The Stately Home and the Shelter

The Stately Home and the Shelter

A Daily Debate post for fome.org.uk

By Dr Jeremy Mellins

On the second day of spring, four partners sat around a table in a grand colonial-era recital room at a stately home in Berkshire. High ceilings, sunshine pouring through tall windows, the grounds opening onto formal gardens, with a cafe where people walked dogs and ate well. The coffee was good. We talked about our practice, about patient flows, and about how to improve our service. It was, by any honest measure, lovely.

Then, in the middle of the afternoon, one of my partners walked to the back of the room, sat down at the Steinway grand piano, and began to play. She chose Michael Nyman’s “The Heart Asks Pleasure First.” The music filled that high, bright room with something beautiful—a state of grace. The heart asks pleasure first, and there we were, the request granted in full.

Thousands of miles away, my family in Israel were sheltering from missiles in a basement.

In Bracknell, in the building where we sat, there were posters. Shaparak Khorsandi, one of the country’s brightest and best comedians, is performing here later this week. She was preparing to make people laugh in the building where I was listening to Nyman.

Khorsandi was born in Tehran. Her family fled Iran after the 1979 revolution when her father, the satirist Hadi Khorsandi, was branded an enemy of the regime. They have not been able to return. In her Edinburgh show, Asylum Speaker, and in her memoir, A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English, she has written with warmth and wit about what it means to lose a country; to have a homeland that remains permanently out of reach. I find it painful, heartbreaking, to imagine how it feels to watch missiles flying over a place you can never go back to, launched by and launched against a regime that drove your family out. That loss of place and of people is a scarcity no engine of abundance can touch.

There I sat, staring at Khorsandi’s poster, listening to Nyman on a Steinway, in the sunshine, with good coffee.

The heart asks pleasure first.

The Pragmatic Case

This is the point at which abundance thinking has to grow up. The naive version of the argument says: once we solve scarcity, we solve conflict. Energy becomes limitless; food becomes trivially cheap; healthcare, education, and housing follow. The engine of abundance, the reinforcing loop between energy, compute, AI, and science, accelerates and lifts everyone. There is truth in that. But it is not the whole truth, because not all scarcities are equal.

Some scarcities are general. Land, for instance, is scarce in the aggregate; we fight over territory because we need it for farming, for housing, for resources. But an abundant world can radically reduce that pressure. Vertical farming liberates farmland. Desalination and intelligent irrigation open up deserts. Better construction and materials make more of the Earth habitable. The generalised scarcity of land, the pressure that drives so much conflict, can be eased dramatically.

Some scarcities are irreducible. Jerusalem cannot be duplicated. A holy mountain cannot be moved. The particular, sacred, contested places that sit at the centre of identity and meaning; these remain scarce no matter how much energy or food or compute we produce. It is precisely here, at the irreducible scarcities, that conflict will persist.

The Design Question

So the question is not whether abundance eliminates conflict. It does not. The question is whether, properly designed, abundance can free us from fighting over things we can solve, so that we have the resources, the time, and the psychological space to navigate the things we cannot.

There is precious little point in creating abundance if we are still murdering each other. The whole promise of the abundance transition is not utopia; it is breathing room. It is the chance to approach the truly hard problems, the sacred places, the irreducible contests, with something closer to wisdom than desperation.

On the second day of spring, in a stately home in Berkshire, the heart asked pleasure first and received it. The task now is to build a world in which that is not an accident of geography, but a matter of design.