Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

NATURE DOESN’T CARE FOR US

I recently read a book in which an idealistic person claimed to have felt “at one with nature” when recovering from a series of traumatic events, and to have been solaced by the seashore, the waves, the birds and other delightful things of nature. Who but a very insensitive person would be cynical about this? Surely we have all often been solaced by some things in nature. Surely we have all felt those moments of exultation at a beautiful sunrise or sunset; at the brillance of the stars on a fine or frosty night; at the majesty of a calm sea or the delight of sharing the universe with animals – in my case the delight of watching seals and primates who are so like us in many ways; or stately birds like the kereru; or companions like my pet cat.

But are these wonderful moments really a matter of being “at one with nature”? If nature means everything that physically exists, or even everything that we have encountered or are aware of, then surely we can make statements about being “at one with nature” only if we are very selective about those parts of nature we choose to notice – those attractive, beautiful, positive things.

For the hard fact is that nature also includes cancer, coronavirus, malaria, leprosy, diptheria, cholera, bubonic plague, ringworm, hookworm, tapeworm; natural disasters like destructive storms, volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunami, and ferocious human-eating animals. Human beings’ own actions add to what is negative, painful and destructuve in life, but none of the things I’ve listed are human-made. They are nature. Often cited as one of the nastiest phenomena in nature is that variety of ichneumon wasp that lays its eggs inside the living grasshopper which is then paralysed and, in its helplessness, slowly eaten alive by the wasp’s hatching offspring, its vital organs being eaten last of all so that the wasp spawn are not eating dead meat.

If you are really “at one with nature” when you feel exulted, calmed and healed, then you must be “at one” with all these things too.

There is nothing new in what I am saying here. Previously on this blog I have sounded off about the Disneyficationof Nature and the tendency of popular culture to varnish over the negative aspects of nature, especially when popular culture so often anthropomorphises animals. More to the point, well-known is that oft-reprinted essay Aldous Huxley wrote in 1929, “Wordsworth in the Tropics” in which he argued that William Wordsworth would have had a less benign view of nature if he had not been contemplating the dales, hills, mountains and lakes of the Lake District; but had rather confronted the tropical jungle with its leech-infested rivers, predatory crocodiles and other daunting life forms. Huxley wrote: “A voyage through the tropics would have cured him of his too easy and comfortable pantheism. A few months in the jungle would have convinced him that the diversity and utter strangeness of Nature are at least as real and significant as its intellectually discovered unity.” The “nature” that Wordsworth loved was nature that had already, at least in part, been tamed and subdued by human beings.

The harsh reality is that nature as a whole is indifferent to us, concerned neither to nurture or to destroy us. More than one commentator has noted that this was understood by ancient poets, like Homer [whoever he, she or they might have been] when he frequently repeated the same epithets such as “the wine-dark sea”, again and again, implying that nature rolls on in the same way without particularly regarding us.

The comforting idea of a benign Mother Nature – or a Gaia if you are into neo-paganism – can be accepted only if you adopt an Olympian view of human beings, regarding them [us] as being of little importance. Thus one sometimes hears cold, haughty statements such as “Coronavirus is Nature’s way of cleaning up the environment by forcing us to pollute less”, which always assumes that we are of no more importance than an amoeba.

Against the concept of benign Nature, and of being “at one” with nature, I have basically used the same argument that atheists often use against the concept of God. (I immediately think of Bertram Russell’s assertion “A visit to a children’s hospital will destroy any notions of a benign God.”) To be benign, something has to have a conscious personality. Nature does not. The idea of pantheism – that all things are God – works only if we assume that all things, put together, have a conscious personality. They do not. Besides which, if all things are God, then nothing is God.

Given all this, the concept of a transcendent God – a God above and over nature – makes far more sense than the dead end of pantheism. We human beings are part of nature, but our consciousness and awareness set us apart from nature. We are in nature, but not “at one” with it.

Some might protest “But I have experienced the wonders and joy of Nature!” I would answer “So have I – but this proves only that nature can provide us with some wonders and joys, along with much misery”.

The choice is between theism or atheism. Pantheism is merely a diversion from this choice.