All things have their natural ordering—that they are free to break. And every break over time is stitched into a new seam, reincorporated into the unbreaking web of cause and effect that makes our natural world. Where, in the end, everything has its place, and everything its nature. No harm and no good come unduly, or unexpectedly. That world has in this way settled into its perfection. And it is in this that is rooted the well-worn truth that natural things are good.
That web of happenings was our home for so long. We built our way into it, our practices and homes interweaving with it. Practices merely an extension of the study of natural processes. Homes not bastions of separation, but new biomes where life still could flourish.[1] Temporary iterations of “human artifice,” built for a better life but not a fundamentally different one. New causes and effects, slowly being stitched back into the natural web. Fading into loving oblivion.
That was until the day a voice stood up and finally said “we can do better!”[2] We can rid ourselves of the most laborious parts of life, of our slavery to nature and all its processes—and at last be free to determine our own fate and so claim the best life has to offer! We must merely defeat nature, crush nature, and take its power—its form—for ourselves.
And could we really? No matter, the idea was already conceived! And though it would take time to come to term, it proceeded uninterrupted into our current age of labor. Beginning when the first machine roared to life, when the first factory assembly line unified the human being with the machine, when we first stepped away from nature, and where able to look back with a gaze of consumption. The seams of our actions could no longer be stitched fast enough and so began to fray.
A long thread, delicately spooling away to wrap itself like a ball of yarn. Growing ever larger until at last the final thread will come loose and the ball will keep on spinning—completely separated—until it spins at last through the wispy remnants of the natural world, demolishing it as no longer necessary, important, or good.
In that tangled new construct, that new globe so much less magical, is a whole new world. A “world of machines” where automated processes interact with each other almost exclusively and so perpetuate themselves. Nature is cut out of this new web of cause and effect.
A handbag of synthetic leather made for a merchant to sell to make money for a coke to a customer more interested in fashion than carrying. A world so fully self-referential as to begin to manifest its own natural processes, its own laws of nature, to be its own separate web of cause and effects. A world “as senseless to describe…in terms of means and ends [as it is] senseless to ask nature if she produced the seed to produce a tree or the tree to produce a seed.”[3] A world built to support human life, but strangely no longer interested in human life; or any organic life that is not directly useful.
Consuming nature as its material, until nothing is left. Not only as a loss, but even perhaps for a world that is not better. That in its new separation, spins itself out into oblivion. In stark disagreement with that original dream. That now has no one to remember it, no one to really remember—just a foggy inclination carrying us forwards. The loving dream of a better world, slipping just below the horizon.
As we finally begin to imagine ourselves unnaturally. As finally capable of so much more. Our responsibility, our determination and hope, begin to flag. Because in this new world, who are we to act? No longer difference-makers, carving out brief reprieves from nature to serve as our formative spaces; where we could declare and make ourselves. Now we have become one with a new set of natural processes. No different from rain, dirt, or foliage. And what business do drops of rain have with changing their world?
We have left behind the split purpose of beings. In nature the ground is the ground, the flowers the flowers, the humans the humans, the prey and the hunters the prey and the hunters. Each has a purpose identical to their being. They are built for what they will be and so their mode of life can never be anything but acceptable. Not so for the human being with their infinite potential. We were never meant to be the soil, from which nutrients rise and fall to feed the cycle of all other parts. We were never meant to be the plant that makes these basic pieces available. We were never meant to be hunter and prey, forcing each other into inequality in a question of proper resource distribution… By cramming all these into limited human lives, we reduce each human being—by a semi-random distribution—to a few strange and inhuman tasks; in every part of their lives. Tasks that, by their nature, belong to the appropriate being in the already existing world. Creating a new world to give all these tasks to humanity reduces the human being and ignores their potential.
Oh tell me you don’t feel it. The cramming of so many disparate purposes into your personhood? That I can be at once product, material, producer, and consumer—and do all three without touching the natural world. Is my money that much different than an apple on a tree that is picked by an opportunistic passerby? Is my labor any different than a speck of soil from which companies draw nutrients to form leaves, stems and flowers? Is what I produce aside from that any different than flowers? Is my free time so much different from a pond that supplies water to grow these plants? Is the work of office-goers so different than that of chlorophyll in leaves?
But setting all that aside as not right, it is clear that this new world is not doing better—and we are well aware. Yet how can we remember to dream that original dream?
And I keep wondering what we dream instead.
[1] See Scott, James C. Against the Grain. Yale university press 2017. Not to underestimate the effect early human beings had on their environment using techniques such as controlled burning (pg. 70. But instead specifically to speak to how human towns and cities created their own ecosystem of fields and houses favored by non-human animals such as rats, sparrows, dogs, cats, luce, etc. (pg. 72-73)
[2]Not a direct quote, but perhaps the sentiment of Aristotle: See Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago university press 2018. Originally published 1958. Pg. 12
[3] Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago university press 2018. Originally published 1958. Pg. 152
