Natural by Alan Levinovitz
Human civilization inhabits a a confusing position, partially within nature and partially detached from it. Humans regard themselves as the only species that ever does unnatural things. Humanity sees itself as having defied nature and as having signed up for the uncharted consequences of doing so.
Nature continues to be a subject of fascination, awe, and reverence. The word “natural” is synonymously used with words like original, wise, honest, clean, authentic, pure, and healthy. When nature produces something undesirable, those things often get labelled as unnatural aberrations, leaving the word “natural” untainted. Many debates about what is good devolve into debates about what is natural; the two sides disagree about what qualifies as natural, but agree that whatever is natural is good. Especially in marketing and in political rhetoric, the word “natural” has long been overused to the point of meaninglessness.
Appeals to nature have a long history of coexisting with organized religions. Nature can be used interchangeably with God, or can be cited as evidence of God’s intent. A “God says so” argument gains strength when a “Nature says so too” observation backs it up.
As humanity’s oldest god, nature is fully capable of acting as a religion for the nominally non-religious. As in many other religions, there is an overarching narrative about an idyllic mythic past, a fall from grace, and a promise of redemption. Nature is seen as a benevolent diety that has people’s best interests at heart and offers constructive lessons on how to live. Nature promises health and wellness to those who follow its prescriptions, while damning its arrogant opponents with sickness and death. Like other religions, devotion to nature comes with a sliding scale of purity, with virtually no one going the full distance because of how inconvenient that would be.
Many claims about naturalness feel scientific, but are ultimately religious at their core. Here is a collection of topics where appeals to nature have led people astray or where the definition of “natural” has changed with the times.
Childbirth. Many modern women feel uneasy about proactively signing up for “unnatural” childbirth interventions such as C-sections, induction, or epidurals. They see childbirth as a sacred experience that connects them to their forebears and to the wider community of living things. Like many things shaped by natural selection, mammal childbirth is a jerry-rigged system that works well enough, but just barely. Difficult childbirth was once believed to be mostly a human problem, but recent scientific observations show that stillbirths and maternal deaths are more common in wild animals than was previously believed. Hunter-gatherer human populations had maternal mortality rates as high as 2% and never had infant mortality rates lower than 15-20%. Making childbirth safe is arguably modern medicine’s greatest achievement. Infant mortality rates are now so low that modern societies have abandoned many old habits such as not conferring full personhood on a newborn until a waiting period has passed. The current scientific position is that “natural” vaginal childbirth has health benefits for both mothers and their infants and should be done as a default unless there is a valid reason not to. The current consensus of medical authorities is that C-sections are overused in developed countries and underused in developing ones.
Crops. After the rise of agriculture, food crops were selectively bred into far more bloated and fragile variants of their wild forms. Despite this trend, farming itself has seldom been criticized as unnatural due to its essential role in society. Agrarian cultures often explained the labor-intensiveness of farming as a lesson from God about the importance of hard work. Farming has become increasingly unnatural throughout history due to technical innovations that improved productivity. In modern times, some products have left the agriculture business altogether; for instance, most vanillin is now produced synthetically rather than from the labor-intensive vanilla crop. In general, distant historical developments in agriculture have long been accepted as natural and only contemporary developments are ever controversial. The modern interest in organic farming is only a minor backtracking, one that is unlikely to see mass adoption due to its cost and scalability problems. Modern panics about GMO crops and artificial ingredients are often a distraction from weightier problems. Like organic produce, neither has clear evidence of health impacts in either direction. From a public health perspective, the deadliest agriculture-derived products today are tobacco and alcohol, neither of which is particularly unnatural or particularly new.
Food processing. In a modern backlash against industrial food preparation, there is a new interest in eating unprocessed foods, ideally as close to their “natural” state as possible. This view runs directly counter to how hunter-gatherer and agrarian populations viewed food. To improve safety and palatability, hunter-gatherers processed foods before eating them in far more elaborate ways than any other animal. Processed food was considered trustworthy while wild food was not. In the Middle Ages, white bread from refined grains was seen as a purified form of bread rather than a deficient one. Pre-industrial people cooked many foods that are usually eaten raw today, most notably fruits. By modern standards, many historical food safety practices were appalling, especially people’s casualness towards lead cookware, arsenic compounds, and narcotics. The modern food industry has faced flak for unhealthy ingredients and preparation methods, but the industry’s mistakes are detected much faster than in the past.
Hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherer societies have a history of being both demonized and idealized, with industrial-era depictions trending more towards idealization. The true picture is mixed and complicated. Hunter-gatherers did not have giant wars, but they regularly had smaller violent feuds. Hunter-gatherers were egalitarian and avoided the culture rot that comes with class stratification, but they also widely practiced slavery and captivity. Hunter-gatherers were healthy and free of many chronic diseases, but this is partly selection bias because many died fast deaths from injuries and infections. Outside written accounts of hunter-gatherers widely describe them as generous and hospitable. European colonists widely noted that many Europeans willingly defected to live among indigenous tribes, but the opposite migration almost never occurred. The question of whether hunter-gatherers were truly happier than modern people is hard to settle, as results differ wildly depending on how the questions are phrased. Likewise, the question of whether hunter-gatherers worked fewer hours than modern people depends overwhelmingly on which activities get counted as work. Contemporary hunter-gatherers who adopt outside technology or who leave for city life widely describe their lives as having become easier. There is a lot of interest from industrial people in emulating some aspects of hunter-gatherer culture, especially their free-range yet attentive parenting style. Many hunter-gatherer habits have proven to be difficult for individuals to port to modern society, mainly because they don’t work unless the wider community adopts them too.
Wilderness. For modern-day nature lovers, camping trips, hiking trips, and road trips to national parks are the modern-day equivalent of religious pilgrimages. These journeys connect people to something grander than civilization and send them home feeling spiritually refreshed. Wilderness areas are increasingly seen in industrial cultures as sacred places that should remain as undisturbed as possible while still being practical to visit. This view differs from that of hunter-gatherer people, who universally saw themselves as part of nature rather than distinct from it. It also differs from the view of agrarian people, who separated civilization from wilderness but treated wilderness as something savage to be conquered. Within the nature-loving camp, a bitter debate exists on the ethics of hunting wild animals; proponents defend hunting as a natural practice with prehistoric roots, while opponents attack it as an immoral and unnatural intervention.
Medicine. In a backlash against industrial-era science-based conventional medicine, there has been an increase in interest in “natural” medicine. Modern-day natural medicine is often a hodgepodge of ancient, non-Western, New Age, and high-tech ideas, with nature and naturalness as its unifying principle. Natural medicine’s central premise is that health is the default and the body is self-correcting. It also holds that illness comes from the modern unnatural world and that returning to nature can trigger healing. Natural medicine has broken with most ancient medical traditions (and ironically aligns with conventional medicine) in that it sees disease as a purely physical phenomenon not requiring moral, magical, or supernatural explanations. Unlike conventional medicine, natural medicine never concedes ignorance, never concedes helplessness, never blames the patient, and never puts patients through humiliating experiences. It should be noted that until the 20th century, doctors of all stripes were ignorant quacks whose interventions were more likely to harm patients than to help them. Modern conventional medicine is statistically superior, but it still leaves many people with poor experiences and poor outcomes. Most people seeking natural medicine do it because of disillusionment with conventional medicine rather than faith in the alternative. The enduring popularity of unscientific medicine raises some valid critiques of how science-based medicine is practiced today, especially its tendencies towards reductionism, opacity, paternalism, and overtreatment.
Pollution. Industrialization and urbanization came with unprecedented levels of air pollution, water pollution, and infectious diseases. Industrial people have long lived with the sense that they were breaking the laws of nature and paying a steep price for it. Even in post-industrial cities that are much cleaner now than in the past, people continue to feel anxiety about contamination. Rich people have long used their wealth to distance themselves from sources of pollution, effectively seeking out a more natural environment. Modern societies have entire industries catering to the rich that promise them cleaner, more natural, and more healthy variants of everyday products at higher prices; virtually none of it has any scientific backing. The natural product industry’s marketing is counterproductive to public discourse. It distracts from the real reasons the rich are healthier than the poor (it’s not because of organic makeup or natural spring water), creates unwarranted mistrust of public infrastructure and government regulators, and implies that healthy living is solely an individual responsibility.
Hierarchy. People have a long history of asserting post-hoc that their current socio-political system is rooted in nature and therefore legitimate. In agrarian societies, nature was widely invoked to justify class divisions, the subordination of women to men, and the existence of slavery. Nature was visibly diverse, with many species specializing in narrow ecological niches for which they were visibly well-adapted. By this line of reasoning, the dissimilarities between different categories of people called for dissimilar social roles. High-class people were the purest, cleanest, and most ideal, which gave them the natural right to rule over the more degenerate subgroups of humanity. A few centuries ago, nature started being invoked to justify equality rather than hierarchy. In this liberal model, all people are equal before God or Nature, and all class hierarchies are artificial and therefore unnatural. Taking the liberal model even further, anarchists argue that governments themselves are unnatural impediments to the natural freedom of individuals. Hierarchy is a topic where appeals to nature have been used to justify every possible position on the spectrum.
Competition. Ever since Charles Darwin first described evolution by natural selection, his ideas have been widely analogized outside of their original context. Discussions of population-wide progress or degeneration were nothing new, but natural selection described a plausible causal mechanism for how it can happen. Darwinian evolution is widely misunderstood as acting on individuals rather than populations, as trending towards perfection rather than sufficiency, and as being purposeful and intentional rather than haphazard. Upper class people cited Darwin to justify their socioeconomic position, warning that helping the poor and disabled would be unnatural and would debase the fitness of the population. Marxists cited Darwin to claim that socialism’s mass adoption is natural and inevitable given its superiority. Political reformers cited Darwin to claim that political revolutions are unnatural and that incremental changes to the status quo should be attempted instead. Free-market libertarians cited Darwin to claim that government regulations are an unnatural intervention into competitive markets that would have otherwise produced perfection. Racists cited Darwin to warn about the dangers of racial contamination, though they ironically often attributed the inferiority of other races to inbreeding. Darwinism has always been an awkward fit for economics and politics in particular, since those domains do not have clear analogs for genes or for reproduction.
Sexuality. People have always been disgusted and outraged by other people’s sexual behavior. People have always tried to rationalize these emotional reactions after the fact with appeals to nature. In agrarian societies, sexual crimes regularly ranked among the highest tiers of crimes. Despite being victimless, offenses such as sodomy often carried harsher punishments than even rape. When human sexual organs were used in a manner that didn’t align with their natural reproductive purpose, nature itself was seen as the victim. Authorities often warned that public tolerance of sexual perversion would lead to moral collapse followed by civic collapse, though they were always vague about how exactly this would unfold. Many religious figures tried to define the bounds of natural sexuality, generally concluding that the only acceptable sex was procreatively-oriented sex between married spouses. Religions have also struggled with the question of contraception, failing to agree on a clear line where natural birth control methods end and unnatural ones begin. Many cultures restricted marriages between people from different religions, ethnicities, or social classes, deeming population mixing to be unnatural. The 20th century’s sexual revolution moved public opinion in a more liberal direction mainly by expanding people’s view of what was natural. Anti-mixing rules were easy to attack; the very existence of anti-mixing rules is an acknowledgment that sexual attraction across forbidden lines is something that naturally occurs. Many taboo sexual acts were discovered to be commonplace. Homosexuality and non-procreative sex were documented in wild animals, allowing sexual liberals to claim that nature was on their side. By ceding the sex debate to nature, liberals and conservatives have both made themselves vulnerable to new research findings. For instance, marriage-like lifelong exclusive monogamous pairings are very rare in the animal kingdom, and homosexual marriage-like relationships are virtually non-existent.
Doping. In recent decades, there have been escalating crackdowns on athletes trying to improve their performance through “unnatural” substances or methods. Lists of banned methods tend to be reactively assembled based on the emotional discomfort the methods invoke. Anti-doping rulebooks are generally not internally consistent along any specific criterion, whether that is safety, artificiality, sophistication, or even efficacy. Sports are an unusual domain in how they restrict innovation, but refusing to set restrictions is not an option either. Sports are artificial activities, heavily constrained by design to be fair and inclusive in ways the natural world is not. Clarifying in the rules that diet is acceptable preparation but steroids are not is similar in spirit to clarifying that shoes are acceptable equipment while wheels are not. Without constraints, the essence of a sport could shift to something else entirely, much like a modern-day unregulated chess tournament would essentially be a software engineering tournament. Humanity invented sports, so it’s up to humanity alone to decide the point at which bio-engineering would overshadow the rest of the sport.
Natural Fallacies
A recurring theme in debates about naturalness is the sheer meaninglessness of the term. Naturalness cannot be used as a criterion if people cannot even agree on how to measure it. In a world where we can measure the health and safety effects of our actions, we do not need to resort to mental shortcuts like naturalness.
Another recurring fallacy is the unspoken assumption that whatever is natural is good and whatever is good is natural. Human civilization repeatedly faces the choice of whether to align with nature’s rhythms or whether to try transcending them; humanity has had triumphs and mistakes in both directions. Revering nature as unconditionally good overlooks the observable truth that nature is a hotbed of both life and death, of both flourishing and suffering, and of both successful experiments and failing ones. This does not mean that nature is evil (that would be merely the opposite religion), only that nature is fundamentally amoral, indifferent, and directionless. It is fully possible to respect nature without crossing the line into blind worship.
Debates about naturalness often oversimplify complex topics into a simple binary of natural and unnatural. Asserting that naturalness can solve everything ignores the fact that almost everything in life comes with difficult trade-offs. The mythic binary also keeps us from thinking about creative middle-ground solutions that neither surrender to nature nor try replacing it.
Appeals to nature regularly fall for the is-ought fallacy. Much like a holy text, nature is so vast and has so many analogy-friendly concepts that it can be used to argue almost any position. Rather than being a genuine source of inspiration, nature is often just a post-hoc defense for positions reached through other means. The study of nature is fundamentally descriptive rather than prescriptive; it can give you factual information, but it does not tell you what to value or prioritize.
In recent centuries, science, medicine, religion, politics, ethics, and philosophy have split off into separate disciplines with thin overlapping regions. A major driver of this split is nature’s inability to act as a unifying framework for all knowledge. In the end, nature is just one source of knowledge among many.