MEAT, VEGANISM AND THE WAY OF ALL THINGS

Life is not life

And death is not death. 

The way makes no such distinctions. 

Things are not as they appear;

Yet neither are they otherwise. 

So you should only cease to cherish your opinions. 

Take a look around the world in some places today and you will find an increasing desire for veganism. This is often among those best described, in the ideological, partisan West, at least, as those with a bee in their bonnet. They will talk about the horrors of factory farming, the pollution caused by farming that takes place on an industrial scale, the fact that propagating meat on such a large scale is actually a misuse of the land and the terrible conditions the animals are often kept in and, in very many of such things that they say, they will actually have a point. I am not here to tell anyone that vegans have got it all wrong or that what they say bears no resemblance to what goes on in the world. What vegans have done is come to the conclusion that industrial meat production [and, by extension, any meat-eating or farmed products such as eggs or milk and cheese] is so bad that they refuse to take part in it and so they stop eating meat, regarding its production as a cruel and intolerable process. Some, if not many of them, will then go on to tell everyone they meet that if they are meat eaters they are “violent murderers” as I was myself told today upon opening my social media and reading it through bleary eyes. This may sound incontrovertible in the ears of some convinced vegan but I received it as one-eyed hysteria which, to say the least, condensed the issues into a very convenient rhetorical accusation. I replied back to my accuser, as I often do, by pointing out that their comfortable Western life is almost certainly supported and maintained by many such “violent murderers” and left it at that. I did this because the fact is that, even if you don’t eat meat yourself, the majority of people you know probably do and most of the people who are keeping you alive and enabling you to go about your daily life in the relative comfort of Western civilisation likely are meat eaters too. And is it just about meat? I haven’t done a great deal of research into it, but I’m pretty sure a lot of medicines come from animals too. Are vegans against medicine we get through animals or animal experimentation? Perhaps they are and, if so, they are allowed to be. Then it occurs to me that there are “animal products”, a vague and probably surprising category of things that ultimately derive from animals and turn up in the strangest of places. Let’s round all this up by saying that human beings have for millennia seen animals as things they can use to further their own outcomes and serve their purposes. Have they been wrong to do this? By what measure?

Of course, I am going to tell you that there is no measure even as I recognise that human beings are those who measure everything as a habit they cannot get out of. Yet one thing I did look into thinking about the issue of veganism was sentience in plants and this, it seems, is not so far-fetched an idea as it might once have been. Plants, no one will deny, are certainly alive and, for me at least, this is already enough to take such organisms seriously. What’s more, plants, as we know, are the basis of ALL life on earth. No plants, no animals: its that simple. Yet even as far back as 1973 researchers were writing books which argued that plants can recognise things, predict things and even communicate [The Secret Life of Plants by Tompkins and Bird]. In short, they act in response to their surroundings in a way we would call sentience and perhaps even consciousness. Subsequent research, a growing field of science, has suggested plants can hear, smell, make decisions, have memories, cognition and the ability to learn, feel stress and pain and have social lives. Is this surprising in something which no one would deny is alive? I don’t think it should be. Being alive, being an animate object, surely implies certain faculties or abilities even carried out in ways other than the ways in which we carry them out. One vegan I spoke to recently laughed off sentience in plants because “they don’t have a brain or a nervous system”. This person apparently believed that any sentience or consciousness must, as a rule, be like ours. Thus, they fell into exactly the anthropomorphic trap which honours that which is tolerably like a human being but regards everything else as alien and different - and so as something we can treat differently. This, I think, is not a very compassionate or understanding way to proceed. Yes, we will always be able to sympathise most with forms of life we can see as most like us but we should never turn this into a prejudice. Life is not constrained to be like us and there is no reason to think that sentience or even consciousness must, a priori, exist only in things like us. It should not at all be surprising if it turns out plants have sentience or consciousness too. After all, human beings have even speculated on machine consciousness. Next to that, plants being more than green things which just grow should not be so controversial.

But for some vegans, at least, it is controversial for they have planted their vegan flag on the notion that meat-eating is cruel and that meat eaters are “violent murderers”. Deciding that killing something sentient for food is horrific is all well and good but what happens when it turns out your carrot or potato or rice was once sentient too? Are such vegans now going to include themselves in the “violent murderer” category? Are they going to refuse to eat plants too and so commit suicide because they now refuse to eat at all? If my brief and pungent interactions with vegans are any measure [and they probably aren’t] then the answer is “no”. They are, like Neo in The Matrix, going to try and dodge the plant sentience bullet or make excuses for themselves. Yet such people kill and eat things that were once alive every bit as much as any meat eater does. Even they do not deny plants were once alive so harvesting and eating them must be akin to killing them. Seeing plants in the light of the developing science of how plants exist [as sentient, social organisms] only makes things worse for exactly those vegans who have decided that to eat a sentient thing is a moral crime of the worst kind. For now they are doing exactly the same thing. No doubt some such people will complain that an apple is not the same as a pig and, superficially, it may not appear to be. But convenient superficiality is no way to proceed here. We should be dealing in reality rather than in that which is rhetorically convenient. If plants are sentient or conscious, if they feel stress or pain, if they react to attackers as it has been suggested in peer-reviewed scientific literature that they do, then everyone, even the vegans, need to acknowledge this.

As I have already suggested, I do not find any of the emerging science about plants very surprising. If things are alive that surely makes a difference compared to if they are dead. [Here, in this argument at least, I set aside the notion that alive/dead is entirely a human distinction that the universe itself does not make. There are ways to look at life and death which don’t make the distinctions it is customary for us to.] We would all of us say that alive things do not act or operate or have the same functionality as dead things and so we would also all of us see alive things as in some sense different to dead things. Animate objects are not the same as inanimate objects. But we must always be careful about these distinctions for they are always contextual distinctions rather than absolute distinctions. They are also not always distinctions we consistently adhere to. Has a vegan ever killed a fly, a wasp or a spider, I wonder? I’ve never personally known a vegan but I would find it hard to believe they had not. Perhaps some vegans have even killed lots of such insects. Do vegans use pesticides, I wonder? Oh, and by the way, who decided that the things pesticides kill are “pests” exactly? From what mentality is such a designation coming? Very quickly, thinking in such ways, we come to realise that even vegans must surely be culpable for many deaths. Do insect deaths count less? Is there some table of vegan virtue to which I can refer which tells me which deaths are a death too far and which deaths are acceptable collateral damage? Death, it may be observed, is a staple of life. It is a natural occurrence. And, what’s more, it is no less the case that one animal may kill another, either deliberately or as a consequence of some other action. It seems to me, then, that if we value life we must value all life. I would find it very hard to start picking and choosing between which lives have more value and which lives have less. Life, in a statement I hope no one will dispute, is actually one big continuum anyway. Life depends on life for it all survives together in symbiosis. Even where it depends on one life taking another life.

In my discussions with vegans, however, it has been suggested to me that comparing human life with other life is an error. Human beings, I’m told, are moral and all these other forms of life are not. They are just performing various virtually autonomic functions. They don’t know any better, in effect. So if I were to compare a lion killing an antelope with a human killing a pig I might be mocked, as I have been, because to such people this is a stupid comparison. But is it? The lion’s ways seem just as unquestioned to it as any human being’s. Might we imagine that all lions are the same? Might not some have different habits or tastes to others? Is a hunger pang in one species not the same as a hunger pang in another? All life needs to feed on a source of energy to survive. In one way of viewing the entire universe all it is is the motion and transformation of forms of energy anyway. From this viewpoint, human distinctions are as nothing. All is just energy transference and transformation. That is all we and the lion are: energy. That is all the antelope and the pig are: energy. But the vegans will insist that, actually, our invented morals are the important thing here. I find this somewhat exceptionalist, as if the moral centre of the universe resided precisely somewhere in the human psyche. Why, uniquely in the universe, is it somehow the case that we humans have been blessed [and uniquely so!] with such moral clarity of insight? Does this make any sense at all in a randomly evolving universe? It doesn’t and as even our human science expands it increasingly finds ways in which other animals [we humans are an animal too please don’t forget!] have things we might describe as morals or ethics. Such things are essentially behaviours and behaviours which would tend to lead to benevolent outcomes. But, in saying that, have you ever noticed how no two people ever seem to have exactly the same moral code? Morality, it seems, gives wide scope for what billions of people will find acceptable or unacceptable. And that is before we ask what the morals of other animals and plants might be.

I interacted with morality, and things to do with morality such as interpretation, a great deal in the second of my three books in my There is Nothing to Stick to trilogy. That book was called The Fiction of Morality for it is my belief that morality, like any human narrative, is itself a fiction. It is human produced and, at its best, is the articulation of good reasons for certain behaviours and further good reasons against other, ill thought of behaviours. That is really all it is as may be seen when nature and the universe themselves allow untold horrors without passing a single comment. Death, murder, the preying of the stronger on the weaker, these are all means by which life, considered generally, progresses. If we ask, in general terms, if it is wrong for one creature to kill another and eat it then I do not remotely see how it can be as, if this so, nature itself is “wrong” and “immoral” whole and entire. Nature proceeds as a general principle by consuming itself. That which is alive eats other things which are alive in innumerable ways. Even plants eat meat as in the case of the venus fly trap, a plant which innocently minds its business until a juicy insect lands in its jaws, at which point it clamps them shut and slowly digests its live meal. Imagine the suffering! The only moral this plant has is its own survival. Certainly this form of life has no concern for any other that may perch in its jaws. If nature had a morality it would have to include accounting for this. 

But, of course, nature does not have a morality for it is the amorality of the universe which has given birth to the moral impulses in human beings. Yet can we now say that human beings are the moral measure? That you have a faculty says nothing about its use nor that it mandates that its use is binding. In short, if you feel something is a moral action that does not bind anyone else to agree with you. The state and scope of morals and morality are, to say the least, matters of debate. And what is the penalty for being immoral or amoral anyway? It may be the case that, in some cases, human beings take action against you but this only reveals that human behaviour, generally considered, is nothing other than a game of actions and consequences. Actions, or inactions, have consequences, and consequences that we may not always see, and there is not much more to be said about it, moralistic narratives notwithstanding. That someone or some group has a moral does not mean anything other than that they do. It is not clear it does, or should, mean anything for anyone else. What is more, the universe’s apparent amorality, that which birthed our own apparent moralities, stands there, inert, as the ultimate context and condition of those very same moralities. We humans can always say something is right or wrong but we can never say so in an absolute way, or, rather, we can ONLY say so in a very conditioned and inabsolute way. We can only protest and give reasons for things. We can never make the universe so. For it, and how it operates, is forever beyond our control. It is the context for us. We are not the context for it. I personally find this to be a very powerful influence on what I may refer to as morals or virtue for how can you ignore that which stands as the context for everything, that which is everything in its manner of operation? I think you do so at your peril. I think this stands as a marker of authentic reality. I think that human exceptionalism and anthropomorphism, the deciding that human beings are the measure, is more often than not a crass act of narcissism and egocentrism, an unjustifiable speciesism and an act of self-regarding.

Yet none of this means that I want animals to suffer. None of this means I look on with a smile as animals are mistreated. In general terms, I would wish that all living things interact with each other with peace, compassion and respect. This may certainly mean that some human practices should be altered or even stopped. I am the last person to tell you that everything we do should carry on as it is. There are undoubtedly consequences of much human behaviour which impact other forms of life in negative and exploitative ways. Yet I am not sure, from my researches, that life is actually always so peaceful, compassionate and respectful. These, after all, are only HUMAN values and life is not always, as so many unrealistic humans seem to want it to be, so fluffy and cuddly. It is still the case that life rolls on by preying on other life. It is not clear that it could do any other. Whether you are eating living plants or animals which are made of living plants you are still life consuming other life. Even within our own beings life exists, in the form of bacteria and microbes, which are not “us”. Life is parasitic on life whole and entire. Microscopic bed bugs in your bedding eat your dead skin even while some other insects, in some tropical part of the world, are born inside a living creature from which they proceed to eat their way out, life preying on life. This is natural and normal, the regular, everyday existence of life which seems to operate only on the principle “if it can happen then it will happen”. This is how life proceeds. Realism should recognise this much more than it should moralise it. It seems to me that if we want to pronounce on life it would assist us greatly if we spent some time considering how life actually exists and how it proceeds before we decide that our self-important and sometimes masturbatory pronouncements are actually the last word on the issue. Calling people “violent murderers” is all well and good but if such moralists opened their eyes a little more they might then realise that such “murder” probably happens tens of millions of times a day in ways quite natural and unreflective. We live in a murderous world where murder is one of the most natural things in it. That murder is, in fact, survival which might be the only actual “moral” that is universal throughout life in the universe.

I see this position as one which takes the reality of the universe and the natural world into account. I do not believe that human morality has some special insight into the nature of things which other life is not privy to and so which we are inevitably mandated to defer to. I do not believe that the argument “but pain and suffering” trumps all other arguments. Such notables as Nietzsche argued that life itself is suffering and whilst this is not then an argument for causing suffering it is, perhaps, a realisation that in life it is unavoidable. To be sentient is not to be borne on fluffy clouds and soft cushions throughout one’s existence. It is, in fact, to be subject to damage and decay from its very inception. We might, in fact, do well to stop and ask ourselves where things come from and to what they return before we insist on the inviolability and integrity of the identities that we accord to things, things which, in each case, exist for microscopic amounts of time in the grand scheme of things. It seems to me that when human beings get too moralistic they do become rather precious. Can we really say that individual examples of anything are really that important? Am I, a human being, of universe-changing significance? I would find it hard to believe so. I find it more realistic, and less egoistic, to think that random chance caused me to be and inevitable decay will cause me to disappear again. In that, I would have lasted for not even a veritable eye blink of time, an event that nothing took note of and which has no special reason to be remembered. It is not the case, I think, that every breath, feeling and emotion matters, regardless of how difficult I or other people might find that to accept. We have got so used to telling ourselves how important everything is that it is now difficult for it to dawn on us that, actually, none of this really matters at all. This planet some of us find so important is just one of billions and, newsflash, it was never intended that it last forever anyway. Destruction was on the menu of everything from minute one of day one. And no one’s feelings were taken into account. 

Nevertheless I would myself also urge compassion for, as my spiritual and philosophical resources in the There is Nothing to Stick to project and in my next book both largely agree, the “uncaring” nature of the natural world is actually the very thing which provides for the life and existence of all things. This can, as some do, be seen as a benevolence and a compassion. Live and let live, all things considered, is not the worst motto one could live by. That we go through life causing as little harm as possible is a good attitude to take in my view. It will also be seen, if one considers this issue more widely in the concept of my other “anarchist” views, that the world as I imagine it would make much of the apparatus of a machinery that treats animals as raw materials for human existence much more difficult to maintain. This, in fact, is where my worldview and the worldview of those who consider themselves vegans would coalesce. I imagine a less civilised, less centralised, more natural world. This, in many respects, would be a more agrarian and less technological world. In such a world it would seem to me that people took more care of and responsibility for themselves and relied less on corporations and economic enterprises to do so. In other words, I see “civilisation” as the problem and it is civilisation which, in most cases, amplifies any problems, such as industrial scale meat eating, which already exist. True, people ate meat before civilisation but it is civilisation and its centralising organisation which turns sentient beings into factory goods. Animals, I agree, are not and should not be regarded as factory goods. Yet that is a value I hold rather than a dictate of the universe. 

In the end, however, we can only see as we see. Eating meat is not a crime and neither is it immoral. I can only assert that and I can never make it so. Morals and beliefs are only ever rhetorical and it doesn’t matter where they come from. Yet even believing that we can still have an eye to the wider context of human practices on earth. It is clear that farming animals carries huge consequences when done to industrial levels. Human beings may want to consider that if they do not want to suffer from the consequences, foreseen or unforeseen. For actions always have consequences and life is a matter of surviving them. Or not. Yet it is also the case that human narratives about things are fictions, hence the short verse at the head of this piece on veganism which came from Zen and Taoist sources. We are told in it that life is not life and death is not death, at least not as we conceive of them. I believe this is so for life and death are merely two more invented human fictions, states seen from one human point of view. Things, so we are then told, are not as they appear, a statement which warns us that all human ways of seeing are only human ways of seeing. But, we are then reminded, neither are they otherwise. Replacing a fiction with another fiction does not make things any better. We have only swapped one illusory imposition for another. What we must do, in a piece of Taoist wisdom, is cease to cherish our opinions. This, ironically, is the very thing that most human beings, myself included, struggle to do. And so they get caught up in the net of their beliefs, desires, wants and narratives about the world which things like Taoism, Zen and Greek Cynicism tell us is the real problem. We want to fix the world when, actually, it should be the world that is fixing us. 

But do we have ears to hear that or will we egotistically continue to plough on regardless as if we could create some equation that balanced everything out better than the actionless action of existence does all by itself without goal, or end, or purpose?

Only cease to cherish your own opinions.


You can read the books in my anarchist trilogy There is Nothing to Stick to HERE! 

AN UNAPOLOGETICALLY PERSONAL AND SPIRITUAL EPISTLE FROM THE ANARCHIC EAST

Dear reader, grace and peace to you and thank you for reading this far into this project. This project itself began by quoting several sayings from the Chinese, Taoist text, the Tao Te Ching here. It was not remotely my intention in doing that either to promote Taoism or to make my readers Taoists. Put most simply, I am indifferent about whether that appeals to my readers or not. But I did make use of it because, when I read it, it opened up a new experience of life for me, a life that was not about rules and right and wrong and canonised directions or decisions but that was about flexibility to circumstances, flowing with life like water, simplicity, humility and a natural, dispassionate compassion for all things. I was taught not to strive and struggle and resist the things around me but to become soft and flow with them. All things pass, I came to understand, and the nature of nature is change. 

According to the earliest Taoist texts, when human nature is aligned with the rest of nature, order and harmony are the result. Taoism is, in this sense, a therapeutic understanding of existence. From this perspective, the purpose of the kind of self-cultivation the Tao Te Ching and Taoism itself recommends, something which also accords with the thoughts of many others I covered so far this project which have broadly promoted an anarchic ‘self-creation’, is to return to a mode of existence that is natural, but that has been obscured by social conditioning. This is essentially what the Cynics of the Greek world complained about too, that being less natural was bad and that being more natural was good. One Taoist remedy, repeating certain actions such as physical exercises or meditation, in such an understanding, is a way of training the body so that it is free to react in a spontaneous, natural way. It is similar to the experience of practicing one's shots in basketball and then making a key basket in the big game — the preparation through repetition makes it possible to act, at a certain moment, without thinking, in pure spontaneity. This accords well with the training aspect to this common to Taoism and to Cynicism, which acquaints one with nature, reality, in order to mimic it, just as it comes to be, and with the habitual practice of those such as Nietzsche, Cage and Goldman in There is nothing to stick to who, all in their own ways, exhorted human beings to more natural lives - and to practices and not simply beliefs.

Yet it is clearly the case that, throughout history, human beings can deviate, and have deviated, from the natural chaos of things, their natural law and order, and have gone after artificial and conventional things of their own imagining. When they do so, often they have brought destruction upon themselves and those around them. Confucian scholars, who were rivals to the Taoist scholars who wrote the Tao Te Ching, were criticized there for imposing rules and social expectations upon people. According to the Tao Te Ching, social mores, the artificiality and conventionality of human culture and threats of punishment, cause more harm than good, as they are methods of forcing appropriate behaviour rather than allowing it to occur spontaneously and naturally which is the Taoist wisdom on such things. That we naturally become the change we seek from such teaching is, in fact, the point of it. This way is to change yourself naturally - rather than to be pushed this way and that and beaten into shape artificially - which is the target in view. Authenticity here matters. It is especially the point where knowledge and knowingness is foreign and innocence is nature in its manner of operation. This is to flow with the river rather than to swim against its current because you are possessed by the idea that you know better. 

So, in this case, the only way to encourage appropriate behaviour is by modelling it. If, for example, a ruler is a person of impeccable character, those he leads will naturally follow. But how is the ruler to become the ideal role model, thus insuring harmony for his empire? As an 8th century Taoist master said to a Tang emperor, "Who governs his body, governs the country." The way forward, then, is to practice self-cultivation and to engage in self-examination. To live according to a nature which gives us nothing to stick to will not come all by itself. It will involve us forgetting a great many things. In fact, one thing common to all the thinkers and thought I have highlighted in this project is that human cultures, in their knowingness, have, in some way or to some extent, usurped a more natural mode of life we should rediscover by imposing things upon us we should forget. But this is not a matter of going back, as if it were better in the old days: it was always available to us and it still is today. It is not a matter of time or place but it is a matter of attitude, orientation and habitual practice. It is a matter of us having all we need if only we can let go of the things erroneously added.

In Taoism the central idea regarding nature and the natural is relationship. We cannot approach nature as a thing to be mastered but only as a partner in a relationship. The goal is to become a natural part of the anarchic environment. The way to discover that environment is to turn to nature in its manner of operation. For this reason early Taoist philosophers left the cities to learn from nature and primitive people living in remote mountain villages. They hoped to eventually bring human civilization into the natural chaotic state much as the Cynics did around the same time but in Greece and the Hellenistic and Roman empires instead of in China. In Taoism nature is taken to be infinitely wise, infinitely complex, and infinitely irrational. It is divine chaos or anarchy, not divine order. Yet, as chaos, it is order. One must take a personal yielding stance and abandon all intellectual preconceptions and culturally-inculcated habits. The goal is wu wei, acting without action, or non-action, doing nothing contrary to nature but existing as it exists. Nature does not need to be perfected or improved or subjected to human ideas of order. It is we who need to change; it is we who need to come into accord with it. It is we who need to attain to its naturalistic rhythms and not us who need to impose our measuring, instrumentalising mentality upon it.

Part of the Taoist aim in this is to sidestep the observed dualities of life. To this end Taoism historically rejected all dichotomies, even the most fundamental one of being versus non-being. The goal of Taoism is to attain that which precedes duality. The only way to discover this original source is to observe nature. During peak experiences in nature, the deep meets the deep. Yet the Tao, which we may think of as nature, is a divine chaos, not a random accident. It is fertile, undifferentiated, and teeming with unrealised creation. It is the mother of everything in nature as nature births itself; it is a great darkness that operates spontaneously to give birth and life to all things. Taoists, as naturalists, seek not to be saved or to win, but rather to return to the original source of ‘the Ten Thousand Things’ which is the term the Tao Te Ching uses for the superfluity of things in nature. They see creation not as a single event, but an ongoing process that has no beginning and no end. Its divine play is taking place right here and right now. The wise person becomes like an animal or a child, participating joyfully in the profoundly irrational and anarchic (dis)order. He or she learns to trust or accept the chaos. Is that not what being ‘natural’ would amount to?

Consequently, Taoists have always avoided anthropocentrism for they recognise that we are just one of many things and not a special thing, a chosen thing nor a necessary thing. Unlike other spiritualities, they have never lost their animal gods. Ancient Chinese shamans put on animal masks in order to communicate with these animal gods. Their spirit-animals were links between the worlds of people, ancestors, and gods. There was a tradition of animal frolics during which one became a particular animal, such as a crane or a bear. These rituals are still meaningful. Taoists speak of a direct knowing that resonates in the belly when one has direct contact with nature. It is not with the head but with the belly that one can participate in the sacred madness of the ancestral gods. It is only with the belly that one can appreciate the eternal flux and the underlying unity of the Ten Thousand Things. This is not to say, however, that we knowing moderns, fixated with ‘the intrinsic nature of reality’, have to take this literally and too seriously as if what can be empirically demonstrated is all that matters. How do we ‘empirically demonstrate’ a feeling or an idea or a context? Instead, we should appreciate it for its poetic, postmetaphysical resonances and for the relationship it signifies with things beyond us that are not about reified concepts of knowledge or understanding or truth. Here context is much more important and flowing with things that are all around us, rather than classifying them in a table or chart, is appropriate behaviour. If human beings are not chosen or special or necessary and if, instead, they are just beings in an environment, then that becomes the important thing.

The idea to write this particular essay came to me because I held a poll on my account on the social media service, Twitter, some time ago. In that poll I asked respondents what it was they believed in. I gave them the choices of ‘the Good’, ‘God’, however they chose to define it, ‘nature’ and ‘evil’. 73% of the responses chose ‘nature’ and yet, as I never enquired as to what those voting anonymously meant by ‘nature’, I have no idea what they think they were voting for. I suspect that not too many of them were very sure either but that the other options seemed even less appealing, as they conceive of them, than nature did. In this project I am trying to fill out some ideas about what ‘nature’ might refer to and what some of the consequences then are, including what living ‘according to nature’ might then entail. Having read the essays in this project and thought about it some more, I wonder, then, if quite as many might then still choose nature as a consequence? Then again, it may be that some who chose ‘nature’ might have thought that it entailed god, the good and evil as well although, in my view, at least two of those are ruled out specifically once we take the view that nature does not speak, has no opinions and has no canonical function at all.

Yet the third, god, is not, a priori, ruled out and I note that Taoism, my own personal impetus to begin this project, does not formally disdain the notion of gods although neither does it specifically focus on them as the point of what it is about or what it does. This, I think, is wise for we cannot rule out the notion of god even if, as I have written about in my essay Endless Impossible which I will post in the near future, the idea of gods as persons seems vaguely absurd. Yet there are other ways to understand divinity, if understanding it is what we are supposed to do with it, and I’m not sure at all that it is. One way, in fact, has been to think of it as something very like nature and Taoism, in this regard, is quite mysterious in regard to what ‘the Tao’ may refer to. That it is not a person or being seems clear but, as with the Jewish God of the Hebrew Bible, it seems we can say more about what it is not than about what it is. For we hopefully more natural, more flowing with nature, more antiepistemological folk, I would hope that we can lose any possible anxiety about that. There are things we do not need to know and things that wisdom dictates are not necessary to our existence in a harmony of all things. This, I suggest, is one such. As Richard Rorty has informed us earlier in this project, there are some vocabularies which go out of date and become useless to us for they are speaking a language which now appears inadequate in the light of our current beliefs and with what we regard as our direction of travel. 

So in what has come before in the blogs previous to this one I have taken a naturalistic spiritual tradition, Taoism, added in some antimetaphysical and hermeneutic philosophy of self-creation from Nietzsche, sprinkled in some of the artistic and aesthetic practices of the Zen Buddhist, John Cage, mixed in a dash of the anarchic politics of Emma Goldman flavoured with a little Cynicism from ancient Greece, and here baked it together with Richard Rorty’s antiepistemological pragmatism, the Cynic-flavoured Judaism of Jesus of Nazareth, some humanistic musings on our experiences of nature, and extrapolated it all back in a naturalistic, Taoist direction. In doing so I have not, I think, obligated you to become a Taoist, a Nietzschean, a Cagian musician, an anarchist, a pragmatist of especially Rortian bent, a follower of Jesus, an incurable romantic for natural vistas or engaging with the elements or, in fact, anything else. The whole point of this project, initially entitled “There is nothing to stick to”, a phrase which remains the motto at the heart of what has been going on, is exactly that there is nothing to stick to. Yes, I really mean it. I really do mean in the face of lots of potential readers who have been taught to believe and who, consequently, feel in their bellies, that there is, in fact, much to stick to that, actually, there isn’t. What we have been schooled in is a form a life but only a form of life. It is a culture but it is not nature. It is The Matrix but it is not the world outside it. Here Rorty’s hopeful, future-oriented pragmatism shines a searchlight on our future and asks us where we want to go which might, to some, seem quite a strange and, perhaps, even unasked question in a world in which, so often, things are set out before us as the conventions to follow, the guidelines inside of which we must stay put, if we do not want to be seen as weird, or strange, or idiosyncratic or even dangerous. 

Yet one message of this project is that it is one of possibility, of opportunity and of self-creation. We are, none of us, limited by what we are told we can be. We are limited only by what we can be and that may be something as yet unimagined simply because, as people of culture but not of nature, it has never occurred to us that we could be anything except that which we were told or that which human culture guided us to accept as the natural order of things. But nature is not order; nature is anarchic disorder. If we open our eyes to that and disentangle ourselves from cultural anchors which try to resist and control nature’s less interested existence, who knows what might come to be?

So please remember: there is nothing to stick to.

On another occasion I once wrote a short book for myself full of Taoist texts and other things of my own creation. At its beginning I wrote this poem which was meant to bring together a number of Taoist views in a compact way:

Something from Nothing.

Nothing from Something,

Ever Returning,

The Unending Tao.

With a Mind like the Seashore,

Devoid of Intention,

With Actionless Action,

We Flow like the Stream.

All Knowledge is Empty,

All Striving is Useless,

All Time is Deceiving,

All Separateness False.

Walk the Way of Humility,

Abide in Simplicity,

Be the child of Compassion,

Be at one with the Tao.

Reading it, we can pick out several themes:

1. That something comes from nothing and something goes back to nothing in a circular process of return.

2. That “the Tao”, which means “the way”, is the term for the whole, things being thought of as a holism.

3. That the mind is thought of as a seashore which should not cling to thoughts but let them be washed away without any concern.

4. That the natural principle of “actionless action” is maintained and upheld.

5. That imagery of a river flowing and of being “like water”, as in the Tao Te Ching, is used as a metaphor for human living.

6.That life is not a matter of either knowing or striving in the sense that it is not about either the imagined knowledge, truth or understanding gained or the effort one puts into life.

7. That time is an irrelevant invention and that events do not happen on a timeline.

8. That the separateness and objectivity of things is illusory.

9. That humility, simplicity and compassion are recommended as ways to live.

Yet, after some thought on what has already gone before in this project, we can add a few more ideas to this simple and compact list to flesh it out a little and give a fuller expression of Taoist proclivities:

1. There is a concentration on the present and a consequent de-emphasis of both past and future which dissolves any notion of the diachronic narrativisation of either the self or events.

2. There is a focus on emptiness and particularly emptying the self of thoughts, narratives and emotions. Emptiness is regarded as openness.

3. Consequently, the self is thought to be illusory, a fiction.

4. Malleability and flexibility are promoted as beneficial life traits.

5. Peace is the goal of life, both within the individual and, due to its view of all things, within the context of a harmony of all things together.

6. Life is not thought to be about possession - either of anything in particular or in general.

7. Due to its abandonment of the self and the consequent de-emphasis of the individual ego, there is a greater affirmation of everything else instead and a rebalancing and recontextualisation of things in relation to other things. In the difference of all things, a completeness is seen.

8. There is no set of rules or morals, nor any algorithm for deciding such things.

9. There is a sensibility, a kind of being, that is beyond words.

10. The existence of all things is not thought something that is yours to control.

What stands out to me about all this is how some of the key imagery of Taoism, water, the seashore, emptiness, is not exactly imagery which promotes what many, especially in the West which is my main personal frame of reference, would regard as “moral” in such places. An attitude to life which can easily be characterised as “go with the flow” does not seem too morally robust and might easily be imagined to be completely inadequate to a world of criminality, viciousness and hate. Yet here we must remember that Taoism is not primarily a morality but is, instead, a way of living and a way of understanding all things in one. It is actually an anarchic amorality, it is naturalistic and seeks to site human beings in the context of, and in relationship to, all others things. As such, in the Tao Te Ching we read the following:

"When the great Tao is forgotten, kindness and morality arise. When wisdom and intelligence are born, the great pretense begins. When there is no peace within the family, filial piety and devotion arise. When the country is confused and in chaos, loyal ministers appear." (Tao Te Ching, 18)

Here the world of which we are aware, the world of contention, arises only because the Tao has been forgotten, buried by other things. Yet it is when we forget such things as I have mentioned above as being core aspects of Taoism that we begin to need things like morality or, even worse, law. We see a similar thought made mention of in the past in the words of Dr Martin Luther King when he says:

"While it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless."

Here it is law which cannot mandate a morality but can restrain those determined to impugn it. Taoism, on the other hand, reminds us that it is only when the Tao is forgotten that people need morality to separate right from wrong and better from worse in the first place. But even then, as Dr King said, there are still those who need law to remind them of the civilised need for morality. Taoism itself is about a proclivity, an attitude, a disposition. It is fundamentally one of letting go. It says that if we live in humility, compassion and simplicity with all things without striving for this or that, without a desire to possess, then the result will be more peace. So it implies, if not directly says, that morality is an observed need if, and only if, you do not do this. It is when you forget or cover over the anarchic disorder of the universe that then you have to start the messy business of right and wrong, something which in Taoism’s naturalistic view only comes into focus once the amoral, non-purposive harmony of all things is forgotten.

NATURE AND NOTHING TO STICK TO: HOW ENVIRONMENTALISTS MISUNDERSTAND NATURE

I wonder what it is that you imagine “nature” to be? Having asked this question, I could now go on to offer various suggestions so as to give you a multiple choice question from which you, the reader, would pick out the answer nearest to your own. Or you could read the previous blog in which several other people did that. But I’m not going to do that right now because what I really want you to do is think for yourself and articulate it yourself. This is necessary today in a world full of people more than ready to tell you what to think rather than let you come to your own conclusions - assuming you even think that “nature” is something about which you should come to some conclusion to begin with. And it isn’t necessarily so that it is.

Increasingly today, though, people do think that “nature” or, more precisely, the imagined human destruction of nature, and so the further imagined threat to it that human beings pose, is something that people should think about and, therefore, it is very much a topic of thought. It is my thesis, however, one very much in line with the thoughts I muse upon and express in the entirety of There is nothing to stick to, thoughts which surely encompass ideas from many times and places throughout human history [and so are not nearly as ‘eccentric’ as some might wish to categorise them], that those who ally themselves to this populist movement of sentimental concern have almost entirely misunderstood the thing they claim to care about. Instead, so I argue, they have anthropomorphised it, turning it, in the process, into some domesticated version of itself, something about which, quite bizarrely, we should have “concern”. What I do not refer to here, coincidentally, is the idea of self-preservation, something which all but the most suicidal of organisms seem to possess quite naturally, which is why those things that are alive don’t just go and sit in a metaphorical corner to die. No; self-preservation I well accept and understand. It is the characterisation of, and the imagined moral responsibility towards, nature that a number of people behind environmental movements seem to possess and attempt to communicate that concerns me here in a universe I insist is nothing to stick to.

Take, for example, a document produced in 2019 by Roger Hallam, one of the people responsible for one of the most public faces of current environmental concern, Extinction Rebellion. He has published on his own website a document just shy of 80 pages titled Common Sense for the 21st Century which attempts to provide an intellectual underpinning for the movement broadly conceived and to describe the political goals and actions in view to achieve it. For avoidance of doubt, I have read the whole document from cover to cover. What it reveals, so I am going to say in what follows, is a thoroughly wrong-headed view of human beings and their place in the world and a total misunderstanding about what nature is. One might be tempted to say that this was just a one off, an anomaly, but one cannot when one sees such a document being cheerleaded for by those such as George Monbiot, another green activist who attempts to supply intellectual underpinnings for green activism, and who are equally as wrong-headed about the things they tell us [ad nauseam] that we are “responsible” for. 

But before I get into this in detail I need to make clear that my problem here is not with any diagnosis of the problem that either Roger Hallam or George Monbiot might give. They describe in lurid detail, based on current climate science, the harm that human activity is predicted to do to the biosphere of our planet and I neither deny anything they say about this nor do I wish to downplay its consequences. So whatever else I may be I am not a “climate change denier” and neither am I an ignorer of climate science. I do not deny that human industrial activity on this planet over the last 250 years has affected the planet’s climate [this is truly mere “common sense”] and I’m more than happy to agree that folks like Hallam and Monbiot are quite right about this. Where I differ from them is that I don’t care about it whereas they are telling me, and everybody else, that we should and that it is a moral duty or responsibility which suggests, in turn, that such things can and do exist.

I may now seem to you like a monster but, if I do, I casually smile a whimsical smile and think “so be it” to myself. Unlike Roger Hallam’s “common sense” that all humans have a “transcultural duty to create a world safe for our children”, I think there is no such duty. Its rhetorical, made up, empty-headed, sentimental nonsense. [And I’d think that even if I had any children which, I have to say, I don’t because, unlike those who claim to care about the environment, I’ve had the good sense to not voluntarily add to the burden put upon it!] People like Hallam and Monbiot will tell you all day and all night that “ecological collapse” is something that it is our responsibility to fix but I read this and go, “Huh? When did this memo come around?” much, in fact, as the American comedian George Carlin does here and here. And that’s a fair and reasonable question to ask because there never was any such memo. Nature, by virtue of us being born, something in which not a single one of us had any say, did not issue us with a list of responsibilities or duties the moment we popped out of someone’s vagina or got dragged through a C-section. Nature, which is passive and uncaring, without purpose or intention, doesn’t have the slightest interest in what lives or dies - including us! - and it didn’t give birth to us so that we could be “responsible”. So if people today are going to preach “responsibility” for nature then that is entirely on them. Its on their shoulders. Its not anything that nature itself cares about. Nature doesn’t speak and has no voice. That is simple anthropocentrism.

Of course, the current “climate emergency” is entirely one of human making. Hallam and Monbiot are clear about that and I’m happy to go along with them on it. Human beings, so it seems, haven’t got the common sense to even ensure their own survival and can’t cooperate to a level in which everyone is seemingly happy with their lot. Neither of these observations, though, are arguments for human beings’ responsibility for the planet or nature or the environment. Human beings, if we are observing this properly, are the problem not the solution! And how can the problem also be the solution? It is at about this point in the conversation that people like George Monbiot will talk about the basic altruism of human beings and how we can work together to help each other out and save the day. But surely it is because so often human beings don’t care to save the day that we are in this mess in the first place? As our species went along farting noxious gases into the sky for two and a half centuries and throwing our waste behind us surely it must have occurred to some of us from time to time as things got poisoned and people got sick that it was actually us who were dirtying our own nests? And did we care then? Of course not! I would argue its because nature hasn’t made us as beings who care, at least, not until the issue is present and existential and right in our faces. And unavoidably so. And then it just becomes self-interest. For human beings will always put off until tomorrow what they can get out of today. We have been made, or rather shaped by the shape of our existence, to deal in the present and take things as they come.

But "we are looking here at the slow and agonising suffering and death of billions of people" says Roger Hallam in his book. Let us agree he is right. Were any of these people expected to live forever? Were they immortal and impervious to accident, illness or disease? Were they going to live pain-free lives of happiness and prosperity in each case? Is that how life is on this planet? Is that nature? Perhaps Roger Hallam lives on a different planet to me but on the one I live on people suffer and die all the time. They get mental illnesses and degenerative diseases and live in poverty and misery and distress. I have no doubt that many of these people derive next to no benefit from their lives at all. They are just lifeforms which existed for a few years and then didn’t. No one noticed them when they were alive and no one misses them when they are gone. For some I imagine that prolonging their life is actually prolonging their misery. There must be reasons why over 800,000 people annually kill themselves according to those who measure these things. I wonder, do Roger Hallam and George Monbiot care about that? Do they care about those people who have no need of an apocalypse to get worked up about because their own experience of life is already quite terrifyingly apocalyptic enough? Climate apocalypse often seems to be the privileged concern of those for whom their middle class lives are quite comfortable enough. Hallam, Monbiot and even the starchild of environmentalism, Greta Thunberg, fit this description very well. Everything in their gardens is lovely and so they need something to worry about. That their garden might go up in flames or end up underwater fits the bill perfectly.

So what is this nature we all agree we have polluted? It is chance. It is “what can happen, will happen.” It is lack of intention, lack of purpose, lack of direction, lack of action. Taoism describes it as “actionless action” in its expression wu wei, an activity it wants human beings to follow as well. What this means is that, even though human beings might make decisions to care about things, these are not nature’s own decisions. We were not created to be custodians of anything. We are, in actual fact, not custodians of anything. Nature is not going to judge anyone for not trying to save anything or anyone because nature itself does not care what exists or what doesn’t exist. Nature just is, and just is as it is, because it could be, because what can happen, will happen. When nature creates something, quite randomly and accidentally, which we, in our human way, describe as beautiful, it didn’t intend to do that. Nature does not set out to be beautiful or create beauty. It is not oblivious to human feelings of attachment to it or happiness in its environment. It doesn’t care. It is nihilistic in this respect. It doesn’t feel and it doesn’t think. It doesn’t know anything and it has no truth. Nature means nothing, not in the abstract. It is simply that which came to be because it could in the ways that it could. Some bits seem beautiful. Other bits are cancer or flesh-eating viruses or animals that live by predating on other animals. Or us, another simple stroke of unintended randomness. There is no way to judge or value any of this. How can one judge what is simply because it could be? Nature is simply an environment, nothing more. Oh, and by the way, all this nature is strictly temporary and it exists by means of constant destruction. If a lion can kill and eat an antelope then a human can kill and eat a pig, a cow or a sheep. Or even something cuddly like a dog or a monkey. That is, by very definition, natural - as is any extinction that follows as a result.

Yes, that’s right. Nature destroys things all the time all by itself, including, incidentally, most things that have ever lived on earth. No humans to blame. Yet environmentalists love humans to blame. Its almost as if its an egotistical human fascination with itself that’s important here and not “the environment” that such people claim to care about. Roger Hallam, in his book, goes after governments and the corporate culture which has governments in its pocket. He is not wrong about this but that is a political issue, an issue to do with how people have let themselves become the slaves and pawns of other humans for a few trinkets and some shiny devices in the trap called “civilisation”. Human beings have, we are told, been given higher brain functions and greater intellects than all the other creatures nature birthed. But what have these resulted in? Greater and better ways to do more damage to more things in a faster timeframe. Civilisation. We are altruistic, states George Monbiot. There are none so blind as those who will not see. Human beings are those creatures which laud their abilities but who have little to feel laudable about as they stagger on wrecking their own home and destroying everything around them. As egotistical beings they, of course, play up their own role in all this but, in a way, they are the perfect examples of an uncaring nature which just does what it does because it can. There is no thought or care or intention in this. If it can happen then it will. This is exactly what human beings are like. Often human beings do things just because they can, a glorious and repeated exercise in “watching the world burn” just so they can look and point at the fire and say “I did that.” So human beings are very much “of nature” and we see its principles of lack of care, lack of genuine purpose or reason, working right through their actions - not least in those they anoint as “civilised”.

But it is not that this is the humanity of Hallam or Monbiot or many others, of course. Human beings, for people such as these, through centuries of human imagination, have been moulded into reasonable, rational, morally responsible beings, beings who needed to be rational and reasonable and morally responsible in order to operate in the world we had created for ourselves. This, I state it plainly, is a simple fiction which, in future blogs on There is nothing to stick to, I will flesh out in much more detail when I discuss morality or, as I believe, its lack, its fiction. Here let me say only that I see little “rational” in the operation of human beings and even less that is “moral”. “Morality” does not exist and in those places that it does it is simply fictions of human thinking piled on top of one another in an attempt to make some form of human culture work and feel justified about it.

Yet if existence, the universe, nature, is not moral, and it certainly is not even though we may observe the pragmatic trade offs that emerge for purely practical reasons along the way, then how can anything within it be? Here what things that nature creates quite randomly think about themselves is irrelevant. Can a part be a measure of the whole, a whole the vast majority of which it is not even aware of? Can a flimsy and primitive human cognition be so puffed up as to imagine that it is capable of knowledge or understanding or truth? Can it be so egotistical as to dream that it can be the ground of rationality or morality or even its dumb articulator? We would look at the ant and laugh if it dared to imagine it had the keys to nature in its imagination. Yet we are more often than not too stupid to realise that we are the ant. We are just as dumb as the squirrel, the dandelion and the microbe. Of course, we think we aren’t. But that’s part of the problem. We have mistaken our increased utility for knowledge and imagined that this knowledge gives us understanding. Because we imagined we could designate truths we took them to be the truth. This is all part of the human folly, all part of the purposeless, immoral nature from which we come and to which we will return.

So Roger Hallam and George Monbiot and Greta Thunberg want to save the earth. They are allowed to want this. But they are not the earth’s custodians. They are not responsible for it. None of us are. None of us are mandated to care. None of us can be condemned for not caring, for just going about our business until we are inevitably expunged. That is what nature is, that which is called forth into existence, which exists, for a while, as it can, and then it dies - at which point that which it is made of becomes something else. Or maybe, eventually, nothing else. Just nothing. For all of the something we so care about now once was nothing and, so our physical scientists and cosmologists tell us, it will be one day again - the tiny, inconsequential, egotistical, narcissistic human pantomime in between notwithstanding. I don’t blame anyone for wanting to continue to exist although, I must say, even this doesn’t really make any sense when any imaginable human life is utterly insignificant in the context of eternity but to imagine yourself a custodian, a saviour or a person responsible I find utterly bizarre, a basic misunderstanding of a human being’s place in nature and the universe in general. Its true that nature doesn’t stop people caring or taking responsibility, indeed, it created them as things with these possibilities and opportunities. But it didn’t do so with a purpose or as a mandate for us to be that way. Nature doesn’t care what we do or how we live or when, or from what, we die. It will carry on, remorseless, indifferent, regardless. We don’t matter. Nothing matters. To think it does, to argue for responsibility, or duty, or care, is straightforwardly sentimental rhetoric which attempts to erase the pain, death, misery and destruction from nature as if there were some dreamy, idealistic version of the same we could put in its place. All of these things, things which human beings often talk about as negatives to be erased from existence in our common hallucination of a natural utopia, are often, in fact, nature’s driving forces. This is yet another way in which human beings have misunderstood and miscast nature in the arrogance of their self-serving, narcissistic idealism.

What that idealism led to, historically speaking, is civilisation and it is civilisation, and its imagined benefits, that human beings now confuse with nature. For the truth is that it is civilisation that human beings want to save. It is that which they have created and built and imagined that they care about. They care about their own comfort and convenience rather than the nature that is chance and the non-intentional “what can happen” that will happen. Human beings domesticated the world and then replaced nature with their own domestication of it. Observe this in the writings of Hallam and Monbiot or in the speeches of Thunberg. They don’t want to go back to nature, they don’t want to dismantle civilisation, they don’t want to live “more naturally”, they have no concern for biodiversity as an abstract thing in itself. They simply want to clean up the environment, physically and metaphorically. They want to control it to their standards of cleanliness. This is their definition of hygiene.

But its not mine and, I suggest, it is not nature’s either. Roger Hallam writes that “the cost of freedom is civic duty” but this is utter fantasy in any and every respect. The context of any and all existence is not “freedom” - which would be unconditional - but constraint which is various forms of conditionality to which everything that exists is subject. That people live in a civic environment is not a given, either in its invention or its maintenance, and many kinds of people, notably for my purposes, the historical school of Cynics, have chosen to disdain such an environment and speak to its negative effects upon humanity in general. One may, in fact, argue very strongly that it is increasing the amount and depth of civilisation that has inevitably summoned the current ecological crises that people like Hallam, Monbiot and Thunberg talk about. Would an uncivilised human race have brought such destruction upon itself? I suggest not for lack of civilisation would not have supported humanity as it now exists in its highly industrialised and technological states, all things that the historical Cynics would have whole-heartedly opposed as detrimental to this and any other species. But civilisation and civilising has been the form human hubris has taken since it learned to wield fire and fashion the wheel and this is that which must not be stopped for it is regarded and promoted as a destiny. 

It will be clear from reading this essay and, indeed, this whole website that I am no apologist for civilisation. Indeed, I laud and honour many within these pages who saw it as diseased and cancerous, a means to the death and dehumanisation of the human race and a thing against which they stood opposed. If Hallam and Monbiot and Thunberg want things to blame for the current state of the earth “civilisation”, the obsession of successive generations of human beings, has a good case for being near the top of the list. But if they are people who merely want to dust off civilisation, give it a make over and make it nice and shiny for us, more acceptable to their current fictions of equality, politics, fairness and naturalness, then what really radical alternative to the progression of humanity over successive millennia, to the detriment of the nature they claim to be inspired by and the custodians of, are they offering? The answer is none. There is no utopian civilisation; there is no impactless civilisation. Their fiction of a harmony is fantasy; their belief that the humans are in, or can be in, control is deluded. Nature is chance. Nature is what can happen, will happen. Nature is remorseless destruction and endless uncaring recycling of matter and life. Nature is pain, death and decay. Life is dependent on these things as we see in countless examples in the natural world and not in their distasteful, sentimental, anthropomorphic avoidance. If you want life you must also embrace death. That is nature. One implies the other.

And so it is my view that environmentalists, conservationists and green activists generally, and the ecological panic they have engendered and encouraged, is based on a million falsehoods about nature and the natural world. You can read about them and why they are false throughout the content of this website. The first and greatest of them is that nature needs a guardian: it doesn’t! And neither does it need self-important and self-interested species waffling on about their duty and their responsibility, things which are preposterous fictions of their own self-regarding reason. Yes, species that want to hang around or want other things to hang around with them shouldn’t dirty the nest without a second thought but, then again, neither do any of these things have to exist in the first place. If something comes to be nature pays it no attention and should it disappear again - as things inevitably do - then it doesn’t remember they were ever there. Nature has no ego even though it enabled us to have one. Understanding nature means fitting in with nature as it actually operates and not, in the hubris of our own egotistical minds, imagining we can create a better version embossed as the currency of human culture and civilisation, a currency which is substituted for the nature we claimed to revere but also a worthless currency that is as temporary as we are. It must be the aim of all people who understand nature as it is described in this essay and this website to devalue this civilisation and to expose it as the artificial unnaturalness that it actually is even if that means accepting the death and destruction that was our birthright from the moment what would become us came to be as nothing other than cosmic energy. An understanding of nature means an understanding of the whole and not, instead, exalting the pride of a species to manipulate and control its singularly unimportant environment. Leave things be. It is our meddling that is the problem. That’s nature’s way. Let it do as it will. Time and chance was all we were ever offered from nature’s well, nothing more, nothing less.

SOME THOUGHTS ON NATURE IN A REFLECTIVE MOOD

Everything around us is natural don't fight it

Don't disagree with this and that, no

Astrology, Evolution, this-and-that-ity

This religion and that, no

And if they were not meant to be

Well don't you think they wouldn't be?

And if they were not meant to be

Well don't you think they wouldn't be? oh

Your beliefs, philosophy, don't give us peace

Destruction of our enemy, does it makes us right?

And if you took them apart and destroyed them all now one by one

This still won't make it work no

And if they were not meant to be

Well don't you think they wouldn't be?

And if they were not meant to be

Well don't you think they wouldn't be? oh

Everything we like and don't like is whole and natural

I know is doesn't feel like it and the world seems wrong

But if we don't like it now then who can we blame?

Blame god, be still, find a harmony...

And if they were not meant to be

Well don't you think they wouldn't be?

And if they were not meant to be

Well don't you think they wouldn't be? oh

The words above are the lyrics to the song “Natural” by the buddhist singer and songwriter, Howard Jones, and they express his buddhist beliefs, as do many of the lyrics to his songs. They are, naturally enough in the context of this essay, about ‘the natural’ and they express the belief that everything that is is natural, for the natural is exactly everything that can come to be. In this, like and don’t like are utterly irrelevant, and imagining that the outworking of any ego-driven agenda can tame the fecundity of possibility that Jones imagines as the natural is vain and ultimately pointless. Jones recommends that we just accept all that is coming into and going out of being and co-exist with it all. Nature neither requires our agreement nor heeds our disagreement.

Yet looking at this two problems might immediately stand out for contemporary, Western readers. The first is that it seems as if Jones is saying “anything goes”. The second is the apparent licentiousness that this seems to mandate. I want to answer these charges not in terms of defending the lyrics to a song but in reference to the character of nature and the natural itself. What actually is the character of nature and what is natural?

That “anything goes” is the not so secret fear of anyone who thinks that there is some kind of fixed morality or that the universe goes about its business in accordance with fixed laws. For those who see fixity all around the only apparent thing they can see if you deny this fixity is that, in that case, you must be saying that “anything goes”. This is, in fact, not the case at all. The context of nature, I want to say, is not actually a matter of fixed laws or fixed morality, which are a claiming too much, a going beyond what we can demonstrate, but of constraint. It is, in fact, constraint which is the primary context of a physical system such as the one we inhabit and such as nature is. And it seems to me that pretty much everyone already and pre-reflectively agrees with this since all alike would agree that, in any given situation you can imagine, not just anything could happen there and then. Certain things could happen, perhaps even something unlikely or unexpected could happen. But not just anything could happen. This is to say, in as non-controversial a way as possible, that the “anything goes” charge is not something anyone truly believes at all, including those who may sometimes accuse others of believing it. Nature, then, is not a ‘free-for-all’ but it is a system which will allow anything to happen, in any given or imagined situation, that can or could happen. But that is itself never ‘anything’.

The second issue I raised was that of ‘licentiousness’ which is something associated with ‘anything goes’ without being exactly the same thing. For those who fear licentiousness fear that nature actually has no opinion about, or allows, things that they think should not be allowed. For example, what view does nature take on pedophilia, or incest, or rape, or beastiality? It takes no view. All these things are possible in nature. And yet all people who want to seem sane and just, and many who wouldn’t, would say that these things were completely wrong and some, I’m certain, would claim that they are also “unnatural” as well. Yet I must insist that on the latter charge they are wrong. We cannot say that these things, and others, are “unnatural” for it is nature itself which expressly allows them and without passing any opinion about them, or judgment upon them, whatsoever. 

There are a few further points I can make about this. FIrst, in nature that something CAN happen doesn’t mean that it SHOULD happen. Nature’s enabling of certain courses of action is not its moral imprimatur to carry out that action. Nature, I would argue, has no opinions and mandates no action on moral or any other grounds. So ‘can’ does not mean ‘should’. But, secondly, CAN does also not mean WILL either. That something can happen doesn’t mean it will happen. Possibility is not eventuality or inevitability. Thirdly, as Melanie Joy raised towards the end of the second section of this essay, we have to consider that what nature itself is silent about in its enabling and allowance of, may NOT be something that we find we could justify to a representative or imagined group of other human beings. It is quite likely, in fact, that if you were open about indulging in any of the four examples of natural behaviour I have given that you would face immediate human consequence and judicial sanction. So what I would actually argue in relation to activities such as these is that, yes, nature does enable what to some might seem like a certain licentiousness by their human, cultural standards. Yet, in doing so, it has not given its approval nor mandated that they should be carried out, nor declared them morally in order. Nature does not have a morality and, as such, morality itself, and what that does and doesn’t have to do with nature, is something we need to consider now.

Morality, as I see it, comes from groups of human beings. Morality, in all cases, is human-shaped. Morality is, then, rhetorical, ideological, fictional, and artificial. Morality is a code of behaviour that humans, in theory if not always in practice, can justify by the giving of reasons. The fact that it is this, I would argue, is another example of its human origin for nature knows nothing of reasons. Yet this, historically, has become a problem for some. An example of this would be Diogenes the Cynic who I made reference to in There is nothing to stick to. For Diogenes, the more artificial things became, the more dehumanising they became. Archetypally, this was civilisation as best exampled by the Greek city state in his own time and place. Yet, in theory, anything sufficiently artificial would and could be seen as dehumanising and unnatural by a Cynic following the line of thinking Diogenes and other Cynics established. This is why Diogenes famously went through the marketplace of a city, in a common anecdote shared about him, looking for ‘ho anthropos’ - the Greek for ‘human being’. It was his view that cities made human beings less human and so, by being closer to the natural rather than the artificial, that humanity was more vividly actualised. Cities, whilst physically being built environments, themselves artificial, are also places where artificial morals and customs are born and where they are put in place to prosper not being human but the actual artificial environment itself, to facilitate its existence and further growth. Meanwhile, out in the fields, the Cynics would live according to whatever nature, in its careless bounty, afforded them, in their eyes actualising their humanity in ways that the civilised city dwellers were deliberately hindering by their so doing. Such people, in naturalistic Cynic eyes, lived less than fully human lives.

Here again with ‘morality’ we come upon some things already mentioned in thinking about this. The first is that can does not mean should. If morality is itself not natural in its force or appeal, if it is artificial as I claim and even though it is certainly a natural development, then its force can only be rhetorical force and that force can only be strengthened by physical and political force. These are all matters of human beings and their desire to impose their will upon others. It is, when intensified, the bellum omnium contra omnes. Morality, as will be observed, is often a case of the more powerful forcing the less powerful to submit to their morals. Here, regardless of rhetorical claim, what is decisive is that one group has the power to make another group submit. Then again, however, we should recall Howard Jones’ refrain from “Natural”: “And if they were not meant to be well don’t you think they wouldn’t be?” Nature, we must say, is not something that operates like a human morality even though the humans that have themselves developed morality were developed through entirely natural means themselves. Yet what we may say about nature and morality and people together is this: if we want people free to live ‘according to nature’ - which those such as Diogenes would insist was to be MORE human - then they should be free to live according to nature’s amorality rather than the moralities of human beings. The former is natural, the latter artificial. Yet we might here also consider the notion that humanity’s culture of morality might, in fact, be a game the species plays with itself which only, in the end and in that ‘war of all against all’, serves to further the more natural game of survival itself. Perhaps the cultural activity ‘morality’ serves a more natural purpose behind its own back. Perhaps.

And so we come to reflect on the ‘state of nature’ itself. I have used the quotes in my second section here to guide my thoughts on this and those quotes were fairly randomly selected as I attempted to mimic the kismet or providence of nature in the necessary selection process involved. Nature, we may say, is not a human organisation of things; it is that ‘free’, constrained choice of the ‘what can happen’ that will happen. This ‘free, constrained choice’ is not bound by our traditions, customs or understanding either. In a song which takes the 20th saying of the Tao Te Ching as its subject matter, Howard Jones, in a further song titled “Is There A Difference?” tries to express this lyrically:

Is there a difference between yes and no?

Is there a difference between up and down?

Must I fear what others fear?

What nonsense!

Some people are content

Enjoying things that belong to tradition

With the seasons they cast their lot

Without a question

Other men are clear and bright and solid

Other men are sharp and clever and jolly

And we go

Is there a difference between high and low?

Is there a difference between then and now?

Do we have to live in pain and fear?

What nonsense!

People are drifting like the waves on the sea

Without direction like the restless wind

Not knowing forward, not knowing back

Just existing

Other men are strong and full of courage

Other men are witty and full of knowledge

And we go

Other men are clear and bright and solid

(I alone am drifting on the sea)

Other men are sharp and clever and jolly

(Restless like the wind)

And we go

Is there a difference?

Is there really a difference?

Yes and no

Is there a difference?

Is there really a difference?

Up and down

Is there a difference?

Is there really a difference?

High and low

Is there a difference?

Is there really a difference?

Then and now

Is there a difference?

Is there really a difference?

Yes and no

Is there a difference?

Is there really a difference?

Up and down

Is there a difference?

Is there really a difference?

The truth of the lyrics of this song, as, I believe, with the 20th saying of the Tao Te Ching, is that, for all human learning, for all its measurements and judgments and quantifications, there is something missing, something it lacks. What it lacks is that nature itself does not measure, judge or quantify. Human beings become knowing in order to instrumentalise and to use - and then they misconstrue that knowledge as knowledge of nature itself, as an understanding inherent to nature. Yet nature neither instrumentalises nor uses. It just exists. It is not knowing. As the Tao Te Ching says in that 20th saying, then, all that is needed for human beings is “to cast off selfishness and temper desire”. Then we can see a way in which there might not ultimately be a difference at all and in which all the knowing activity of human beings can be cast aside for the pursuance of more natural lives.

Yet, as humans, we know of certain “drives” and we see these drives in nature too. ‘All things wish to survive’ is something we imagine to be common to all living things, even if only as instinct or autonomic function. Therefore, things must feed, must reproduce, must often be in community to increase their chances of survival, etc. Things seem to be fulfilling a purpose even if it was one nature gave them when it birthed them rather than one they chose for themselves. In this context we can remember George Carlin’s love for the tuft of grass that forces its way through a crack in the concrete, taking account of the meagrest amount of soil with its necessary nutrients that provide it with the sustenance to hang in there, part of a much greater whole that comprises all living things. This “part of a wholeness” was something that Albert Einstein focused on in the first comment from the previous section of this essay and it unites him completely with thought such as that which is Taoist. Yet this part/whole conception also serves to point out that human beings are not themselves nature or, indeed, nature’s authorised biographers or interpreters. Human beings always and only speak for themselves and not nature. The part can speak about the whole but never from or for the whole. 

With this in mind, there are further things we can put forward about nature and its character. One is that nature is a place of possibility yet not without a degree of predictability. In a given or imagined situation some outcomes are probably more likely than others yet we must always, at the same time, be prepared for that unexpected event or process that can happen nevertheless. Here the character of nature is that if something can happen then it sometimes will. Yet, again at the same time, there is also the feeling here that nature has no overarching plan; there is no guide, no “intelligent design”, no blueprint. Nature is not trying to get anywhere and there is no ziel or goal in all this. Nature is just a big engine of possibility. If it can happen, it will. For some this is a problem since they themselves feel a need for purpose or intention but it must be plainly stated that although nature often gives human beings these things, and seems to distribute a more primitive instinct for certain things more widely, this does not seem to be something that nature as a whole has. Nature exists because it can. And that is all. It doesn’t want, have purposes or intentions in doing so, or aim at any particular or general outcome.

Ironically, the lack of these things in nature may act as a kind of release valve for the human being who, unlike nature in general, is beset by all of these things and may experience them as burdens. This, I think, is why so many human beings, and I quoted several above, experience ‘being in nature’ as a release from the artificial world of human creation, intention and purpose. It is also perhaps why certain human beings, those, for example, of Buddhist or Taoist persuasion, traditions which focus on balance and being ‘at one with all things’ and that intend to join with nature in its imagined manner of operation, practice these spiritual traditions in an imagined therapeutic way. Their testimony is that the human being can be trained to be more in phase with nature as it manifests itself and that this acts as an aid to human well being. This then feeds back into my previous thoughts about ‘can’ and ‘should’ in that, although nature gave us a need for purpose or intention, it did not do so by making us robots who are slaves to such things. It is always a matter of their use and our focus - and we can even train ourselves to progressively abandon or negate such features of our make up and become more like nature in her manner of operation. The human being, then, a child of nature, is not fixed but presents as having the possibility for a variation of possible lives. What can happen will happen?

Yet this raises the question of ‘the human’, what we might here call human culture, and nature. Are these opposites? Are they antagonistically in opposition in their operation? We may say, I think, that they can be distinguished and variously identified. Yet they are also seemingly symbiotic and this is understandable as any and every human culture was birthed by and from nature. Yet so prodigious has nature been in equipping human beings, and human culture, that it has, quite unknowingly, of course, given birth to a creature which, in its cultural endeavours, can begin to destroy that which gave it life. This is to say that the function (and sometimes the purpose) of human culture, either deliberately or merely through lack of care or neglect, can be to destroy nature. Nature, of course, does not care. At no time does nature care how much of it exists, or as what, or how much of it doesn’t. Nature in general, in fact, doesn’t even care if it does exist. And why should it when we can usefully point out that everything that exists effectively came from nothing? Nature, thought of as the entirety of the system of ‘what is’, has always created from nothing. Were there nothing once again, a scenario which vastly over-estimates humanity’s power to destroy and negate, who is to say that a new nature, a new universe, would not come into existence in ways we cannot even begin to fathom? Here I like to think of human culture in ways analogous to the role of Neo as ‘The One’ in the Matrix films. In the second film of the trilogy Neo has a famous talk with The Architect who tells him that, rather than The One being an actual saviour figure, the saviour figure is, in fact, a role that is acted out as a function of The Matrix itself. Once The One has performed his role he returns to The Source and we all go round again. Human culture is a bit like that, I think. It is playing a role, barely perceived, perhaps even only instinctively felt, in a much, much greater whole. Rather than being saviours, human beings are merely functions. As with The One, they over-exaggerate their importance but, given time, they will soon be put in their place. 

This place, of course, is the context of nature as a whole, which is, was and always will be, our perennial and eternal context. This nature, it has been observed, seems to have its own natural rhythms that go with the habitat it provides as an environment. It is said by some, even many, that becoming attuned to this, perhaps in phenomena as diverse as the seashore, a river or stream, a walk through wooded areas or even the feeling of sunlight or rain on your face, is to promote ‘a more elemental feeling’ than that which comes from a world of human creating. Here nature is again an escape from the deliberate, the knowing, the purposeful, the intentional. It offers, instead, a poetic mysticism such as that found in the words of Thoreau or Keats above. This is “the tonic of wildness” or “the poetry of the earth”. We recognise nature’s differentness, that it is not bound to purpose, to intention, to worry, to desire, as we are. It just is. It speaks its own strangely naive and beautiful language that is nothing to do with the need to ‘make sense’ as our’s is. It seems somehow more primal, more elemental, more basic, more fundamental. And, of course, it is. All creation comes from the abstract nothingness of nature and this is nothing but a mystery to us.

What human being with their knowing, understanding and explaining can make something as amazing as a tree? Nature makes trees by the million and without even knowing or caring that it is doing so and without even having a reason for doing it. It just happens because it can. It is by analogy to such miracles that the Taoist asks people to live according to an ethic of “non-action” or “actionless action” which is to mimic the nature that makes trees. The moral, of course, is that lacking intentions, purposes and desires is not to say amazing things cannot happen. Amazing things are all around us which no one set out to create and we are among them! It was non-action which made our world and so us and all the life we are witness too. It was non-action which created the many views we stare at, open-mouthed. Perhaps this is why William Blake said that “nature is imagination itself”. Nature, then, is pure existence without judgment, meaning, purpose, desire or intent. Nature is unconcerned change, a constant becoming or imagining if we stay with Blake’s idea. 

Yet in this recognition there is a question: is nature innocent or simple? Is it both? Or neither? Here we have opportunity to distinguish human beings from nature once more for we are lots of things it is not. Human beings want to get to know and understand things so they can use them to their imagined benefit. Nature does not do that. Nature just flows forwards in whatever ways it can. If one thing cannot happen, then something else will. Or perhaps nothing will. What does it matter? Since nature has no purpose or intent ‘what happens next’ is of little importance. Nature is, of course, consequential but only in a way in which there is indifference to consequentiality. Here I remember the British farmer, James Rebanks, once telling a story of how nature will allow a sheep’s horns to grow right into its head if you let them, killing the sheep that has grown them. It can happen and so it sometimes does. Nature gives birth to a sheep whose natural processes then kill it. Rebanks, as a responsible farmer, has to cut the horns of sheep whose horns might develop in this way. Nature is unknowing and irresponsible. It doesn’t act with an eye to the future. It just acts and in this is both a kind of innocence and a kind of complexity that functions as a simplicity. Nature has a complete lack of guile. It is not wily. It does not need to be smart. It doesn’t survive on its wits. It is not looking for what will follow as a consequence. Consequences happen and causes have effects but nature remains unconcerned about them and impervious to them in its ubiquitous flexibility.

This brings us back to morality. Morality is not such an innocence and we are not innocent. Morality is a knowingness or, as the Bible describes it in Genesis 2-3, a fall. Human beings have morality exactly because they cannot be innocent or act innocently. The Genesis story, which is much cleverer and deeper than many dismissive people imagine, links lack of innocence with desire to know in what I read as an ancient warning to the people of the earth about separating themselves from the earth and so the nature that gave them birth. In that mythology it is, of course, bound up with a god figure but this should not distract us from this fundamental point in a story in which this god is bound up intimately with nature through creation in any case. The human beings desired lack of innocence, they craved to know, and then, when they did know, losing their innocence in the process, they experienced it as a loss, as pain and as a fall from grace. Nature is that grace and we have often ever since distinguished ourselves from it and set ourselves above it, seeking to master the innocence we once gave up through even more and more knowing. Genesis, I believe, teaches us that this can never be the case for innocence and knowing cannot mix. Like matter and anti-matter, they cannot exist in the same space. Too rarely do human beings learn from nature in the sense of attempting to become like nature itself is. Writer Rebecca Solnit pronounces herself surprised that “we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown” and here the “ugly scenarios” are those of our knowing and “the pure unknown” is the innocence of nature. Nature is the pure unknown. It is the unknowing, the uncaring, the unknowable, the place where knowledge ceases to matter or exist. In contrast, human beings appear very much like those depicted in yet another song by Howard Jones, this time “Hunger for the Flesh”:

Spare a thought for the souls

Who cannot leave this earth

The attachments bind so tightly, not a chance

Not a chance of a new birth

The river gently beckons

But the answer is no

Gripping their illusions

They cannot let them go

Hunger for the flesh

Leads them to a weaker heart

Mortals who imprisoned themselves

Let them have a new start

Wishing to hold onto life and all its games

Singing their lament song

Holding back the change

They came here for to dance

To learn and not to cling

Holding onto life

As if it were the important thing

Hunger for the flesh

Hunger for security

Caught up in the mesh

Caught up for eternity

Hunger for the flesh

Hunger for security

Caught up in the mesh

Caught up for eternity

The river gently beckons

But the answer is no

Gripping their illusions

They cannot let them go

Hunger for the flesh

Leads them to a weaker heart

Mortals who imprison themselves

Let them have a new start

Let them have a new start

Hunger for the flesh

Hunger for security

Caught up in the mesh

Caught up for eternity

Hunger for the flesh

Hunger for security

Caught up in the mesh

Holding back the change

This song directly addresses the question of what matters and so of meaning, something apparent to the human being in most cases but not apparent in nature in general. If we ask this question only from our own personal perspective, and without wider context, it is our life and security that matters. But the wider you go and the more context you bring into this question the more our own personal meaning and value recedes. Currently, as I write, there are renewed waves of environmental concern for the earth in numerous directions. We have the campaign Extinction Rebellion on the one hand and, in the USA, politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talk of a “Green New Deal” which they imagine will remedy our planet’s environmental problems and allow (human) business as usual to carry on without dramatic and world-altering events occurring which may hinder our (self-) imagined progress. 

Yet I, with a perhaps much wider context on the issues, that of nature as a whole as the system of all that is, ask myself what the worst that can happen actually is. This, it would seem to me, would be the entire destruction of life on earth, the essential neutralisation of life on our planet. I am told that this would be horrific and devastating and for those that are going away no doubt that might be true. But our planet, the only one any of us will likely ever have any direct experience of, is not even a pinprick in the totality of everything that exists. If we simply disappeared who would even be around to care? Would anything miss this planet? My point is that we humans are so small-minded. Our thought is not nearly big enough. Nature is much, much bigger than us. It is so beyond needing or requiring us to be around to direct it or fix it or even be a part of it. So I’m totally on board with that part of George Carlin’s act in the past where he spoke of “human arrogance” towards nature as if its purpose was us. We have a big shock coming if we continue to believe such nonsensical things. But then we have that same big shock coming one day anyway. Nature is not really into permanence. Its much more into change. So don’t “grip your illusions” too tightly. You can’t “hold back the change”.

And so the question returns again once more, as it always seems to: what are we and what is our place in all this? The metaphor of The Matrix returns again, too. The One played a role in a system. Even in the end, in that last conversation between The Architect and The Oracle, it was suggested that real world changes would not last forever. It was a tacit acknowledgement, of course, that nothing ever does. For millions of years our own planet existed and we did not. We appear and then imagine this planet is “our’s” like New World colonialists claiming land not our’s is now our own. But what then is the role of human beings in the system that is nature? It is, as it can only ever be, to be what we are. This cannot be sugar-coated. While some paint us as the altruistic ones who are easily led astray, others, perhaps characters in films such as Agent Smith from The Matrix, describe humans as “a virus”. Yet, at the end of the day, whether altruists or viruses, we are insignificant and the ‘matrix’ that is our planet can easily be shut down and made into something else by nature. It will be anyway. It is inevitable. In this, nature teaches us humility. It also teaches us limitation. It teaches us constraint and circumstance and consequence. It teaches us, in fact, that we need nature but it does not necessarily need us. As The Architect says to Neo in sinister fashion: “There are losses we are prepared to accept”. Nature, we should be in no doubt, would be able to take the loss of us and our planet. It wouldn’t even raise a hint of recognition that we had disappeared. 

In this way, we can see an egotistical and narcissistic set of human cultures as ways to recreate nature or as new natures we attempt to create more under our control. The overarching thing humans seem to care about is control whether of each other or over nature. As transhumanists try to invent ways to live forever and technocrats try to plug people into an electronic world they increasingly cannot exist without, this reveals a human blindness: that human beings are not in control of nature! In truth, human beings are engulfed and overwhelmed by nature even as they are, moment by moment, subject to its all-powerful constraints. We are one volcanic eruption away from a year of worldwide winter even as we are one asteroid strike away from extinction even as we stand one disease or accident away from death. Nature is a place of eternal consequence and the human beings who have used their nature to pursue cultures of control inevitably end up fearing being controlled themselves the most. We see this too in Neo’s reaction to The Architect when told, in The Matrix Reloaded, that he is merely a function of the system. “Bullshit! I don’t believe it!” he is heard to say. But it is true nevertheless. Yet the matrix that is nature does not care about our feelings or opinions on the matter. It just works as it can. And, unlike The Matrix, you cannot argue with nature. Nature is never wrong. Nature is innocent of knowing. Nature is innocent of thinking. Nature is guilt-free. Nature is, thus, due human reverence as something transcendent far above it yet also as something far more immanent than we could ever be. If we want a source, that is it. Nature is the way of all things, what a Taoist would call ‘the Tao’. It is this way we humans need to acknowledge, respect and attune ourselves to - as we recognise when we take time out to appreciate the sunshine, be inhabited by the feeling of a particular view, cuddle an animal and feel the natural communion of touch or sit in the shade of a particular tree. That should be the normal, not the exceptional. The normal is not human control but human acceptance in humility of its place in an anarchic harmony of all things.

Yet when we think of nature we will perhaps more immediately think of things such as animal cruelty or vegetarianism and veganism or the extinction of individual species. We will be told, with a straight face, that, for example, extinction of species is very serious as if nature itself was weeping when the truth is that it was nature itself which created the possibility and enabled and allowed it to happen through its own special agents: us! (Although it is also true to say that things will go extinct whether we exist or not. Always have, always will!) Yes, it is human beings which created pain, evil, suffering and misery. Other things can hurt, perhaps more than we can know, but they do not feel these specifically human things no matter how much they do. This, in case you are wondering, is not to be callous or indifferent to the sufferings of others. I still think and believe we should aim to reduce examples of all of these things even though I do not think I can claim ‘nature’ as my mandate to do such a thing. It is, I think, more to do with nature’s gift of the instinct to survive and to prosper all things in the furtherance of that same gift as much as we can and to the best of our own ability. Yet nature does not implore us to be vegans. Nature does not stop us killing for food while creating thousands of other creatures that prey upon each other for survival. Nature is not a human being and its interpretation is not to be given in human language, thought or emotions. 

It comes to this: nothing has to exist. That which exists exists because it can and it may very easily go away again because it can as well. Nature is fragile, contingent, changing, flexible about its arrangements. There are questions about which bits are and aren’t necessary at any given time - although nature itself knows nothing of time and time is irrelevant to it. Nature swallows time as it swallows being and non-being before regurgitating them back out again. As beings of nature, formed from nothing, we need nature to exist, both from an originary standpoint but also from a sustaining and maintaining standpoint. There is a reason people feel more alive ‘in nature’. Yet nature doesn’t need us. We should never forget who is the real boss and what it is that gives us the free gift of life in a commonwealth of all things that exist without reason. This, I imagine, is why some spiritual traditions engage in silent meditation. Nature speaks, yet without words. As human beings, we need to find ways to mimic nature in this and many other ways in which it operates and, I would maintain, for our own good as long as we are to survive.

I finish this section of my essay, enigmatically, with yet more lyrics from a Howard Jones song. This time the song is “Hide and Seek”:

There was a time when there was nothing at all

Nothing at all, just a distant hum

There was a being and he lived on his own

He had no one to talk to, and nothing to do

He drew up the plans, 

learnt to work with his hands

A million years passed by and his work was done

And his words were these...

Hope you find it in everything, 

everything that you see

Hope you find it in everything, 

everything that you see

Hope you find it, hope you find it

Hope you find me in you

So she had built her elaborate home

With its ups and its downs, 

its rains and its sun

She decided that her work was done, 

time to have fun

and found a game to play

Then as part of the game

She completely forgot where she'd hidden herself

And she spent the rest of her time

Trying to find the parts

Hope you find it in everything, 

everything that you see

Hope you find it in everything, 

everything that you see

Hope you find it, hope you find it

Hope you find me in you

There was a time when there was nothing at all, nothing at all

Just a distant hum