It's Only Natural

Romanticism is taught in literature courses as having a strong connection to Nature, in fact it is one of the defining features.  Likewise among philosophers such as Rousseau Nature is seen as pure and civilization corrupt.  But really Romanticism has a sort of love/hate relationship with Nature.

I’m reminded of the story of the Californian and the Oregonian going for a walk in the forests of Oregon.  The Oregonian shows the Californian all his favourite spots for fishing, hiking, and the best river for swimming.  The Californian is awe-struck by the beauty of it all and says, “You know, we could build a road up here so it is easier to get to, and maybe a visitor’s centre, and maybe some cabins, and….”

This story illustrates the origins of the word, “Californicator”.  It means, “Whatever a Californian touches; they fuck it up.”   California was settled by Romantics eager to make a better life for themselves either through gold, oil, oranges, or movies.  The settlers of Oregon and Washington State were more salt of the earth farmer-types, pioneers with families.

Here we have two very different approaches to Nature.  Should Nature be used for maximum benefit or should it be honoured and enjoyed?  I think a true Romantic can make both arguments.  This means that there is not one clear-cut answer and each question has to be examined individually.

You may have noticed that I have been capitalising the word Nature.  This is because I am not just writing about the birds, flowers, and trees.  I am writing about the order of Reality.  I am writing about the ecosystems of the birds, flowers, and trees, but also the Laws of Nature, and Natural Law, and Human Nature, and Individual Nature.

Sir Francis Bacon summed it up when he observed that “Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.”  We are simultaneously the masters and servants of Nature.

When it comes to the Natural world, no construction can take place these days without assessing the environmental impact.  This is because the Natural world is something that we can see, touch, and experience.  However, when it comes to Human Nature or Individual Nature we are in a state of denial that such a thing even exists.  This arrogant disregard is what leads to unintended consequences.

In October 2003 calamity struck the show of magicians Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn at the Mirage in Las Vegas.  Their act is famous for its use of white tigers and in this instance the tiger was seven year old Montecore who had been raised from a cub by Roy Horn. 

According to reports, Montecore was distracted by a woman in the front row with “big hair”.  She foolishly attempted to pet the tiger and Roy Horn intervened.  In doing so he tripped over the cat’s paw prompting stage hands to come to his rescue.  Montecore assumed that Horn had been injured and tried to drag him to safety as a mother tiger would do for a cub.  Just like a mother house cat, this is done by grasping the kitten by the neck.  Horn suffered severe neck trauma, loss of blood, and partial paralysis.  Fortunately, he survived and the duo performed their farewell show in 2009.

There is order to the universe.  All things can be understood and once understood we can work with that knowledge to make life better.  Montecore the tiger is a great illustration of Nature.  Roy Horn understood the tiger’s nature.  The big haired woman in the audience did not.  A tiger is not a tame pet like a cat or dog, and even then some dogs bite strangers.  And despite all its training and conditioning, Montecore acted according to his Nature.

When Jamie Oliver tried to improve school lunches, the kids went to the burger vans outside the school for lunch.  They acted according to their Nature.  When governments impose regulations on trade, the businesses find a way around them by hook or by crook.  They act according to their Nature.  When men in positions of power have affairs with hot girls, they are acting according to their Nature.

Nature can be restrained, retrained, or reconditioned, but it will always find a way to assert itself, maybe not every time or in every situation.  Some kids don’t go to the burger vans, some businesses accept the regulation, and some people restrain their impulses.  This is usually due to fear of consequences or lack of opportunity.  When that force is no longer applied the rubber band will bounce back into shape.  Nature will always reassert itself.

There is a documentary series called Life After People.  The premise is that all humanity has mysteriously vanished from planet Earth.  The series shows through the analysis of scientists and experts how the buildings and monuments of the world finally collapse as Nature reasserts itself.  For example, without a regular paint job and maintenance the Golden Gate Bridge would face metal decay and rust and eventually collapse.  Some segments include how various domesticated animals either learn to fend for themselves or die.

The series serves as a reminder that humans are constantly in the process of bending Nature to our will by working with Nature.  Should we stop applying that process, then all that we take for granted and arrogantly call “Reality” will fade back into the natural state from which it had come, like that rubber band returning to shape.

The Artificial Reality, either material or social, only exists because of human production, that combination of time, energy, skill, and will.  Without these factors there can be no production and without production there will be no human race. 

Of course it will not come to that.  Rather we should remember that our quality of life is dependent on the production of the whole.  I have a relatively inexpensive laptop and big screen television because people in China are mass producing these luxuries for a global market.

Scientists who understand the Nature of physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering make these products possible.  Programmers who understand the Nature of computer systems give the machine a soul.  Businessmen who understand the Nature of global markets and manufacture make and distribute the products.  Advertisers who understand the Nature of human psychology sell the products.  Understanding Nature improves the quality of life.

We can understand the Nature of nature.  We can understand the nature of human construction and human social systems.  What about human nature?  A core tenant of the Romantic is free will.  People prefer to deny that like Montecore the tiger we are subject to our Nature.  Or rather they may see others acting by Nature, but deny it in ourselves.

Men who have become experts in pick-up will tell you that if you employ certain techniques that you can pull almost any girl.  Of course women find this offensive and demeaning.  It implies that if you push all the right buttons a girl will respond in a particular manner regardless of her free will, not unlike entering a code into a computer to get a pre-programmed result.  The sad truth for women is that these men are gettting the result they claim.  What they have done is come to an understanding of a woman’s Nature and applied it to get consistent results.

There is such a thing as Human Nature, those natural impulses true of both genders.  Then there are the differences between the Male Nature and the Female Nature that have resulted from evolution and 10,000 years of gender roles.  Finally there is the Individual Nature, something unique to you.

Nature is the hardwired template that we have inherited from our ancestors and by virtue of our respective genders.  For example, I read of a recent study of newborn babies in which baby girls responded to the image of a person’s face and baby boys responded to a hanging mobile.  This study indicates that women are more socially oriented while men are more mechanically oriented.

I think most people would immediately accept this conclusion, however when we take it further we find the conclusions not so appealing.   If the nature of the female mind is more inclined towards subjective social dynamics and the male mind towards objective constructions, then men are the builders, the creators, and the architects of the Artificial Reality and women simply inhabit that space.

When we look back to the age of the hunter/gatherers we see that women most likely invented language.  It was important for them to be able to indentify plants, for example.  A feminist might see this as a point for their team.  In pre-school, we see girls forming complete sentences while the boys are still grunting.  However, part of the division of labour was that women were engaged in routine, menial, repetitive tasks.  They would sit around the camp and engage in what today we men call a “stitch-n-bitch”.  This behaviour in women has been going on for 10,000 years.  So we might say that it is in woman’s nature to enjoy menial, routine, and repetitive task.  Men see this as work but women see it as fun.

Men on the other hand were hunters.  They had to be clever, imaginative, brave, and strong.  They had to be able to work as individuals within a co-operative group to track, catch, and kill game; then they had to work out the logistics for skinning and transport back to camp.  Men did not talk much, as silence was imperative, but they did communicate through sounds and hand signals to co-ordinate their efforts.

When they got back to camp they relived their adventure like this:  “So there was this mammoth and he was all ‘aaaaargh’ and like Grod was all ‘aaaargh’ and I thought he was totally done for.”  Probably not much lofty communication going on there, but after hundreds of generations of this lifestyle the male pattern for creative problem solving and action orientation was set.

It was not until the advent of agriculture and eventually cities that men started to expand their skills.  They became merchants, craftsmen, and politician.   Men had to master language and skilled manual labour. 

And yet even though agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago, my ancestors did not start inhabiting Roman cities and diversifying labour until about 1,500 years ago.  They were not hunter/gathers but rather the next stage of production called agrarian/pastoralists (small farmers and animal herders).  There are people living in our cities today whose grandparents were either hunter/gatherers or agrarian/pastoralists.   These states of Nature are not that far away for some.  My grandfather worked the railroads in America while the grandfathers of the wealthy oil sheiks were literally living in tents in the desert as pastoralists, just as their ancestors had done for thousands of years before them.

The American Indians lived a nomadic lifestyle for thousands and thousands of years before Europeans arrived.  The Europeans had not lived a similar lifestyle for maybe about 3,000 years or more.  Concepts like law, land ownership, and rule by a removed government were all part of the European Nature, but these complex abstract ideas were not part of the Indian’s programming.  They could only conceive direct use.

Factors like being human, gender, and cultural heritage all play a factor in the programming of our Natures as individuals with some being more deeply ingrained than others.  But this is literally only half the story.  According the researchers, factors like intelligence are only 50% determined by Nature and the other half by nurture.

When discussing individual Nature, I can only look at myself.  On my mother’s side I am descended from British royalty and nobility.  Those who came to America created a line of impoverished writers.  Only my great, great, grandfather’s nephew made the grade as one of the Fathers of American Literature, Oliver Wendell Holmes.  The rest simply wrote journals or articles for local papers.  My mother taught me how to write and I have been creating stories and writing for my entire life.  You might call it my Nature.  So when I am praised for my writing I am of course grateful, but on the other hand you may as well praise a bird for flying.  It is only acting according to its Nature.  I have no publishing deadlines and I receive no wages.  I just write because that is what I do and have always done.  I feel most fulfilled and confident when writing.

In psychological tests measuring brain gender I always fall on the male-side of the middle.  So you might also argue that my Nature is androgynous.  So if we say that the female brain favours the social and subjective while the male brain favours the mechanical and the objective, then what happens when you mix the two?

I’m really not concerned with how machines work.  I cannot fix a car and I do okay in DIY and home repair.  I am more concerned with the mechanics of reality as found in the Humanities: history, politics, and social studies.  I am not fond of sports, but I do enjoy action films.  So the male fundamentals are there, but they express themselves in a female manner.

A woman may love the emotional dynamics of a pop song.  I may be able to appreciate it as she can, however I deconstruct it like a man would want to tear down an engine.  I see the song in the context of pop history, I see the message, and I see its social effects.  If I had more musical talent, I might see its construction. Most girls could care less.  They just love the superficial aspects of it and perhaps how cute the lead singer is, that is, how he makes her feel.  

Someone with a more pure masculine brain might not care about either my interest or the girl’s point of view concerning a pop song.  Men are naturally wired for production so everything is judged in relation to that standard.  Does this song inspire me to action or provide temporary distraction?  Will liking it help me get the girl?  No?  Then it’s irrelevant.

The important conversational bonding of women, the stitch-n-bitch, has been described by men for centuries as inane prattle because men look for solutions in conversation.  They may discuss sports along the lines of how a team should be managed or politics in how the country should be run.  Men sit around the coffee shop table, or in the pub, or in the gentleman’s club, or around the campfire and “solve the world’s problems” whether or not they have the power, influence, or even skill set required to implement their schemes.  Despite my androgynous nature, I have more affinity to the male pattern than the female.

Arrogance is an attitude derived from the misguided belief that you are better or more capable than you are.  An arrogant man acts as though he can defeat any other man in a fight despite the fact that he has never fought another man in his life.  An arrogant person believes that they are better than anyone else but they have accomplished nothing to prove this to be fact.  A character like Sherlock Holmes is often depicted or described as arrogant.  This is incorrect, because he consistently proves his superiority.

In regards to Nature, mankind has shown its arrogance in its constant attempts to be the master of nature despite the fact that he has never succeeded.  We believe our cities to be eternal even though the ruins of past civilizations say otherwise.  We believe that we can create political and economic systems that thwart nature, despite evidence of failure.  We believe we can pass laws to make people better or equal, and those fail.  Even personal attempts at self-improvement through religion or therapy fail without taking individual Nature into consideration.

This brings us full circle back to Sir Francis Bacon.  “Nature to be commanded must be obeyed”.  We ignore it, deny it, and choose ignorance of it at our peril.  Only by accepting and understanding it can we negotiate with it to get what we desire from it, and thus become the people we want to be in the society we want, and living in the world we want to inhabit.

A brief addendum, I just became aware of the shooting of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona.  I know nothing of her, her politics, or the circumstances surrounding the shooting.  The news article I saw simply quotes the responses of various political leaders which illustrate my points regarding Nature and human arrogance.

President Obama:  "We do not yet have all the answers…What we do know is that such a senseless and terrible act of violence has no place in a free society."

House Speaker John Boehner:  "An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve…Acts and threats of violence against public officials have no place in our society."

Arizona Sen. John McCain:  "Whoever did this, whatever their reason, they are a disgrace to Arizona, this country and the human race, and they deserve and will receive the contempt of all decent people and the strongest punishment of the land."

Are they right?  Do people kill each other?  Do people kill political leaders?  Do people kill political leaders in the name of freedom?  Sic semper tyranis!  People do not like to be pushed, pulled, and meddled with.  If they feel trapped and without recourse, they may kill.  That is human nature.

I am not saying that Gabrielle Giffords was a tyrant, or a bad person, or even what motivated the shooting.  I honestly have no idea.  Nor am I condoning the actions of her murderer.  I am rather criticising the arrogance and foolishness of political leaders who have forgotten that despite America’s relatively peaceful political history it does not change reality. 

As for Obama’s statement that such an act has no place in a free society, well history shows that you are more likely to see political assassinations in a free society than in an authoritarian one.  Chairman Mao ordered the deaths of 36 million Chinese, and yet it was John F Kennedy who was assassinated.

To John Boehner’s claim that acts and threats of violence against public officials have no place in our society, I say that such is the Sword of Damocles.  Public officials should be afraid or else they become arrogant, complacent, and act out of self-interest and convenience rather than courage.

It is preferable to have a nice warm home, but make no mistake.  That home is artificial, man-made, and therefore transient.  The Natural state may be a patch of grass subject to wind, rain, and cold.  Your house may stand for hundreds of years in peace, comfort, and warmth, but one day it will be a ruin and then naught but a patch of grass.  The same holds true of human social constructs as to human material constructs.

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”