This is just semantics, but I mean… nature isn’t good. Nature is really terrible, actually. It’s an endless cycle of violence, death and entropy that has killed literally all of our ancestors and will kill us just as quickly if we give it the chance (to paraphrase one of my favourite games, The Talos Principle II). Being better than nature is an ideal anyone who isn’t some kind of insane social darwinist should strive for.
While I’m pretty sure I wholly agree with the sentiment of the majority of people saying it, I resent this “man is part of nature” argument because at face value it romanticizes suffering. Nature is dying by 40 if you’re lucky, and by 5 if you’re not. It’s your entire tribe starving to death because a volcano you didn’t even know about erupted on the other side of the world. It’s being killed or enslaved by another tribe’s raiding party because they want something you have (you may argue that this is human action, not nature, but chimps go to war and chimps are animals in nature, ergo war is part of nature). I am glad to be above a lot of that, and I hope future humans can be even further removed from it.
Of course what most people mean when they say that humans aren’t (or shouldn’t be) above nature is just that they think we should stop destroying the planet in the various completely unnecessary ways we do, and that if we don’t it’ll bite us in the ass, and I fully agree with that. I just don’t vibe with the way it’s phrased.
I agree this is all about semantics, you seem to consider nature only for its bad sides (but don’t forget we also get all our food from nature).
Nature is really terrible, actually. It’s an endless cycle of violence, death
Dying sucks but I don’t think we should ever stop doing that (at a reasonable age, let’s be clear).
I agree that being above the violent killing part of nature should be an ideal, but I’m sorry to say I don’t believe we’re there yet, people are still killing; for food, for fun, for greed, just look at the news… :'(
I resent this “man is part of nature” argument because at face value it romanticizes suffering.
Here you raise an important question: does being part of nature exclude us from using technology?
I don’t believe so. To me being part of nature does not mean to live like our ancestors did when there was no manmade things, or when you would get burned at the stake for doing science…
(I’m not sure in what periods of history you would consider we were part of nature).
The way I see it, we could be part of nature while using a lot of the technologies we use today. We would just need to tweak (a lot) of them and drop the use of many more, but I’m convinced that, if everybody started taking their responsibilities, we could find effective ways to produce enough medicine and food without the damage that those currently cause.
So yeah, I get you, you get me, we just don’t mean the same thing when we say nature :)
Chimps don’t have buttons that can annihilate entire cities at once. They don’t go out their way to spends years, decades, centuries to develop items and techniques to inflict the maximum amount of pain onto another chimp.
That we (as a species, not inviduals) totally do outdo chimps, or any other animal species, in cruelty. In my mind, the peak of cruelty isn’t mindlessly tearing someone apart maenad-style, but instead calmly designing and building and using instruments for the sole purpose of being cruel.
Mostly no disagreement there, though I want to say that chimps do not go to war out of cruelty. Chimps go to war because they live in scarcity and it increases the war gene’s odds of survival.
In the past this was also the primary reason humans went to war. In modern times we have invented many new reasons, but usually even those do not boil down to simple cruelty (though there’s many cases in history where one could argue cruelty was the primary motivation). Usually war wields cruelty as an instrument, not the other way around.
This is just semantics, but I mean… nature isn’t good. Nature is really terrible, actually. It’s an endless cycle of violence, death and entropy that has killed literally all of our ancestors and will kill us just as quickly if we give it the chance (to paraphrase one of my favourite games, The Talos Principle II). Being better than nature is an ideal anyone who isn’t some kind of insane social darwinist should strive for.
While I’m pretty sure I wholly agree with the sentiment of the majority of people saying it, I resent this “man is part of nature” argument because at face value it romanticizes suffering. Nature is dying by 40 if you’re lucky, and by 5 if you’re not. It’s your entire tribe starving to death because a volcano you didn’t even know about erupted on the other side of the world. It’s being killed or enslaved by another tribe’s raiding party because they want something you have (you may argue that this is human action, not nature, but chimps go to war and chimps are animals in nature, ergo war is part of nature). I am glad to be above a lot of that, and I hope future humans can be even further removed from it.
Of course what most people mean when they say that humans aren’t (or shouldn’t be) above nature is just that they think we should stop destroying the planet in the various completely unnecessary ways we do, and that if we don’t it’ll bite us in the ass, and I fully agree with that. I just don’t vibe with the way it’s phrased.
I agree this is all about semantics, you seem to consider nature only for its bad sides (but don’t forget we also get all our food from nature).
Dying sucks but I don’t think we should ever stop doing that (at a reasonable age, let’s be clear).
I agree that being above the violent killing part of nature should be an ideal, but I’m sorry to say I don’t believe we’re there yet, people are still killing; for food, for fun, for greed, just look at the news… :'(
Here you raise an important question: does being part of nature exclude us from using technology?
I don’t believe so. To me being part of nature does not mean to live like our ancestors did when there was no manmade things, or when you would get burned at the stake for doing science…
(I’m not sure in what periods of history you would consider we were part of nature).
The way I see it, we could be part of nature while using a lot of the technologies we use today. We would just need to tweak (a lot) of them and drop the use of many more, but I’m convinced that, if everybody started taking their responsibilities, we could find effective ways to produce enough medicine and food without the damage that those currently cause.
So yeah, I get you, you get me, we just don’t mean the same thing when we say nature :)
Chimps don’t have buttons that can annihilate entire cities at once. They don’t go out their way to spends years, decades, centuries to develop items and techniques to inflict the maximum amount of pain onto another chimp.
Yeah and crows don’t have electric drills yet they are still capable of tool use. What is your point?
That we (as a species, not inviduals) totally do outdo chimps, or any other animal species, in cruelty. In my mind, the peak of cruelty isn’t mindlessly tearing someone apart maenad-style, but instead calmly designing and building and using instruments for the sole purpose of being cruel.
Mostly no disagreement there, though I want to say that chimps do not go to war out of cruelty. Chimps go to war because they live in scarcity and it increases the war gene’s odds of survival.
In the past this was also the primary reason humans went to war. In modern times we have invented many new reasons, but usually even those do not boil down to simple cruelty (though there’s many cases in history where one could argue cruelty was the primary motivation). Usually war wields cruelty as an instrument, not the other way around.