Comment by phantasmish
2 days ago
One way to read it: nature as a whole makes no effort. It wouldn’t even make sense to say that it does. Does a star make an effort? Yet nature encompasses all that happens.
Another interpretation may be connected to Luke 12:27 (yeah I had to look it up, I actually thought it was from Ecclesiastes, lol), which, paraphrased, is that flowers do not work to be beautiful—that’s just what they are. They can’t (be generous with the reading of “can’t”, if you would) be otherwise.
To expand: humans want what they are not, and that creates work, and stress, and so on. I want to be pretty like a flower. But I’m a person. So now I must spin cloth, and do a bunch of other work, to attain that want, or else suffer unmet desire. Animals and plants (perhaps) have wants (like: a rabbit may want food, or not to be killed and eaten) and pain and such, but don’t work in that sense. They just are what they are, and do what something like them does. This may fall apart in particular examples, but the broad poetic sense isn’t so bad.
(Yes you can nitpick this to death with stuff like “but maybe what humans are is animals that want very very much to be what they’re not, so that is their nature” but c’mon)
[edit] cf Vonnegut’s (serious? Joking? Half-joking?) suggestion in Galapagos that humans’ big brains are a curse that causes most of our trouble, and we’d be better off as something like smartish seals.
I think this is a romantic notion of what we’d like nature to be like, not what it actually is. Nature is in a constant struggle for survival. When I see a rabbit freeze in abject terror, then flee at maximum speed because a well-fed 200+lb apex predator is passing by, it sure looks like work and effort.
>then flee at maximum speed because a well-fed 200+lb apex predator is passing by, it sure looks like work and effort.
I think the 'effort' being described in the article—despite using analogies of overgripping and physical strain—is mental effort.
When the rabbit has escaped, he returns quickly to a relaxed state. A typical human reaction would be to continue to worry about the predator, to form plans to rid the whole _world_ of all predators, to build a fortress with grass to eat on the inside...
This whole saying that "Nature is red in tooth and claw" is overstated. Most animals have normal, humdrum days like we do.
However, I think it was the Buddhist teacher, Ajan Cha who said: "We live in a world where we must eat to survive, and some of us are uncomfortable about being eaten."
But this does not mean that every animal lives a life of unremitting terror all the time.
I’m wary of your use of 'romantic' as a descriptor here. It's a rhetorical shortcut which makes it easy to pre-emptively dismiss a position as naïve without further examination.
Only a touch of judgment? I must have been too subtle, then.
I’m not convinced that most animals have humdrum days. It’s hard to judge the “natural” state of an animal when I’m a terrifying predator, but even when I’m pretty sure they aren’t aware of my presence, their lives seem pretty stressful. The prey animals seem to be constantly worried about attacks, and the predators are always hungry.
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I think it’s mostly an observation about unforced discontent, which is a notable (defining?) feature of human existence that’s apparently (at least) much rarer in the rest of nature. I doubt people much closer to nature, death, and killing than most modern OECD-state humans weren’t aware that animals suffer, nor that they must sometimes run to catch their food.
It might be worth interrogating the original language of the work, which I’ve not done. The translator may be depending on the reader’s cooperation here.
I do think that’s true, but largely because animals mostly don’t have the luxury of being out of survival mode. They can’t have unforced discontent when it’s constantly being forced.
I’m sure the ancients were aware that animals suffer. I think it’s noteworthy that the passage in Luke was talking about plants, not animals. It’s hard to imagine effort and discontent in an organism with no brain.
In any case, I’m definitely not taking life advice from an apocalyptic cult telling me not to plan for the future and give away all my possessions because their god will provide.