The Whale and the Reactor by Langdon Winner

Author:Langdon Winner [Winner, Langdon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0226692548
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-03-20T07:00:00+00:00

III

EXCESS AND LIMIT

7

THE STATE OF NATURE REVISITED

SEEKINGA RELIABLE WAY to judge the works and accomplishments of civilization, each generation finds an obvious point of reference. Nature provides a vivid contrast to human artifice, a source of powerful insights and arguments. Many political theories begin on exactly this note, asserting as an explicit or implicit first premise: this is the natural way; here is the path nature itself sets before us. In the same vein many criticisms of human institutions, including criticisms of technological society, rest on the charge: what we are doing is horribly contrary to nature; we must repair our ways or stand condemned by the most severe of tribunals. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s classic essay “Nature” depicts the situation clearly in the context of a man walking into a forest. “The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he takes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her.”1

Ideas of this kind become more interesting and problematic when expressed as organized doctrine. No artist, no thinker, no political movement, no society has ever rested content with the simple definition of nature as “the totality of all things.” From the vast array of natural phenomena, people inevitably select particular features for emphasis, endowing them with great esthetic, moral, and political significance. Anyone who examines the range of meanings that have been attributed to “nature” in Western history must be impressed by their number, diversity, and glaring contradictory implications. For some nature brings conflict, for others harmony; for some it exists as the very essence of reason and order, for others it looms as throbbing irrational passion; for some it is a source of warmth, nourishment, and solace, for others it is a set of awesome, threatening forces. In different historical periods the same symbols of nature carry different, sometimes opposite meanings.2 Thus, the “wilderness” feared as a haunt of demons by medieval Christians has commonly been regarded as a place of beauty and inspiration in the eyes of industrial society.

To invoke “nature” or “the natural” in discussions about social life is in effect asserting: “This is real. This is trustworthy. I am not making it up.” Because natural phenomena existed before human intervention, they have a certain reliability, unlike human artifacts and institutions that are all too often filled with deceit. On those grounds the bastard Edmund in King Lear appeals to nature to justify his claims, renouncing those civilized conventions that label him “illegitimate.”

Thou, Nature art my goddess, to thy law

My services are bound. Wherefore should I

Stand in the plague of custom, and permit

The curiosity of nations to deprive me . . .

Shakespeare’s play offers the spectacle of political society and its categories dissolving when confronted by uncontrolled natural forces. It was this very solvent that philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries employed to discredit existing authority and to prepare the way for the establishment of new regimes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.