The Nature of the Unnatural
This piece is a long meditation brought on by a discussion with a friend relating to “An Invitation to Desertion” by Bellamy Fitzpatrick. It is a piece of anti-civilizational writing, and I have a complicated relationship with anti-civilization and post-leftist thinking. I don’t like it by any stretch, but this is more of an affective disinclination than a well-thought-out response, which is something that always bothers me. I find 40-60% of the arguments put forward in this sort of writing to be very compelling, and I find the remaining portion to be distasteful to the point where I can’t accept the remainder.
Perhaps I recognize the validity of the argument, but I’m too much a creature of civilization – tied to my video games and my rye whiskey and my not-dying-of-dysentery. That being said, I’ve also long been a proponent of collective intelligence, the principle that we are smarter together than we are separately, and that working from a variety of different perspectives is useful.
So while Fitzpatrick has some good points, and while I may modify what I think and propose based on what I’ve read, I will not be engaging in desertion anytime soon.
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Notice how the section on the left looks like carpet and the section on the right looks like plants. (Image uploaded to wikimedia commons by I, Snowmanradio, under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.)
Sitting in the folder where I keep the drafts of articles for this website is one I have labeled “Lawn Biodiversity Thing” that I last accessed near the end of September in 2019. It’s based on a series of thoughts I had while house sitting for my parents, specifically while I walked their gigantic cocker spaniel, Ernest, around the neighborhood where they live. It was a deep dive into something that Bruce Sterling wrote in his book on Futurism, Tomorrow Now, (previously mentioned here) that dealt with the fact that human beings seem to have a tendency to radically shrink the biodiversity of environments in which we live (we take a half-acre or so of land, and kill off the vast majority of species in it to provide living space for ourselves and maybe a dog or cat, removing everything but grass and a few ornamental trees, bushes, or flowers. It’s a weird pathology).
This, of course, ignores the fact that indigenous people the world over are stewards for something like 80% of the planet’s remaining biodiversity. Saying that this is “human nature” would be like saying that cell phones or bank accounts are human nature. This is, of course, leaving aside my arguments about the existence of human nature in my various pieces on Essentialism.
Our attitude toward the natural world is a product of the social forces that act on us, and the principle attitudes seem to stem from the question of whether one views the natural world as functionally finite (and thus in need of stewardship) or functionally infinite (giving permission to despoil it as you wish.) These two positions form the poles of a particular debate that is repeated over and over again, and forms other positions through negotiations between them. These forms an ideological grounding for other positions – one of the most interesting papers I’ve found on this was Professor Cara Dagget’s article “Petro-Masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desires”, which is quite worth the read despite the author’s much-memed article on the “queer dimension” of drone warfare (which I have yet to find the full text of; it seems she has disavowed the work, but I’m still interested in reading it).
I honestly can’t imagine this being pleasant to be around, much less drive. An example here, taken from the New York Times article on the phenomenon (Picture taken by David Kasnic.)
In this article, Dagget draws connections between authoritarian right-wing politics, reactionary masculinity, and fossil fuels, a connection best typified by the practice of “rolling coal” where a vehicle – often a pickup truck – is modified to produce a greasy black smoke. It provides no increase in functionality, is harmful to the environment in general, and to the driver’s health and finances. It’s a very expensive tantrum, basically. When I found this article, I read through the whole thing in one sitting, though I’m the sort of person to read through a large block of theory: someone disinclined to do so might get the same experience from watching Mad Max: Fury Road, which articulates the same general idea implicitly in its portrayal of the War Boys. Personally, I find value in both, but I’m a pedant and a theory nerd.
Of course, this polarity – nature is an infinite buffet for human beings vs. nature is a tightrope walk that we are disrupting – seems to me to be limited. Before I read this paper, I had watched the Adam Curtis documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. (I watched a stream of it of questionable legality, so I won’t be linking directly to it, but you can find it if you google it. Content warning on the third episode, which features journalistic images of dead human bodies.) In this series, Curtis presents an examination of the relationship between the human world and the natural world. Of special interest to me is the second episode, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts”, which focuses on the emergence of ecology as a discipline, and describes the various ideological forces that combined to produce it.
The documentary has a very particular visual style, characterized by extremely well-chosen stock footage with text overlaid. I would recommend listening to the General Intellect Unit series on it, which begins here.
Curtis argues – convincingly, I would add – that the discipline of ecology is heavily and improperly influenced by the field of cybernetics. The synthesizers were the Odum brothers, Howard T. and Eugene, working in the 1950s: Howard would collect field data and bring it back to Eugene, who would model it by creating an electrical circuit. They would test whether the observations were correct based on whether the electrical circuit worked or did not. This was inspired by the book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by philosopher Norbert Wiener (which tantalizingly includes a mention of “Bergsonian time” in the table of contents, but the wikipedia article mentions nothing about Bergson beyond this – given my interest in Gilles Deleuze, this mention is almost enough to make me track down a copy, but I know I wouldn’t read it).
Back to the Odum brothers: by using this method of modeling ecology, whereby the sun is a battery and a flock of birds might be resistors, or a school of fish might be a miniaturized transformer, they are importing the idea that machines and these features of the natural world work by the same laws. Now, of course, the physical laws acting on the individual components are the same – but I (inspired by Curtis) think it is highly questionable to say that the system-level laws are necessarily the same. By using this method of modeling, the Odum brothers brought their assumptions in through the back door.
When you get down to it, the idea that nature is a self-regulating system is found in not just deism but in western esotericism as far back as the hermetics. It is, fundamentally, a religious idea.
This idea was challenged by the work of George Van Dyne in the 1970s, who built computer models showing that the natural world is not a homeostatic system that tends towards stability, leading to a reckoning within the field of ecology – but the idea had already escaped the field into the popular consciousness.
The conception of nature as a self-regulating system is at the foundation of both perspectives (the buffet vs. the tightrope); the question is simply what the margin for error is and a justification for thinking that way. Personally, the tightrope is my second-choice perspective, and the buffet doesn’t even make the list. If our whole conception of nature is wrong (as Curtis argues,) then a different perspective is in order.
Consider: we think of paper when made by human beings as an artificial substance – a relatively benign one, but artificial nonetheless – but when made by wasps for a nest, the paper is natural. Every building is artificial, but a beaver dam is clearly natural. A tool made by an octopus or a crow feels more “natural” than something made by a human.
We have created an entire category, which we place cognitively on the same level as “natural”, to contain everything that we produced. We have worked hard to make this category equivalent, but we have only succeeded in beginning to replicate the feat of blue-green algae, the first living being we know of to pollute its environment with its waste product to the point where almost every other living thing died off, some 2 to 2.4 billion years ago.
To be fair, a lot of predictions from the early 20th century don’t make a lot of sense. A lot of what we thought about the world was nonsensical.
As with most dichotomies, we attach a moral judgment to this. In the 19th century and in the early 20th century, we engaged in a sort of madness by which we judged that the artificial was superior to the natural, that we would create a utopia wherein we would eventually exterminate even those animals that were beneficial to us – like the horse. I think it is a mistake to think that the current conception, where the natural is fundamentally good, and the artificial is inherently bad is just as flawed. Not to get all dialectical on you(1), but it is necessary to move beyond this, necessary to synthesize the two perspectives and arrive at a new position.
There is no fundamental separation between the human world and the natural world. Every artificial thing is made of natural materials, because we are not creating anything out of nothing: we are processing natural materials to produce these artifacts.
This is not to say that human beings do not occupy a privileged state in the natural world, but it is to say that this is a matter of degree, and not a matter of some inborn quality. We have the cognitive ability to plan for the future and theorize, the communicative ability to work in concert with one another, and the ability to make and work with tools. Just about no other species possesses these same qualities to the same degrees (octopi might be getting close, but living in an environment where they can’t make fire is going to be a bit of a drag on their ability to make something like what we would recognize as civilization).
I think it would be best to think of human beings as being something like the executive functioning of the natural world. I acknowledge that this is influenced by the tightrope-thinking mentioned up above and my Catholic upbringing (wherein human beings were supposed to be stewards of the natural world), but it goes beyond that: if something like civilization is going to continue, it needs to be pursued in a fundamentally different way than we currently are going about it.
We’re obviously not managing things properly — consider the fact that we have damaged the climate to the point that we had 30 named storms, and the worst of them made landfall in mid-November.
Much to my chagrin, I don’t think we’re going to make the necessary adjustments to mitigate climate change by 2030, which is most likely a hopeful deadline to begin with, but it’s impossible for us to meet this challenge. We’re in the process of failing one of the biggest tests humanity has ever faced. So, for those of us who currently lack the ability to make the adjustment (due to a lack of political or economic power), I think the most beneficial thing to do is to learn to adapt.
By “adapt” I don’t just mean learning permaculture or “rewilding” spaces that you control to the greatest degree that you can, or gaining the necessary skills to mend your clothing and most necessary tools (though you should do that. Hell, I should be doing that). I mean that we need to change our mindset and learn to notice changes in the world around us, because these “systems” are not self-regulating, and we’ve done everything we can to disrupt them.
If we are to survive, as much of the natural world around us as possible must survive. This doesn’t mean that we should not modify it: it means that we should be careful in doing so. That we should weigh our choices based on their benefit not just to us, but to other organisms in our environment.
I’ve said many times that a thing is what it does. A big part of that principle is that we can make the things we produce function differently: it is only out of ignorance that we are harming the natural world around us, so it becomes essential that we crack the shell of that ignorance.
Not to get all hippy-dippy on you, but in The Whole Earth Catalog there is a line that sticks with me: “We are as gods, so we might as well get good at it.” This means that we have to craft newer and better mindsets for the task that we set ourselves to, and I feel that can only be done by thinking of the natural world as more than just wasteland to be improved or resources to be extracted.
The attitude that we should simply retreat from the world we have built is an irresponsible position. We need to hold ourselves accountable for the mess we have made of this world, but the fault is not with the tools we have built to interface with it. The fault lies with the attitude we have brought to the job.
Clearly, there’s only one thing to do: use a meme as a callback to my original point about lawns while giving me license to reference the similar visual style commented upon in my piece on American Cringe, thus inviting you to read that next.
1) Sorry, Edgar. I know you hate the word “dialectic.”