It's, Like, From the Earth, Man

"Graduation" by Peter BlinmanThere is a pervasive yet erroneous idea circulating these days that things are "good" because they are "natural".  Advertisers for foods or beauty products often engage in label-slapping to that effect; moneyed hippies and bobos buy up "natural" products like nature is going out of style; obesity and cancer are explained away as cosmic justice for our civilization of plastic's forsaking of the earth goddess.

Nowhere can this idea be heard more stupidly (or more harmlessly) than in a circle of close friends and random acquaintances passin da righteous civil disobedience on the left-hand side whilst listening to music about that with which goats love to play and/or watching marijuana-related comedy:

“Why is marijuana against the law? It grows naturally upon our planet. Doesn't the idea of making nature against the law seem to you a bit . . . unnatural?”

Which one might naturally (no pun intended) counter with this pithy dialogue: 

Nick: Come on, what's the big deal? It's from the earth, it's natural. Why would it be there if we weren't supposed to smoke it?

Lindsey: Dog crap is here and we don't smoke that.

The clear and obvious truth is that marijuana is harmless enough without having to appeal to its being natural.  People high on marijuana don't commit crimes.  They don't die.  They mostly just sit around watching stuff on TV and figuring out how to order pizza.

But this post is not about marijuana.  It's about "natural" not entailing "good".  After all, arsenic is natural.  The black plague is natural.  Even rape is natural.  In fact, the entirety of human society - from our legal code to our hallowed institutions of medicine - exists as a Hobbesian bulwark against the evils of the natural world.

That's not to say that "natural" is "bad" either.  Recently, I've been linking to an excellent essay by Alex Rosenberg, a former professor of mine, and Tamler Sommers on the topic of how we can't make value judgments on our prevailing morality simply because it is our prevailing morality (I also linked to this essay as part of the comments of my essay following last year's TED Sam Harris affair.):   

Darwinian Nihilism departs from Naturalism only in declining to endorse our morality or any other as true or correct. It must decline to do so because it holds that the explanation of how our moral beliefs arose also explains away as mistaken the widespread belief that moral claims are true. The Darwinian explanation becomes the Darwinian Nihilist’s “explaining away” when it becomes apparent that the best explanation—blind variation and natural selection-- for the emergence of our ethical belief does not require that these beliefs have truth-makers.

Indeed, something which the learned influence-peddlers of our society must learn and relearn is that the properties of "natural" and the properties of "good" have nothing to do with each other unless it is by subjective contrivance.  

It is amazing how far this elementary misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution by natural selection goes.  I could spend a lot of time here on mass media or religious opposition to Darwinism, which is entirely rooted in the fallacious understanding I have described above, but I have already written a mini-post to that effect:

...(S)ome questions for religious people: why oppose Darwinian explanations for human behavior?  Does studying physics or geology diminish the beauty of nature?  Does understanding how a zygote works make me love my daughter any less?  Does accepting that generosity builds community invalidate goodness itself?

Instead I would like to concentrate primarily on the organic food movement, something which I enthusiastically support, but feel must be sharply qualified.  I personally prefer organic food both because it is generally produced in a more equitable and environmentally friendly fashion by local farmers who are fairly compensated and because it tastes a lot better than the 40% corn 30% soy milieu of "regular" (but decidedly strange) supermarkets.  

Nevertheless, organic food is not superior to processed food because it is natural per se; although there is a rational argument to be made in favor of the superiority of organic food on the basis that it is natural given that "natural" foods are usually "old" foods and any adverse effects on humans would have been worked out long ago by the cumulative effects of natural selection acting over many thousands of generations.  A good example of this is cow's milk, which archaeological evidence suggests took several generations to reach a non-vomitous equilibrium.

However, still to be accounted for are the anecdotal and empirical claims that organic food eaters are generally thinner and healthier than non-organic food eaters.  The prevailing take on this is that even if organic food eaters were shown to be thinner and healthier compared to non-organic food eaters when controlling for type and quantity of food, such a difference can be explained more parsimoniously by economics: organic food is more expensive, and wealthier people tend to be thinner anyways, so there would be a shared demographic; but there are so many variables here and they are so difficult to control for that it seems impossible to sort them all out.

My favorite way to interpret these anecdotal and empirical data is with a rational argument: that both the accumulation of wealth and remaining thin in a food atmosphere generally offering instant gratification require the ability to consciously delay gratification.  In other words, a wide variety of ways to succeed requires that we exhibit extraordinary strength in resisting what comes naturally.