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.

Reading:  Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, by Michael Scammell (2009)

Bought & read because Arthur Koestler has been a tall figure in my intellectual landscape since he & George Orwell cured me of fellowtraveling in my adolescence (early 1950s).  I have returned frequently to his many autobiographical books as well as Darkness at Noon, Arrival and Departure, Thieves in the Night, and (an oddity of mine, it turns out) The Age of Longing.  I did not, however, keep up with him in his move to philosophy and science during his later years (except for The Sleepwalkers).  Thus, this book rounds out my acquaintance with him, both in filling in what he left out in his own extensive accounts, and in describing the sometimes crazy excursions he made after I stopped reading him.

The process is often distressing.  Scammell is skeptical of accusations that Koestler was a "serial rapist", but abundantly documents that he treated his women meanly & had far more of them than he deserved.  I am sentimental about sex, and the news that someone got laid (whether in fact or in fiction) regularly improves my opinion of the human race; but in this book, for the first time, I got tired of hearing about it.  Of course, one must remember that such behavior is prompted by some widespread vileness in human nature, that in his times & places society largely seconded that vileness, and that fame greatly increases the temptation to indulge in it.  (The same can be said about his record as a serial drunken driver --- he spent a good deal of time in prison, but not, alas, for that.)  Koestler seems to have gotten his start on abusing women in a poisonous relation with his mother.

As I have hinted, I was disappointed to learn that The Age of Longing was not numbered among Koestler's best works, and that he himself regarded it as a failure.  I have found it immensely instructive (even more so than Darkness at Noon) and in parts beautiful.  I first read it in my undergraduate years, when its frank description of the hero's impotence with a whore caused it to be passed around at Caltech.  True, its satire on the atmosphere of the early Cold War makes it a period piece; but I trust the author, as in all his work, to have rendered faithfully the kinds of arguments people were having in that milieu, and that is always valuable, because we all tend to forget how silly we can be.  Also, his vignettes of various characters & situations have for me an intense charm.  I am grateful to Scammell for quelling my suspicion that the book had been subsidized by the CIA, with which Koestler turns out to have been on bad terms at the time.

Scammell is unsympathetic with Koestler's late dalliances with parapsychology & other such stuff with the stink of superstition about it, and I am more so.  They seem to be due to the same cause as his many services to decency: disillusion with the murderous cults of reason that arose from the French Revolution & its sequelae.  Koestler traces them back to the conflict between Kepler the mystic and Galileo the scientist.  There is some irony to that.  Galileo (we learn from The Sleepwalkers) called Kepler a crackpot.  He was right about that; but Kepler was right about the orbit of Mars being an ellipse (pretty near), and if you are doing astronomy, being right about the orbit of Mars is more important than being right about who is a crackpot.  Koestler took Kepler's side (indeed, even identified with him: "K = K") and blamed Galileo's tactlessness for starting off science on a collision course with religion.  Newton, on the other hand, kept his eye on the ball.  He extracted Kepler's three laws of planetary motion from his mass of gaudy nonsense, combined them with Galileo's astronomical discoveries & insights into mechanics, and thus --- after inventing the necessary mathematics --- provided a beautiful and useful theory, all without bothering to insult any bishops.  With that synthesis in hand, it was rather desperate of Koestler to inscribe "Back to Kepler!" on his banner.  There are plenty of cogent reasons for being skeptical about claims to scientific rigor in political theory, without disturbing Kepler of his rest.  A temperate discussion may be found in "The Case Against Intellect", Chapter VI in The House of Intellect by Jacques Barzun (1959).

For all that, he did a lot of good and brightened my life.