The mastery of nature

Our present human condition embodies an antagonism towards nature, one that explains the heights of our creative intelligence, the depths of our self-destructiveness, and how they have become one. Although of nature, humanity relentlessly seeks to master it, and in doing so prompts its own demise.

The biology of our underlying animal drives – hunger, thirst, and sexuality – is primary, and one might say explains the development of our self-consciousness and reason, both of which, in combination with our creative intelligence, have been enlisted in service to survival. The result is a human effort to master nature, to bend the natural world to our will, to use it, manipulate it and attempt even to possess it.

In order the achieve the mastery of nature, we’ve had to create the delusion that we are separate from it; to objectify, name, and turn the natural world of which we are a part into things. Having done so, we then manipulate things to satisfy ourselves, but this, ironically, exacerbates the antagonism we feel. Nature becomes something to conquer, be it trees, oceans, metal ore, oil, the atom, genetics, the weather, and now outer space. In doing so, we set the stage for our own destruction.

We’ve sublimated our animal drives by inventing culture – satisfying fear of hunger through delayed gratification compensated by the availability of local restaurants, fast food, and overstocked supermarkets and curbing thirst by providing readily accessible household drinking water and all sorts of beverages – milk, beer, booze, Coca Cola and Mountain Dew. Of all our animal drives, sexuality has been the most difficult to sublimate so we celebrate it instead, thus the prolific use of sexuality in movies, books, advertising, entertainment and online. The profusion and acceptance of new and varied sexual identities mirror the continuing centrality of sexuality in human life.

Civilization overall can be described as an act of sublimation, a collective submission of individual freedom to authority in exchange for safety and social order. Such submission was once entirely a matter of surrender to predatory brute force, and it remains that way in many places in the world. The replacement of brute force with social systems of organization like democracy, socialism, communism, etc. has outwardly replaced brute force with the use of reason in the form of law, but for those individuals unable to conform, the use of brute force remains, albeit supported by the powerful aegis of reason. Reason is neutral and can as easily support the tenets and logic of authoritarianism as it can democracy. To devoted Nazis, the barbaric policies of fascist Germany were entirely reasonable.

Accordingly, the role of human virtue and ethics in an otherwise dog-eat-dog world remains uncertain. Human transition from Homo sapiens into Homo economicus has only exacerbated this uncertainty. The use of reason has brought with it a systematic transformation of modern humanity into mathematically calculable units and interchangeable parts; our evolution has adopted our industrialized models. This is, perhaps, the inevitable result of the objectivity of reason combined with the experience of mastery over nature. We have objectified ourselves.

Ultimately, the various proposed forms of utopia – economic, social, political – are attempts to replace our animal drives with homogeneity, conformance imposed through both culture and at the barrel of a gun. Life-destroying nuclear weapons are poised mere minutes away, the reasoned threat of annihilation subordinating all else. Our antagonism towards nature has become antagonism towards ourselves.