. Its fur, in changing light, can shift from yellow to gold to red. Its eyes are covered with a layer of skin and fur, and it has never seen its own radiance. It lives almost entirely underground, emerging only to hunt for insects.
that the fur evolved to be densely flattened, hard-wearing and low-friction to make burrowing easier. The iridescence is an accidental by-product. So the moles burrow and breed and hunt, live and die under the African sun, unknowingly glowing.
To be in the presence of golden animals has a stark, Keynesian effect. They make other forms of gold – watches, bejeweled necklaces, cufflinks, taps – look like a con. We haven’t, historically, been talented at identifying what is and isn’t treasure. But it is possible that, as Keynes hoped, this isn’t inevitable.
What is the goldest gold? It is every living thing. The greatest treasure in the known history of the universe – the world we stand on – is at stake. It requires your disobedience – urgent and iron-willed, political and social – to those interested parties that would tell you to look away and acquiesce in its destruction.
Katherine Rundell’s book is out now
