come_to_think

Evidently, if the appeal to nature is foolishness, it is natural foolishness, and as such deserves some attempt at sympathetic understanding.  A notable attempt at a balanced view is provided by Bertrand Russell.  In "What I Believe" he says

There is a certain attitude about the application of science to human life with which I have some sympathy, though I do not, in the last analysis, agree with it.  It is the attitude of those who dread what is "unnatural."...  I think there is a mixture of truth and falsehood in the admiration of "nature" which it is important to disentangle.  To begin with, what is "natural"?  Roughly speaking, anything to which the speaker was accustomed in childhood....  Clothes and cooking are too ancient to be denounced by most of the apostles of nature, though they object to new fashions in either....  [T]hose who preach "nature" are inconsistent, and one is tempted to regard them as mere conservatives.

Nevertheless, there is something to be said in their favor....  [I]n the absence of knowledge, unexpected harm may be done by a new departure from nature; but when the harm has come to be understood it can usually be remedied by some new artificiality.  As regards our physical environment and our physical means of gratifying our desires, I do not think the doctrine of "nature" justifies anything beyond a certain experimental caution in the adoption of new expedients.  Clothes, for instance, are contrary to nature and need to be supplemented by another unnatural practice --- namely, washing --- if they are not to bring disease.  But the two practices together make a man healthier than the savage who eschews both.

There is more to be said for "nature" in the realm of human desires.  To force upon a man, woman, or child a life which thwarts their strongest impulses is both cruel and dangerous; in this sense, a life according to "nature" is to be commended with certain provisos.  Nothing could be more artificial than an underground electric railway, but no violence is done to a child's nature when it is taken to travel in one; on the contrary, almost all children find the experience delightful.  Artificialities which gratify the desires of ordinary human beings are good, other things being equal.  But there is nothing to be said for ways of life which are artificial in the sense of being imposed by authority or economic necessity....

To the charming example of children in subway cars one might, in our day, add the potent one of children using computers.

In "Scylla and Charybdis, or Communism and Fascism", tho, he loses his balance:

...Where living beings are concerned, and most of all in the case of human beings, spontaneous growth tends to produce certain results, and others can be produced only by means of a certain stress and strain.  Embryologists may produce beasts with two heads, or with a nose where a toe should be; but such monstrosities do not find life very pleasant....  It is possible to cut shrubs into the shape of peacocks, and by a similar violence a similar distortion can be inflicted upon human beings.  But the shrub remains passive, while the man...remains active, if not in one sphere then in another.  The shrub cannot pass on the lesson in the use of shears which the gardener has been teaching, but the distorted human being can always find humbler human beings upon whom he can wield smaller shears.  The inevitable effects of artificial moulding upon human beings are to produce either cruelty or listlessness, perhaps both in alternation....

...The ultimate psychological argument for democracy and for patience is that an element of free growth, of go as you please and untrained natural living, is essential if men are not to become misshapen monsters....

I fancy there are better arguments for democracy & patience than that.  One might retort that nature can produce monstrosities without the help of embryologists; that they need not find life any less pleasant than their normal parents do, and may even be the beginnings of new species; and that we can hardly avoid artificial molding of human beings, which are (as Skinner points out) the most domesticated species of all.  In this respect even the earlier passage is somewhat incoherent.  People's "strongest impulses" are not necessarily the natural ones.

Mention of children, however, does bring up one fact about human nature that is of great moral importance --- tho more for the problems it creates than for the guidance it provides.  That is the fact that as infants we need to be taken care of, and so as a species we have to be provided with instincts for caring and for being cared for.  We share that program, of course, with other mammals & with birds, but we have carried it to an extreme.  A vast range of habits, including especially those that enable us to live together, is left to upbringing.  As Isaac Asimov ("No Connection") imagines an intelligent bear describing us, we are "gregarious without being social":  We have an inborn need to live with each other, but no inborn ways to do it.  That means, in particular, that the notion of liberty has to be reconstructed in each individual over a period of years.  (From the way some libertarians talk, you might think they had hatched & walked away on all eight legs.)

IMO nature deserves far more respect in esthetics than in ethics.  It is odd that people tend to think of esthetics in connection with art; it seems to me that most of the ugliness in the world is due to art (e.g., make-up, motel signs, Mylar balloons, newspaper advertising supplements, rock and roll, small-business storefronts, and station breaks on vulgar radio stations), and most of the beauty is due to nature.  Except for music, I see little use in trying to create beauty; it is more important to find it & try to avoid destroying it.

2.1  Nature as a stand-in for God

If you do not believe in God, it is rhetorically helpful to have some other powerful authority to appeal to.  That has been an increasingly important maneuver among primitivists in recent times.

If you do believe in God, then nature is part of Creation, so it has to be good in some sense; but some parts of Creation are embarrassing.  Thus, calling something natural is a way of intimating that it is good or at least tolerable without the blasphemy of calling it divine.  For this purpose, nature is often personified as female and called Mother Nature.  That, of course, is heretical if taken seriously: it was not God the Father who needed an help meet for him.  In the Christian scheme, as Chesterton justly complained, Nature is not our mother but our sister.  In either case, however, making her female eases the notion of her doing God's dirty work.  Having to piss or shit is a "call of Nature" --- part of a mother's job, no doubt; "call of God" would be in terrible taste.  "Nature's Mistakes", the sign at the freak show used to say:  "God's Mistakes" would have been blasphemous, and "Mistakes of Nature and of Nature's God" would really have been giving the show away.

The substitution of Nature for God can also be a license for harmless fun.  Burns says:

  Auld Nature swears, the lovely Dears
    Her noblest work she classes, O:
  Her prentice han' she try'd on man,
    An' then she made the lasses, O.

Nature made man first --- but that was only for practice!  Burns could not have gotten away with making that joke about God.

Mencken, who was a skeptic, had another kind of fun:

The central aim of civilization, it must be plain, is simply to defy and correct the obvious intent of God, _e.g._, that the issue of every love affair shall be a succession of little strangers, that cows shall devote themselves wholly to nursing their calves, that it shall take longer to convey a message from New York to Chicago than it takes to convey one from New York to Newark, that the wicked shall be miserable and the virtuous happy....

2.2  Nature as an excuse

In some arguments (most notably, these days, those about homosexuality), it is supposed to be important whether certain desires and behavior are genetically determined or are due to environmental influences.  Heredity, being due to "nature", is supposed to be unchangeable or perhaps divinely inspired; contrary environmental influences are supposed to represent culpable choice or Satanic perversion.  There is no sense in any of this kind of talk.  Genetic tendencies can be resisted; indeed, because they conflict, some of them have to be --- even if they are not wicked, which some of them are.  (A great deal of evil has deep roots in human nature.  If I had to choose one Christian dogma to believe in, I think it would be Original Sin.)  And plenty of learned tendencies are far more difficult to change than many inherited ones.

The fact that my hair was once blond & is now gray is undoubtedly due to hereditary influences.  It is also partly a matter of choice, because yonder lady in the supermarket has dyed hers orange, and I could do the same if I wished.  If I had become a beach bum in my youth, there would have been streaks in my hair, and that would have been due to environmental causes.

The fact that I speak English is undoubtedly due to my childhood environment.  The fact that yonder Cambodian immigrant in the laundromat speaks English is a matter of choice (more precisely, the choice of a package that includes that as well as wealth, freedom, and a smaller chance of getting shot); he is following up that choice with some effort.

A law against speaking English would be far more oppressive to me than a law against gray hair, altho I was born with a propensity to the latter & not the former.  Either law would be beyond the moral competence of government.  Whether getting rid of either would be worth a shooting war is a prudential question, as stated in the Declaration of Independence.  Nature & nurture have nothing to do with it.

I could go on for quite a while listing arithmetical statements that I believe, but I suppose it would be more exciting to mention things that I believe and most people don't:

This would be a better world to live & die in if suicide could be made the most common cause of death.

The stock market has very little to do with the operation of market capitalism.

The economists, who have taught the biologists so much, would do well to learn something from them: that successful systems accumulate parasites.  Among the vilest institutional evils in the rich countries are the promotion industry (parasitic on the market) and the drug laws (parasitic on the government).  Right, shmight!  Left, shmeft!  Markets and governments are both too powerful; far more of what people do for each other should be done for fun, without the mediation of either.

To understand oppression the second thing one should always do is blame the victim; the taboo on doing so is stultifying.  In particular, people who let themselves be influenced by television advertising are asking to be swindled, and by thus creating a market for swindlers they poison the entire body politic.

Mass entertainment (by which I mean entertainment in which the chief measure of success is the size of the audience) is a morally depraved activity.  In order to maximize the size of an audience, one must make use of fashion and intergenerational hostility -- that is, of fear and hate.  Those are base motives, and the business of appealing to them is bound to attract bad people and make them worse.

Many undoubted evils are irremediable.  (It must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!)  In particular, the problems posed by ethnic pest zones such as the Middle East and the Balkan peninsula are insoluble.

Neither art nor nature is a moral category; they are merely the interior & exterior of the region that has been altered by deliberate human activity; they have no more moral content than indoors & outdoors.  In particular, to call behavior or food or rights natural is not to recommend them.

That should do to go on.

Listening:  "The Luck of Roaring Camp" by Bret Harte

One of my favorite short stories, an exercise in microsociology whose sentimentality is relieved by a sharp sense of irony.  The only woman in a mining camp dies in childbirth, and the camp adopts the baby.  His presence gradually teaches the ruffians courtesy, hygiene, quiet enjoyment, esthetic sensibility, and (alas) respectability.  No happy ending.

You can read it at
http://www.bartleby.com/310/4/1.html

Besides being funny & instructive, this story is valuable to me as a corrective to my philosophical prejudices.  I am skeptical of, and on the whole hostile to, the prevailing view that nature (somehow defined) is a source, or even the source, of moral judgment.  On the whole I agree with the lady in Agee's movie that human nature is something we are supposed to rise above.  However, meditating on this story forces me to concede that our being mammals counts for something.