Nature’s Monstrousness Drives Human Progress
Artificiality, the wilderness, and science’s dire implications
For those who mostly confine themselves to working and living behind walls, stepping out into nature is a welcome respite.
We might even deprive ourselves of vitamin D and suffer from cabin fever, cooped up in our offices or dens, in which case we earn the advice that we ought to “touch grass.” To try to balance things, we mow our lawns, our captive corners of nature, and we might hike, take vacations at a faraway beach, or camp in the wilderness. Hence the contrast between our pride in our compliance with civilized norms, and our unconscious longing to be as free as a prehistoric forager.
Still, we’re evidently ambivalent about nature. We suspect there’s something inhuman about locking ourselves up in our artificial domains because the human brain evolved over 2.6 million years ago on the African savannas. The Paleolithic hunter-gatherer is therefore, in a sense, more human than the well-heeled, glad-handing businessperson.
If that’s the case, though, we assume, as Nietzsche said, that human nature is something to be overcome. Civilization may have begun as a trap, as agriculture, technology, and social hierarchies enlisted us as workforces for royal elites who supposedly spoke for gods. We lost our animalistic freedom and burdened ourselves with gratuitous social responsibilities which mean everything to us and nothing to the universe. But by a kind of Stockholm syndrome, we came to admire these games we play. We call the exploration of the civilized niche “progress.”
Regardless of the rhetoric we attach to politically correct environmentalism, we prefer life behind walls to life in the jungle. The prehistoric wilderness hardened us, whereas the artificial domains we erected domesticated, pampered, and enslaved most of us so that we feel more at home sitting at a computer than trying to start a fire with rocks and sticks.
We think nature is crucial to our wellbeing because we know we evolved from animal species and because we want our progress to be sustainable. Otherwise, the enrichment of our living standard at nature’s expense would be a relatively short-lived travesty, as the ecosystems will snap back and extinguish us for being so vain.
Progress as domestication
What is it, though, that motivates us to experiment with progress? And what’s the opposite of progress? Ahead of what starting point do we mean to be advancing?
Sedentary societies may have originated from some of our primordial bumbling frauds and childlike trials and errors, yet we can't reduce the value of civilization to that origin without committing the genetic fallacy. Civilization came to represent “progress,” which made us as artificial as our cities and cultural standards. An artificial animal is precisely a person, and artificiality is anti-natural.
Natural ways of life are under the auspices of biological norms such as natural selection, the need for homeostasis, the struggle to complete a life cycle by eating, sleeping, mating, and dying to make room for fresh generations.
By contrast, artificial ways of life begin with an intelligent animal’s anomalous self-awareness, and with its realization that this animal is autonomous and can forge a new path, one that’s at odds with the evolution of life. An artificial way of life is unnatural since it’s intelligently designed and thus is fallible, perhaps even doomed to be farcical. By contrast, unknowing nature can make no mistakes.
So, we set up societies and posit laws of religion, morality, and politics which aren’t wholly reducible to the norms of sociobiological behaviours. We live as dignified people rather than as animals just to the extent that we aim to achieve far-fetched goals that emerge from our imagination rather than directly from the planet’s evolution of gene carriers. Although we, too, need to eat, sleep, mate, and die, we don’t take that cycle to be the point of our life; rather, we live with our mind swimming in cultural fictions. The more counterfactual our convictions, encultured our character, and domesticated our conduct, the greater our anomalousness in the animal kingdom.
To be sure, each animal species has unique gifts, but animals use their traits to adapt to their natural environment, whereas people use their creative intelligence and opposable thumbs to build environments that are so unnatural, they threaten the planet’s evolutionary balance itself. People are no longer subject mainly to natural selection since we aim to govern the planet, and to decide which species live or die. Specifically, we prefer livestock and pets to wild animals. Hence the sixth mass extinction we’re perpetrating to make room for our refuges.
The kind of nature we admire, then, isn’t nature in the broadest sense, but a walled garden, a cultivated portion that we use as just another artifact. Nature as the sublime cosmos is hardly as reassuring as your front lawn or your favourite vacation spot, pet, or camping ground. No, the greater, cosmic wilderness has come to be defined by scientific objectification, which leads inexorably to the fear of nature as the ultimate monstrosity.
The cosmic monstrosity
Science is naturalistic, meaning that scientists avoid self-defeating appeals to the supernatural; in other words, scientists explain events by positing natural causes. Those causes either go on forever or they end in some brute, inexplicable point of origin. Either way, the universe or the sum of these natural causes and effects is monstrous in that its counter-intuitiveness is inhuman.
What is a monster, after all, if not the ostracized other, that which we fear because it’s different from us? A monster is deemed ugly not just because it happens to fail to conform to certain standards of beauty and propriety, but because the monster is alien to those standards. The monster has foreign aspirations, a fact that discloses the relativity of all aspirations, thus humiliating us for being so parochial and proud of ours.
We have our cognitive capacities, and as advanced as our empirical knowledge surely is, our models and laws of nature don’t encompass the universe’s ultimate identity. Specifically, there will never be a scientific explanation of the property of naturalness, of why there’s anything natural in the first place. Scientists can explain something only by naturalizing it, and thus by positing more natural forces, elements, mechanisms, initial conditions, or structural relationships which themselves will always be open to further scientific questioning and explanation.
Thus, the universe is as monstrous as the fictional zombie, in that physical energy and the zombie’s shuffling are both ultimately inexplicable. The natural order is real, but having outgrown the appeal to supernatural gods and the personification of the inhuman, we must live with nature’s alienness.
And we live with that by unconsciously loathing the wilderness. This may not have been the impulse that led prehistoric people to devise artificial shelters in the first place, to turn their back on animality and to strive to be godlike in their domesticity. But this loathing is what we’ve evidently learned to do after being separated for so long from the Stone Age.
Of course, the institution of science is a relatively recent invention, but this is to say that with science we understand consciously what we’ve been doing unconsciously all along: by attempting to “progress” with our artificial enclosures, we retreat from the natural world we now more deeply understand because the more self-aware we became, the more we stood apart from the animal and physical orders. The more self-centered and inward-looking our cultures, the more the inhuman cosmic plenum seems implicitly monstrous, or disgusting according to our civilized expectations.
If we prefer to live in cities, the wilderness must be grotesque by comparison. The wilderness isn’t a shelter that flatters our infantile preoccupations; nature doesn’t care even whether we live or die. Nature is content for the worst of our pastimes to play out, for the unjust to prosper and for gentle, conscientious souls to languish in oblivion. Although we take our ideals seriously, nature doesn’t.
That’s the anomaly of personhood on top of the anomaly of organic life in the largely lifeless universe.
Secular whitewashers and truthtellers
Now, there are two ways in which atheists deal with this analysis. Secular humanists whitewash it, carrying on about the benefits of progress and celebrating our pride in our abilities to understand the world and to live together freely and peacefully, while indulging in saccharine paeans to nature’s beauty and to how we’re just another part of the wider world.
Grimmer, existential thinkers foreground the conflict, reminding us, rather, that social and technological progress is a tragically heroic rebellion against nature’s absurd godlessness. Nature creates itself and evolves from scratch with no intelligent direction and for no human, moral purpose, ruining everything on its way to maximum entropy at the end of time, perhaps only to start the cosmic clock up again for another round of the grotesque shuffling of forms.
The progress that centrist, neoliberal secularists take for granted, then, is taboo and bizarre, as far as nature would be concerned. We’re proud of personhood, but via scientific understanding, we’re also aware that nature is impersonal.
This means that an astronomically vast and ancient universe is neutral about what we live and die for. Our families and hobbies, aspirations and dreams, religions and political parties, wars and histories are all virtually meaningless on the cosmic scale. Again, they mean everything to us, which is why we spend our decades mostly within these developed societies. But they mean nothing whatsoever to the wider universe.
Progress is a refuge from that impersonality, indifference, amorality, and lack of divine, vindicating direction. Progress is the attempt to create the world that we think nature should have been. Progress is only tragically heroic in that nature will likely overcome our efforts, and our species will one day die off, possibly in disgrace.
Still, these are the existential stakes that are implicit in the civilized adventure. Secular humanists represent the mainstream culture of developed societies, which means they protect the noble lies that keep the peace. Existential philosophers and artists are disgusted as much by those lies as they are by the absurdity of a godless world. These radicals delve into such unsettling reflections in their countercultures, so we don’t forget our primary purpose.