What is our relationship with nature ?
What is our relationship with nature ? I'd say: It depends.
If we are talking about nature "out there" in the sense of the environment, then we often speak emphatically of "Mother Nature", which must be respected and preserved. According to this view, the original sin of industrial modernity is that modern man has subjugated Nature in order to exploit it.
In this context, one often reads and hears that human beings are a part of nature.
But when it is about themselves ("Nature within" ), the same people refuse to speak of "nature" at all. Instead, the tabula rasa and the free decision of the individual reign supreme; people, free of any natural constraint, determine for themselves what they want to be. "I feel like X, therefore I am X".
One can observe this attitude when it comes to the topic of gender, where everyone should and may be what he/she wants to be, independent of and unconstrained by any "nature", however it may be understood.
Something like a natural sex or gender no longer exists in this worldview, it is replaced by an act of social attribution. The personal feeling determines / creates the identity and this defines the own being. Every person is free to become its own creator. Nature - if it is still alluded to - is nothing but the amorphous material of one's own self-creation.
So what is considered a "sin" in one area (nature "out there" ), namely to remodel and exploit nature according to our needs and ideas, is considered a desirable virtue in another area (nature "within" ).
Am I the only one to see an incoherence here?
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.Me and nature largely have a distant relationship. I am very committed to maintaining the status quo of this relationship to be best of my ability but nature seems to have some boundary issues. I try and minimize my time with nature while maximizing distance but nature frequently violates this by sending unwanted advances toward me in the form of mosquitoes, roaches, inconvenient rainstorms, and even minor vandalism to my home. At this point I think our relationship has grown unhealthy but nature refuses to go to counseling with me.
Charles1971
Level 7
June 25, 2021
1
The people who say nature must be preserved and the people who believe they are blank slates may not be the same people. But in cases where they are, they are just swimming in cognitive dissonance, like most of us.
That said, we are still a long way from knowing exactly what our nature is, and exactly how amenable it is to deliberate modification. Clearly, H.sapiens has some large capacity, through cultural evolution and individual will, to behave in ways that “nature” did not specify. Equally clearly, that capacity has contributed toward our outsized fitness success as well as toward our increasing existential challenges.
skado
Level 9
June 25, 2021
1
@Matias
I don’t think science knows all there is to know about this subject yet. There might well be a felt sense of sex that we are born with, just like there is a felt sense of sexual attraction that people are born with. And that felt sense of sexual identity may not always match one’s biological equipment. If homosexuality is natural, and It appears to be, then why might mismatched gender identity not be natural as well?
No I can see the same problem. One part of it of course is the inherited cultural dogma, that there are only two sexes, which is not true even of nature, where all manner of hermaphrodites have always and always did exist. And that everyone has to have just one of those two sexes, why not three or four ? Say a birth sex, the one entered on your birth certificate, a genetic sex determined by your genetics (of which there should be about five natural ones ), which could be used for sports, and a self defined sex, the one you choose for yourself which goes no your passport say.
Fernapple
Level 9
June 25, 2021
3
@Matias Yes I am probably going down a rabbit hole, the issue of gender in sports has been so much to the fore this last month here, I was making an assumption that your post was inspired by that. But it still makes the point that biological gender is not simple, and that how you define sex may depend very much more on your reasons for needing to use gender, rather than biology.
Perhaps the best answer to your main question though, is that since cognitive dissonance and the property it gives to people to believe several quite contrary things at the same time, is the norm in virtually every sphere of human life, why should our attitude to nature be the one exception.
Where did the "nature within" come from and how did it get there?
Word
Level 8
June 25, 2021
1
See a doctor.
waitingforgodo
Level 8
June 25, 2021
0
Word:
Are you with big pharmaceutical? You seem to really promote people to see doctors and take meds. Do you capitalize on people being medically or medicinally treated?
@Word when it is obvious someone needs help,what else should we recommend? The truly snotty reply reveals your deep need!
Word:
@AnneWimsey snotty reply you say as in Analogious that it causes me allergic reactions. So my reply being a response to an allergen.
Deep needs, I don't doubt that I could need things of a deep natural but I don't think you could dig up what is needed.
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