Michael Crichton on the Noble Savage and Romanticized Nature

And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.

How about the human condition in the rest of the world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200 years after Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability to hang on in the face of centuries of factual contradiction.

There was even an academic movement, during the latter 20th century, that claimed that cannibalism was a white man's invention to demonize the indigenous peoples. (Only academics could fight such a battle.) It was some thirty years before professors finally agreed that yes, cannibalism does inbdeed occur among human beings. Meanwhile, all during this time New Guinea highlanders in the 20th century continued to eat the brains of their enemies until they were finally made to understand that they risked kuru, a fatal neurological disease, when they did so.

More recently still the gentle Tasaday of the Philippines turned out to be a publicity stunt, a nonexistent tribe. And African pygmies have one of the highest murder rates on the planet.

In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die.

And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you'll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you'll have infections and sickness and if you're not with somebody who knows what they're doing, you'll quickly starve to death. But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won't experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.

The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It's all talk-and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it's uninformed talk. Farmers know what they're talking about. City people don't. It's all fantasy.

One way to measure the prevalence of fantasy is to note the number of people who die because they haven't the least knowledge of how nature really is. They stand beside wild animals, like buffalo, for a picture and get trampled to death; they climb a mountain in dicey weather without proper gear, and freeze to death. They drown in the surf on holiday because they can't conceive the real power of what we blithely call "the force of nature." They have seen the ocean. But they haven't been in it.

The television generation expects nature to act the way they want it to be. They think all life experiences can be tivo-ed. The notion that the natural world obeys its own rules and doesn't give a damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock. Well-to-do, educated people in an urban environment experience the ability to fashion their daily lives as they wish. They buy clothes that suit their taste, and decorate their apartments as they wish. Within limits, they can contrive a daily urban world that pleases them.

But the natural world is not so malleable. On the contrary, it will demand that you adapt to it-and if you don't, you die. It is a harsh, powerful, and unforgiving world, that most urban westerners have never experienced.

Many years ago I was trekking in the Karakorum mountains of northern Pakistan, when my group came to a river that we had to cross. It was a glacial river, freezing cold, and it was running very fast, but it wasn't deep---maybe three feet at most. My guide set out ropes for people to hold as they crossed the river, and everybody proceeded, one at a time, with extreme care. I asked the guide what was the big deal about crossing a three-foot river. He said, well, supposing you fell and suffered a compound fracture. We were now four days trek from the last big town, where there was a radio. Even if the guide went back double time to get help, it'd still be at least three days before he could return with a helicopter. If a helicopter were available at all. And in three days, I'd probably be dead from my injuries. So that was why everybody was crossing carefully. Because out in nature a little slip could be deadly.

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Source: Michael Crichton, "Remarks to the Commonwealth Club" (presentation, San Francisco, CA, September 15, 2003).

Diagram of Ens Reale

Ens Reale (Greek: φύσις [physis]; mind-independent being):

Esse (To exist):

-In

--Alio (another): Accident

--Se (itself): Substance

-Ad (towards/for): Relation

Hence although relation is grouped within the accidents because it isn't substance, relation is unlike any accident insofar as it does not exist intrasubjectively but suprasubjectively, dependent upon subjectivities as its foundation yet above them. Accidents properly speaking are intrasubjective determinations that specify the substance as an individual.

Ockham's reduction of relation to similarity existing between subjectivities that possess intrasubjectively a same quality or determination (accident) is a reduction of relation as suprasubjective to intra- and inter- subjective. Relation therefore loses its proper characteristic and becomes an expression of the multiplication of some similar quality or being; if two or more beings share this quality, there is relation in the shared quality.

Relation, interestingly, is characterized precisely by its indifference to the orders of ens reale and ens rationis, mind-independent and mind-dependent being. A relation may exist even if its fundament or terminus exist either in ens reale or ens rationis; hence whether the relation is a "real relation" or just a "logical" one. For example, a relation of fictions is still a relation even though fictions are related; hence even though the fundament and terminus are within ens rationis, the relation is real (not as in "real relation" but simply as existing). But an individual that is a fiction is precisely not an individual because an individual is that which exists independently of ens rationis. Relation bridges the gap and is therefore also the bridge between culture and nature.

Relation is also the bridge between subjectivity (individuality of substances, ens reale) and objectivity (ens reale that has become an ens rationis through the awareness of a cognitive or quasi-cognitive power). Something becomes an object precisely by coming into relation with a subject that possesses some power of awareness.

Cf. John Deely, Purely Objective Reality (2009), ch. 2.

Zizek on the Illusion of Nature

Humans are becoming a "geological factor," not simply one species among others. Paradoxically, therefore, "nature does not exist," as in the idea of nature that we commonly accept as a "balanced, harmonized circulation, which is then destroyed through excessive human agency," this doesn't exist. Nature itself is "crazy," a "series of mega-catastrophes." Nature isn't a puppy we need to protect to put it another way. It is a lion that could destroy us at any moment. Technology is an extension of nature, of human nature. Zizek therefore questions, "What is the extent of our omnipotence?" We must accept the fact that we live in an irreversibly technological world; well, the only fathomable way that such a condition is irreversible is if "nature" annihilated the entire human population.

Memo: Grace and Nature, Unconscious Affect and Spiritual Emotion

If I could have the opportunity, I would like to study the intersection of unconscious affect and spiritual "emotions."

It would also be interesting to see the extent to which grace depends on nature. For example, if a person very advanced in holiness were to suffer such a brain injury that they lost all sense of morality or self control, what would be the implications for the relationship between grace and nature?

John Deely on Romanticizing Nature

MT: I guess part of this semioethical realization concerns what real-world consequences all our human actions have, and to what extent the human world practically – ehm – messes with a natural world that is non-human.

JD [John Deely]: Did you say ‘messes’?

MT: In search of a better word – ...or interferes in a non-human world. Isn’t part of the realization that there is not a sharp distinction between what concerns humans and what concerns others than humans?

JD: Yes, but when you start to speak about the human world as ‘messing with’ the world of nature, you’re coming from an almost Rousseauean, romantic idea of nature: that nature is what we need to just leave alone. And that’s completely naive, because we’re part of nature. They’re talking about – you know, it’s so criminal that we would eat the flesh of animals, et cetera. I like the cartoon – I think it was in The New Yorker, where there are these three characters who are very ecologically friendly, and there’s a couple of lions that are trying to eat them. And they’re up in a tree, and then two of them say to the third one: "Would you please explain to this guy [the closest lion] how much we’ve done for him?"

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Source: John Deely, interviewed by Morten Tønnessen, "Tell Me, Where Is Morality Bred? The Semioethics Interviews I: John Deely," Hortus Semioticus 4 (April 7, 2009): 56, accessed March 1, 2014, http://www.ut.ee/hortussemioticus/4_2009/pdf/hortussemioticus_4_deely.pdf.