Our Unnatural Nature

“Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural.” – “The Great Dictator” (1940), Charlie Chaplin

There are still rushes of goosebumps electrifying my body when I listen to the final speech of Charlie Chaplin in his movie “The Great Dictator”. While the world was just plunging into mayhem and collective madness, later labeled WW2, he delivered the most compelling plea for freedom and humanism I have ever encountered. In it, he fervently beseeches humankind to renounce the hatred and violence of his contemporary “machine men with machine minds and machine hearts”. He implores to not hate, as only “the unloved and the unnatural hate”. My intuition could not agree more strongly on that statement. However, what does it really mean to be “unnatural”? Were all the millions of humans killing, hating and ravaging while Chaplin recorded his movie “unnatural”?

Leap in time from the horrifying battlefields of the 1940s to the ideological battlegrounds of today: If there is one trend clearly evident in Western societies nowadays, then it is one crying out for a return to a more “natural” life. With worries about impending ecological disasters, every major brand is trying to signal caring for this customer demand. The marketing industry adapts to the prevalent zeitgeist, which is characterised amongst other factors by eco-friendliness and a longing for the “natural”. When we criticise that the technological development xy is “unnatural”, we use the term “natural” without really thinking about what the more “natural” alternative actually implies. It almost seems self-explanatory what we mean by “natural”, if we utter such criticism to whatever developments are to our disconcern. People usually nod their heads in silent, contemplative agreement to how terrible the modern subjugation of Mother Nature is. Rarely anybody disagrees with turning towards a more “natural” path. Even more rare it is to question one’s assumption stack of what the praised alternative of a “more natural” way of living actually implies.

So what is the nature of the “natural”?

An etymological investigation brings about more questions than answers: The term ‘nature’ derives from the root ‘nat’, Latin for ‘born’. It refers to the totality of existences having been brought into this world with their inborn, thus natural, qualities. Objectively, this set includes but all that is manifested in this universe: All the galaxies, stars, planets, organisms, and atoms. In this way, for something to be natural, it merely needs to exist at all. Surely Charlie Chaplin did not mean to draw the line between the ‘natural’ and the ‘unnatural’ along the quality of having been brought into this world at all. Obviously every living being, including the most vicious war criminal, is fulfilling this criterion. So how can we make sense out of the slippery slope trying to separate what cannot be separated by definition?

Here comes in the evaluative, subjective aspect to the term: (Un-)naturalness is rather a personal judgement than an empirical observation. Objectively, there is no yardstick to measure it. As every elementary particle in this universe acts according to the laws of nature, no

composition of them could be unnatural. Nature will keep on giving birth to new compositions of itself, no matter how ‘unnatural’ we judge something to be. Yet we still have an intuition of ‘naturalness’, which can evoke such limbic upheaval that millions decry the ‘unnatural’ condition the modern homo oeconomicus finds itself in. And I feel their pain. Spending 10 hours a day hunched over a glimmering screen in an airconditioned condo may be ‘natural’ by definition but it does not feel like it. This condition might have been brought about by the laws of nature working in perfect harmony but our spirit rebels against it, trying to break free from its ‘unnaturalness’.

However, there are some pitfalls in the pursuit of a more ‘natural’ way of living. First and foremost, there is the danger of backwardness. Often, spinoffs of a romanticised past are invoked to portray the future promised land. It is easy to be biased towards seeing only the upsides of a less complex past, while overlooking the downsides of the life humans were living 50, 500 or 5000 years ago. You cannot have real tribal community life around a campfire without 10+ % infant mortality and sleeping on rocks with wildebeest lurking for you to relax. The agricultural revolution might have been the “worst mistake in history” (Jared Diamond), but there is no way back to the primordial, blissfully ignorant past, even if we would all collectively make the greatest effort to do so. Within isolated communities, it is indeed nowadays possible to pursue building a paradise-like bubble of autonomous subsistence. However, this “natural” way of living is indebted to the despised violence monopolies that keep free-for-all anarchy at bay. Even if this “natural way of living” (in the past) would be desirable for all, it simply would be impossible to implement at scale. These temptative fantasies of shaping the future with a template of a refashioned past is not even due to any malintentions but merely due to the automaticity with which our cognition remodels the past in order to fit our narrative. When that narrative is attached to the past, regarding a ‘more natural’ way of living as the only way to move forward is the end of looking ahead – the grave for innovation.

It happens constantly and with great ease that innovative ideas turn into the scapegoats on which anxieties about an ever-more complex future are projected. Ironically, these very same ideas which seem so far removed from the soil they have grown in, thus “unnatural”, are often those that become most deeply ingrained in us. In the 90s, the idea that almost everyone would value their cell phone like an essential organ seemed outlandish. Regardless, this is exactly what happened. The incorporation of ever more sophisticated technology not just into our lives but into our selves, keeps transforming our understanding of what it means to be human. There could be nothing more natural to our species than overcoming our nature – or rather: overcoming what we erroneously thought to be our nature.

After all, trying to divide what we humans do into the natural and the unnatural or into degrees of naturalness is futile: Nothing exists, which is not natural. By trying to put the alleged essence of our nature into a box that is convenient to our current motivations, we reveal more about the latter than the former. Some aspects of nature, including the evils which humankind is capable of embodying, are so appalling that we find ourselves feeling more comfortable stripping away selected aspects from our conception of nature. In the worst case, we end up trying to enforce

an orthodoxy of what “nature really is”. And rigorous orthodoxy it was that brought about the ineffable horrors that troubled Charlie Chaplin. Let’s aim for the better part of our nature.