If you look
carefully through a full-color nursery catalog these days, you may well come to
the conclusion that the future of the horticultural trade has a huge stake in
the fertile soil of nature’s weird imagination: the color break, the anomaly,
the mutant freak, the lawbreaker and the abnormal individual are essential in
the race for bigger, brighter and bluer.
Hortibusiness loves the genetic oddball and, apparently, so do we
all. Can you not almost with unnatural
anticipation foresee the day when the first blue Helianthus will nod its cool
cerulean head over late summer gardens?
If such things as
blue sunflowers were ever to occur in nature, none of us would likely live to
see them. But aesthetic whimsy aided by advanced
genetic engineering produced in a few short decades what might have taken
hundreds of years through natural hybridization and careful re-selection, while
the most improbable crosses would never have occurred at all without our
prurient matchmaking. Plant breeders
have taken evolution into their own hands, leaving little to chance, time and
the imagination. They are directed by an
aesthetic, a market driven one to be sure, where the public taste for large
splashy blooms, double and triple if possible, is one of many factors. Today’s flowers must last longer in a vase
for the florist trade, stand up to wind and rain to keep their appearance in
the garden better. They must be made of
stronger stalks and thicker petals.
Certain qualities like fragrance and intricate markings, which make them
irresistible to pollinators are often absent from these new hybrids. Small wonder considering that many of these
hybrids are sterile. The marketing
genius is that one must buy the seed from the distributor every year, or the
plants themselves. Genetics is big
business.
The scientist is
no longer an empiricist, who carefully and faithfully observes the laws of
nature, the geological record and animal behavior, but the director of creation
itself, or at least its manipulator, who has as his creedo “for the benefit of
humanity” and “better living through chemistry.” But better living for whom and what?
What this speeded
up evolutionary process may mean is far more startling than a hole in the ozone
layer, climatic shifts, and polluted air and water (the “end of nature” as Bill
McKibben called it) but the complete rejection of nature aesthetically in favor
of a post-natural world.
If the bird (all
birds ) should become extinct, and that is hardly outside the realm of human
genius (something like 50% of the world’s terrestrial creatures have vanished
in the past 40 years), it is certain that flight will not go extinct with
them. It only means that birds will
cease to function as our favored metaphor for flight. We might speculate, that if the scientist
should decide that the bird is passé, too bothersome to economic growth to keep
around, then perhaps the new masters of evolution will proclaim some flying
machine as the ideal, the very essence of flight. All living creatures may become repugnant to
human beings, the way many insects already are—spiders, cockroaches, wasps,
beetles, mosquitoes. In the same way,
institutional humanity has tried to denature human beings (not only steeping
ourselves in a popular progressive view of homosapiens as an advanced
post-natural creature, but also subjecting us to same genetic engineering undergone
by plants), so all creatures must be domesticated in our image or perish.
Science, as the
technocracy, might decide that nature is too much of a nuisance after all, and
replace all living creatures with more functional computerized, satellite
operated models of birds--recycled aluminum owls and hawks that hunt down the
remaining rodents and pests that have not already been eliminated. Or advanced breeding programs will begin to
domesticate all wildlife. Look at the
success we’ve had with dogs and cats.
Perhaps natural instinct will be the final frontier of our mastery.
The question this
raises is whether there will be enough true science, and true humanity, to
prevent the inevitable logic of our post-natural course? Can we count on scientists who truly love
what is wild? It is hard to be
optimistic, when nearly all major research is funded by profiteering
corporations and short-sighted economic policies.
For a very long
time now, wildness has been viewed as something both virginal and obscene. We depend on nature for our sustenance, yet
at a very basic level we mistrust and fear it.
Whether or not you view human attempts to tame terrestrial wildness in a
positive or negative light, our success is quite possibly only an illusion. The
poisonous stew of toxic waste that saturates the air, water and soil of our
industrial centers is in fact not a controlled substance, but itself a wild
force of natural fury, killing off plant and animal life, altering the quality
of air and water, even our genetic structure.
If deforestation and fossil fuel emissions are causing climatic changes,
a new kind of wilderness may shortly come upon us. But it might be a lifeless kind of wild—with
raging heat, and dust storms, or another ice age. Wildness is everywhere in the universe,
exclusive of life, it is “civilization” that is the exception.
Because we are so
steeped in the minutia of our own time, so very conscious of ourselves and of
our history, we could never be reconciled to the scale and pace of evolutionary
time: it’s infinite patience, the painfully
slow advance and retreat of glaciers, the millennia of micro-evolution that
eventually crawls to the precipice, the leaping off point for the inception of
wildly different forms. The rapid
changes in the world over the last two hundred years, points to the human
consciousness as the new seat of evolutionary intelligence, one that does not
work through the processes of nature, but works upon nature, altering,
suspending, tweaking natural law into submission at a breakneck pace.
As living
organisms, we have not changed much. The
natural results of our lives on earth are more or less like those of all other
creatures: we copulate, bear offspring, or fail to bear offspring. Everything else we do in life--besides
eating, sleeping, eliminating, and dying--is unnatural. Getting dressed in the morning is perhaps the
greatest perversion of natural intent.
In fact, representing socialized behaviors as natural, while presenting
natural behaviors as perverted is one of the hallmarks of civilized hubris, and
the surest sign that humankind is truly alienated from nature.
Emblematic in
labeling of socially unacceptable behaviors as unnatural is the view that same
sex love is outside of nature. It must
be said, that this likens it to every other activity, mode of production, or
recreation that humans are involved in, besides those few essentials I listed
above. On the one hand, same sex love
produces nothing in the procreative sense, beyond the old-fashioned marriage of
convenience. On the other hand, same sex
love requires nothing unnatural, no institutional framework laden with economic
incentives to exist, no apparatus other than the human faculty and body for its
apprehension and enjoyment. It continues
to appear in human society, as it has over and over again in virtually every society
across the ages, including many animal species, despite often severe social
penalties inflicted for its practice and a strong religious zeal to stamp it
out. Efforts to change it are the
product of social pressure and behavioral suppression, the failure of which over
thousands of years points to an immutability in this form of attraction
indicative of natural origin (at least under our old definition of
natural). Because the effort to punish
it and root it out comes from the social order, which is highly mutable over
time and place, the efforts of society in this direction must be seen for what
they are: opposition to the natural
order.
If there is really
only one category of sexual desire, and gays and lesbians are really confused
or just perverse heterosexuals deep down, then the idea of choice is a
double-edged sword for these social engineers.
For, if sexual behavior can be changed in either direction on a whim or
by relational dysfunction, then sexual behavior is either not strictly natural
(using our earlier definition of nature as an immutable law or force), or it is
not naturally strict. That is to say it
is naturally fluid.
Of course, our journey to the post-natural
world would not be complete without a battle over semantics. I’m afraid natural, like the word democracy,
is used to describe anything deemed to be good, while unnatural, like
socialism, has become widely synonymous with anything we wish to label as bad
or harmful, despite the fact that socialist democracies are the norm in Europe. There is nothing empirical, or even rational,
about these cultural designations.
There is a
metaphoric ratcheting for control over language and meaning in the battle over
the future of nature. In the world of
food production, the battle between political progressives and corporate
profiteers goes on full tilt over exploitive and environmentally destructive
practices. The closest most of us come
to the front lines is reading the labels on the grocery shelves. We know about free range chickens, grass fed
beef, organic produce, mad cow disease and fair trade coffee.
Seventy years ago,
the so called greatest generation had just finished waging one war, and wasn’t
about to start another one over the advent of highly processed foods, even if
this new food had little to do with the real thing it had replaced. Grape flavored, cheese flavored, chocolate
flavored seemed like harmless enough designations for the unsophisticated and
dutiful survivors of depression and world war.
Flavor is flavor. People gobbled
it up without the slightest qualm that what they were eating was unnatural,
possibly antithetical to health and life.
In the language of food production, the word natural only means that a
particular product, such as peanut butter, is made mainly of ground peanuts and
perhaps salt with no additives; while other kinds of peanut butter not deemed
natural may be whipped up with hydrogenated oils, lard, sugar and preservatives
that give it a constantly smooth texture and make it possible to store it in
the kitchen cabinet rather than the refrigerator. The existence of this heavily processed food,
overloaded with additives and sweeteners, serves both aesthetics and
convenience. It does not need
refrigeration, keeps for months, is always smooth, easy to spread, and pleasing
to present. In the fabulously artificial
1950’s this was the metaphor for post-war optimism that reached into every
corner of American life. Even the food
we ate had to represent our triumph over all of life’s natural
unpleasantness. But was this kind of
unnatural selection, this survival of the aesthetically pleasing, this
obsession with appearances, a healthy thing?
Now, we know that
the word natural does not speak to methods of growing. These days, we have organic produce that
supposedly does not use commercial fertilizers and pesticides in its
production. We have since learned that
in order to be truly organic, it must say 100% certified organic. But to most people organic is a metaphor for
“healthy” and in some circles it means “self-righteous”. Natural, though, is more widely mistrusted in
supermarkets as it now has been exposed as a fraudulent claim of
healthfulness. Organic without the
proper qualifiers has also been exposed as a deception. In this highly artificial world, everything
is deprived of its explicit, objective meaning in favor of a rapidly evolving
cultural relevance, wherein an object holds briefly a transitory value (either
positive or negative) in its role as a commodity. Medical science and big business (the
technocracy) is largely responsible for this day to day shift in the relative
meaning and value of every day objects.
One day soy products are cancer fighters, the next day a new study
proclaims that the isoflavins in some soy products may result in some form of
brain degeneration. More recently, soy
has been determined to have estrogenic properties and men should be cautious
about over-consumption. The result is a
deep unsettling and mistrust of everything in the objective world, even the
very natural and seemingly harmless soybean.
We don’t know from day to day where we stand in relation to a particular
edible, an activity, environment or pattern of consumption. The capitalist/democratic impulse of competing
interests has turned choice into a pathology.
Mark that soon Consumer Anxiety Disorder will be heralded as the latest
disease, with an etiology of unbalanced brain chemistry in the presence of
unparalleled consumer options and internet dependency. This will lead to a new line of anti-CAD
drugs, which with their characteristically paradoxical side effects, will
create yet another trigger for consumer anxiety disorder—or sleeping-walking. It goes on without end. Will soy save me from cancer, or will it rot
my brain? Will my driver side airbag
keep me safe in a crash or will it suffocate me? Do radio waves from cell phone towers really
cause cancer or don’t they? If I get too
little sleep will I fail at school? If I
get too much sleep will I shave 5 years off the end of my life? This perpetual state of doubt, anxiety and
confusion, intentional or not, is proof of our fanatical devotion to
technology, and to technology’s whimsical application in the service of
commerce. And the deadly combination of
confusion and absolute faith makes further manipulation possible. For the “true” answer is out there, surely
just a matter of more research dollars.
Much like Christian converts, who struggle daily for the assurance that
the blood of Jesus has washed away their sins, so the cult of
technology wavers from moment to moment between righteousness and sin, joy and
weeping, fear and thankfulness, hope and despair. The technocracy is the author and finisher of
our faith. We are poised on the
precipice waiting to take the ultimate evolutionary leap. The heady flight over the abyss of our own
mortality toward a post-natural world.
On the other hand,
it could be that our status as living organisms necessitates that our industry
also must be considered natural results of evolution’s unconscious choice of
consciousness. In this pragmatic view,
the skyscraper and the desert butte are natural results of evolutionary
process; the city canyons of New York and Tokyo are just another natural
pattern echoing the Grand Canyon; the scientific laboratory is as much the seat
of creation as the ecosystem. Perhaps
more so, as we wait, deceptively poised in evolutionary time, in the front car
of creation’s roller coaster, able to detect in our limited perspective only
the lightning quick jerk of our own unnatural mechanisms, not the slow,
infinitesimal grinding of the glaciers, or the turning of planetary
wheels. We are mortal, we are conscious
of it, and we cannot wait to see what the next ice age produces. For we will not be around to witness it. We must take the wheel out of nature’s
lumbering hands and drive, faster toward the amber palisades of the Kingdom,
dreaming the world over again as we ride.
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