“Respect for Nature”
I’m not very sentimental, even when it comes to things I want to help protect. This is why I don’t approach environmentalism from a tree-hugger’s perspective, but more as if Ayn Rand left her old house in California and actually liked what she saw. Speaking of Ayn Rand, here’s a nice quote on “irrationality”:
The irrational is the impossible; it is that which contradicts the facts of reality; facts cannot be altered by a wish, but they can destroy the wisher.
I agree a lot with this sentiment. The only thing regretful about it is that it was written by the infamous idealist and wisher Ayn Rand. Her big wish was to rebuild capitalism and the American Dream as if we didn’t already reach their logical conclusions by the mid-20th century. Like the modern Communist, Rand thought that if the system (capitalism) was run and followed correctly, it would have been impervious to the brutish social, physical, and economic violence that has resulted so far. She created a rather rigid philosophical system, Objectivism, that may well be the blueprint to run capitalism correctly, but no matter how many Rand adherents I have seen in high places, I haven’t seen the tides of capitalism turning in our favor.
Ayn Rand wished that Nature solely existed to be the canvas of man to create his own constructed world, which she wished was Capitalist. You’re going to get disappointed when you ask the impossible from the real. And boy was she disappointed.
I don’t really get the phrase “respect for Nature”. First, we are part of Nature. We’re not like a twin brother and sister whose mom says, “you have to respect each other now, you’re equals.” In reality, mom would be wondering why there are two identities bouncing in the head of one child.
We’re the one weird species that has to develop a speech and symbolic system just to process the culturally-driven word of “respect” and promote the action toward other things that we have deemed “Nature”. No whale has to teach their children about “respecting nature”.
I approach Nature like I do gravity. I don’t think I’ve ever said that I have “respect for gravity”. This is because I did not anthropomorphize the concept, and I’ve never built rocket ships or planes; I bet some rock scientists have uttered the phrase “respect for gravity” at least once. To anthropomorphize is to take ownership of an inanimate object through an anthropocentric that is inherent in all cultures. This is a natural human process; but I don’t want to do it for gravity. Because that would mystify gravity as having human-like temperament, which is simply untrue. We do this for Nature because we’ve thrived in nature since pre-rational days. Nature was emotional, judgmental, devilish at times.
But what if Nature was like gravity? What are the implications of this?
When Newton “discovered” gravity, he didn’t show his friends and family an apple falling onto a floor, because everyone knows that apples and all other objects fall toward the ground. Newton’s “discovery” of gravity was actually the development of a mathematical model that approximated the effect of gravity. Now he had something to show his friends and family: Apples and all other objects fall toward the ground… in a mathematically consistent way!
How could this apply to Nature? The problem we have right now is that we are enacting Isaac Newton’s ill-fated attempt of showing an apple fall. We hold our hand out wide at a grouping of trees and exclaim “this is Nature!” People, finding this rather self-evident, shrug and walk on. There is no further action needed when pointing out the obvious.
If you want the modern person to “discover” Nature, you have to develop similar models as Newton did that proves Nature is not a hippy-dippy commune but a literal force of nature: like gravity, Nature is a complex of atomic ecosystems that do not care about culture or myths or faith or wishes.