It's Funny How the Word “Natural” Is Often Understood as Meaning “Good”

Colloquially speaking, the word “natural” is quite closely tied in with the word “good” to the point of the two almost being considered synonyms. Time and time again we find all sorts of products being advertised with aesthetic appeals to nature, what with constantly showing beautiful fields, flowing rivers, rocky mountains under an orange sunset, or even wild animals depicted in an almost spiritual sense. Then if you slap a sticker with the words “natural” or “organic” to pretty much any product you can count on someone out there buying it because they automatically think it's healthy for them or, for lack of a better word, good. Now let's say, for the sake of argument, that this is all correct, especially because, intuitively, it kinda seems to be. It's wholly preferable to look at pretty natural landscapes that are often presented to us in beautiful and almost dreamlike ways, as opposed to ugly urban sights, always gray and dull, and it appears to be way healthier to consume and use natural products than unnatural or processed ones, though that first term lacks definition. That all makes sense, we are animals so we have instincts that make us prefer natural things, which might indeed be all be fine and dandy, but why is “natural” taken to mean “good” when nature is also so damn full of things we want to completely destroy? I think that's simple – it's because nature, for the most part, actually sucks.

Merriam-Webster gives us nine definitions of nature, the first one being – the inherent character or basic constitution of a person or thing. The second one, which I think adds to the first, reads – a creative and controlling force in the universe. The sixth one is kinda more philosophical – the external world in its entirety. It's only the last and ninth that reads quite simply – natural scenery... I have said it before, it's not a great idea to confer with dictionary definitions of terms to be specifically used in a philosophical discussion, but in this case the definitions seem rather appropriate. The first one makes a lot of sense as it describes nature as being merely a state of affairs, because nature really is just how things are. End of story. With the second it adds a bit more, almost a bit of personality to it, I now say very tentatively. Because while creation and control can often be rather impersonal, though many would disagree, it can still feel like things are being moved in a certain direction and with a rational sense of purpose. As to the sixth one it appears to encompass the universe itself as nature, seemingly giving the term a meaning that transcends the strictly biological, which I also agree with. It's only the very last definition that gives us a meaning closely related to the one we would, in very colloquial terms, fully understand as being nature.

So why the inclination to assume that all things natural are good? Maybe it's because it's easy to forget the bad aspects of nature, in fact it's surprisingly easy for people to forget pretty much anything after a little while without being in direct contact with any kind of reminder. It's easy, for example, to look at pictures of camping trips and feel the immediate urge to go camping, the urge to be in the forest, to be surrounded by those tall trees, and we can almost feel that morning dew as we listen to the chirping of birds uninterrupted by fast cars, even if only in the imagination... It's all nice and incredibly beautiful, that is until you actually go camping and you also see the creepy spiders and the wet crawling worms, or until it rains and you find doing the smallest actions all too inconvenient and life becomes way too tough. In other words, we only appear to love nature because we romanticize it constantly and consistently. Even as I wrote that bit about the good aspects of camping I could feel myself slip into daydreams about how nice it would actually be, even if rationally I also know I definitely wouldn't like it all that much. And all that is a long-winded detour to explain that the reason we like nature but only casually is because we tend to ignore the positive aspects of technology just as much as we ignore the negative aspects of nature. For example, what exactly is unnatural about an earthquake or a tsunami or a volcano eruption? Absolutely nothing, to the point where those instances are called natural disasters. Likewise what is unnatural about packs of wolves hunting and mercilessly killing a few baby deer? Nothing, to the point where that instance and all similar ones are simply called wildlife. And then what is unnatural about a parasite lodged in your belly, and what is natural about the technology used to remove it?... In a word, nature is brutal, but even so, is it brutal on purpose?

My answer is no, and that's kind of the essence of pessimism, or of my pessimism anyway. Maybe nature isn't evil on purpose, but it's either evil or completely indifferent, and between one and the other I don't see any major difference. For all intents and purposes we do live in a brutal world, we live in a world where the capacity to suffer is inherent in most living creatures, and the possibility that we will suffer at some point is pretty much guaranteed, it's only a matter of time. And while we can and do in fact mitigate that suffering in quite a few different ways, very ironically through the use of technology, nature still wins, she always does. Because someone always gets cancer or dementia, someone always dies of hunger, someone always dies because a stronger someone or even a stronger something decides it so, and if our answer to all of those evils captured in a wildlife documentary is just to shrug and throw some platitudes or tautologies into the air, then why don't we have the same reaction when a similar evil happens to us? I guess because when it's us it's different, it hurts way worse, it makes far less sense, and I almost wanna say it makes us believe it's not really nature doing that to us, it's gotta be something else... We have to either personify nature one way or another, such as God or karma, or we have to find a way to ignore all that violence.

But what can really be done? What is nature except everything? What is nature except reality itself? The way I see it it's really nothing more than the way things are, and things aren't really all that great, not for most of us at least. On this or that occasion we can get away with some luck, some of us can and do live pretty decent lives, full of riches on all levels, be it health, appearance or circumstance, but others have no such luck of the draw. And at the end of the day, who deals the cards except nature? It would appear it's all random to the point where being born healthy and beautiful is no different than being born sick and ugly. We simply take what nature gives us, or rather, we are forced to accept the gift of life which, by that token is hardly a gift, it's more like being offered a bag of fancy golf clubs by Tony Soprano... And even with all that sheer randomness and brutality we are still hopelessly prevented from ever complaining, we can't say a single mumbling word because nature won't listen. At the end of the day there's just no true sociological solution to a biological problem, we will always be behind the scoreboard, we're always just chasin' it... Nature's balance is thus a bizarre joke, because while she does balance herself a bit, it's only by giving some absolutely everything, and others absolutely nothing, and then at the end of it all, taking everything for herself.

So what is good? What is bad? What is luck? It would appear it's nothing, it seems those concepts might not even exist by themselves, they can only exist in a mind who comprehends them, and even still they only exist subjectively, they only exist as long as we exist and as long as we largely agree upon their meaning. The moment we cease to exist, or the moment someone goes rogue and disagrees with the common acceptation of those words, then it all collapses, and “good” becomes all too vain and empty with the exact same ease with which nature creates life only to moments later take it away, and in staggeringly violence too... Either nature is completely careless about the physical suffering and existential dread it creates, or she's not careless at all and instead this is all meticulously planned so as to inflict the greatest possible pain, even if that means we at times get to receive some good things, only for them to be mercilessly taken away for ten times the damage... While this all seems fairly obvious, I still can't grasp why people can still claim to somehow love nature. Either they do so with a completely ignorant and cartoonish version of what nature really is, being therefore led into delusion by their silly daydreams, or they find in all this violence a purpose that simply escapes me.

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Paulo Seabra

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