Naturephilia

Naturephilia

What kind of society is best? We have come to accept the concept of the “open society”: this is deemed better than the “closed society”. These terms were introduced by Henri Bergson in the 1930s and then popularized by Karl Popper in the 1950s. The best society is the most “open” one. But what is it for a society to be open? There is no simple definition (it isn’t like a shop being open for business). Roughly, the idea is that an open society is one that is democratic, tolerant, liberal, critical, law-governed, and allows freedom of speech—as opposed to authoritarian, intolerant, illiberal, uncritical, lawless, and prohibits freedom of speech. In an open society you can act and speak as you please so long as you harm no one thereby. If we live in such a society, we will be happy; otherwise not. Nothing in this conception includes religion, so the good society can be an irreligious society. You can be religious, but you need not be. It has been felt that this ideal is a bit on the thin side: it is largely negative and ignores various human aspirations and needs. The gap is commonly filled by religion, typically but not necessarily Christianity. So, the maximally good society has been thought to be both open and religious. The trouble is that religion has been crumbling for years (or centuries), so that all that is left in our social philosophy is the secular notion of the open society. Is that enough? Do we need a return to the religious?

Religion is typically conceived as theistic. Specifically, we are told to love God and our fellow man. This directive is not easy to obey: many find it difficult to believe in God, and man is hard to love. We are exhorted to direct our love this way precisely because it is not natural to us; punishment is therefore threatened if we don’t obey the directive. We are not born loving God and the human race. So, are we limited to the etiolated conception of the open society? Not that there is anything wrong with that—it beats tyranny—but it seems humanly insufficient. There is an existential gap; the heart is not satisfied. Life in an open society is not ipso facto a meaningful full life. We thus seem condemned to a hollow existence (as existentialism maintained, heroically).  Put simply, the question is what to love. We can’t really love an open society; but we can’t believetraditional theistic religion. We seem stuck. When religion held sway, we lived in a religious community that bound people together and provided a vehicle for their deeper aspirations; but in a merely open society nothing binds us and nothing provides the requisite emotional infrastructure. Thus, we find fleeting fashions, popular culture, art and music, esoteric hobbies, cults, mass sports, the mobile phone—anything to fend off the ennui of normal human existence. Is there a solution to this predicament?

This is where nature comes in. Theistic religions instruct us to love God above all else—not nature. We are indoctrinated in a suspicion of nature, especially our own nature. We are to praise and worship God but not the natural world (so grubby, so material). Jesus had nothing to say about the love of nature, but plenty about the love of God. Nor was our love of other people supposed to be directed to their natural condition—certainly not their “animal nature”. Nature was on the other side—opposed to the supernatural world inhabited by God. Loving nature is accordingly deemed impious, unholy, degenerate. But this is not a natural way for humans to feel—hence the reprimanding character of traditional theistic religion (we are all born sinners etc.) We must “rise above” nature—the world of beasts and beastliness. Sex becomes taboo, or deeply problematic. Animals are to be deplored or exploited. But this is not the way we naturally feel about these things—especially as children. Children must be “cured” of their natural ways—their childish passions. There is only so much love in the human heart and it must be directed correctly—to the right intentional objects. Love God not your dog. If the choice is between going to church or walking your dog, do the former. Religion is thus conceived as a battle between natural inclination and virtuous conduct.

However, there is an opposing tradition: the love of nature as opposed to a supernatural God. Thus, we have naturephilia and biophilia[1]—love of nature as a whole and love of a particular part of it, viz. plants and animals. It is easy to caricature this kind of philosophy by restricting attention to certain aspects of nature, particularly what is called “wild” nature. But the idea isn’t to encourage love of the wild, i.e., the non-human; it is to encourage love of all creation, including the non-wild. We are not being instructed to go and live naked in the forest. Nature is here construed as everything but God: art, artifacts, games, sports, music, food, friends, family, sex, clothes, study, books, cars. We have an innate disposition to love nature—the physical things around us, whether found or man-made. Life without this kind of love would be dismally thin—the abstract love of God really doesn’t cut it. We like to walk in the woods, ride our bike, swim, pet our dog, eat our food, see our friends, play a game, read, sing, etc. We are passionate about these things. Sometimes we feel the majesty of nature—the night sky, the oceans, the mountains, the beasts of the jungle. So, let us applaud these passions, encourage them, refine them—instead of declaring them ungodly or worse. We should make a religion of our inborn natural passions. Some people choose to dedicate their lives to God; why not let people dedicate themselves to apes or insects or rocks? A life dedicated to philosophy is really a life dedicated to nature—to the existing natural world. We evolved in the natural world, both wild and civilized, and we are naturally adapted to that world (we didn’t evolve in a supernatural world); no wonder we feel deeply connected to it. We want to explore it, experience it, absorb it. Our human nature is a reflection of nature. Our emotions are the results of nature. No doubt other animals love their natural environment; they don’t hanker after some supposed non-natural environment (“paradise”). We just have to accept that what we naturally love we oughtto love. We should therefore embrace naturephilia and biophilia. That is our religion.

Will it be enough? If we combine love of nature with the open society, will we have the ideal world? Will we be perfectly happy? I don’t think so, but it will produce a life that is sustainable and tolerable. There will still be death, disease, disappointment, betrayal, violence, stupidity, and all the rest; but we won’t be condemned to the spiritual emptiness of the bare open society or the absurdities of traditional religions. The open society is just a protective framework for the full expression of human nature; it isn’t what we primarily value. You don’t wake up in the morning and thrill to the prospect of free speech or the rule of law (so what, you might say); but you do wake up and feel excited about the bounties of nature (in the full sense I described). You are not thrilled by being permitted to play guitar or read a book but by actually playing guitar or reading a book. You can’t make a religion out of the open society alone, but you can make a religion out of the natural world—and there is nothing wrong with such a religion. Our politics must include the latter as much as the former.[2]

[1] The term “biophilia” was coined by Erich Fromm and taken up by E.O. Wilson.

[2] We might refer to thin politics and thick politics, or procedural politics and substantive politics. We need rules to enable and preserve human flourishing, freedom being paramount, but we also need substantive concrete goals and values. We must be permitted to bird-watch and love to bird-watch. (I include humans as part of nature, so we can love them too, in so far as we can.)