The Wrath of Ra

Interesting,

Usually when I start speaking like this I'm accused of thinking more than feeling...What I will say, is that the natural/artificial binary seems contingent upon time. That which is new is "artificial," that which is old is "natural." And to that extent, I buy into these things: Our human body carries the entirety of its evolutionary history within it, and much of that took place within the context of what we would call "natural." At the same time, the "natural" world has exposed our ancestors, human and otherwise, to some seriously traumatic shit. It's not like it was all well-balanced, peaceful, smooth sailing until "artificial" humans showed up. In fact, there were many, many mass extinctions, and we carry the adaptations to those within us--the oxygen which we live on was itself the cause of one of the planet's great mass extinctions. Was this "natural"? "Artificial"?

That said, electronics are newer than plants, and if all electronics went away, shit would go down, but if all plants went away, then humans would really be fucked. So in a sense, I do buy into this binary, but in its immanentized, temporal sense, and not when they are portrayed as two timeless, categorical binaries to which we must harmonize our lives.

Like all binaries (though not the yin/yang phenomenon of the "binary" itself), these two terms are relative and contingent upon one another and the particular environment they evolved in. They are themselves a form of life (as much as mainstream academia could stand to deal more seriously with McKenna and Aurobindo, I wish more New Age types would deal more seriously with Wittgenstein et. al.).

But this article implies that our reliance upon the "artificial" leaves us more vulnerable to "natural" disasters, but what if a virus came along that wiped out most of the plant life on earth. What then. Would our reliance on "things not naturally occurring on this Earth" be the problem, or something else?

I agree that this whole edifice in which we live is quite fragile, much more so than the planet as a whole--this experiment of humanity stands a much greater chance of ending in the near future than the larger experiment of life on Earth, of which we are merely the latest expression. But could it be any other way? If anything, our technology is an aid to survival, not a hindrance. More humans live longer lives now than ever before. This is the cause of a whole bunch of new problems, but the very threat that this presents to survival assures that a solution will be worked out. Or we will die. Same as it ever was. But if some Earthlife is to survive, post-Earth, that will be thanks in part to technology. It will be this planet's way of pollinating the galaxy, so to speak. But here I go using a metaphor that can't keep "natural" and "artificial" straight.

And certainly we can all do a bunch of heroin. Such behavior would be very "natural" for some, not so much for others. Either way, we will all die very quickly. As such, I choose not to, as I assume most would, whether doing so is "natural" or not. This has nothing to do with the binary I critiqued.

I would agree with the author that modern humanity has a tendency to view the natural world as opposed to the human world, as something to be harnessed. I disagree with this view, I simply wish the only other option wasn't to view the human world as something opposed to the natural world, and something to be rejected. 

All I would suggest is that the boundary between "natural" and "artificial" is itself deeply "artificial." It isn't necessarily wrong, but it isn't necessarily right either, and I think our ability to deal with the problems created by modern industrial society would be greatly improved if we used a new language/conceptual scheme that viewed them as an integral, interrelated whole and not as opponents in a war, one of which one must be either for or against.