Reason in Nature

I've started working with the Urban Ecology Center. It's actually nice to be out in the sun pulling weeds for a change, especially after sitting indoors in a chair all day. And, geek that I am, I am thoroughly excited to start learning about prairie plants and migratory birds (insert obligatory Monty Python joke here).

I was collecting seeds the other day, and one of the volunteers was explaining to a student about domestication and why domesticated rye has larger seeds than wild rye. I though about that, and how odd human cultivation is as a process of evolution. Normally, plants develop thorns and poisons and stuff to avoid being eaten. Here, though, under human care, they no longer resist us - they grow alongside us precisely to be eaten. We're on the same side instead of constantly opposed, as it were.

Now, I want to take this so far only as a metaphor - in reality, the rye doesn't care about having larger seeds or being domesticated, so we can't actually say that rye is "better" for the arrangement. I think that dogs and cats really do end up in a symbiotic relationship with human beings - they get regular food and shelter, lacking in the wild, and we get rid of mice and burglars, and we have funny internet memes.

But the point is this: human beings, given the sort of beings we are, can adapt to nature from within nature and rework it into an "everybody wins" sort of approach. Not always, granted, or in any way with even a modicum of grace at times. But think of how odd this is. If there are too many deer, they can't learn to cultivate grass or switch food sources. The grass gets eaten and the deer starve to death. The way to avoid this is an external force: add wolves or hunters to take down the number of deer.

That's where human beings differ. We have reason. We have an internal force for change. I don't mean by reason mere logic - that is merely one form that reason takes. Reason is the ability to take up the form of the world around us, to understand it and in so doing identify with it.

Think about this: What, in the end, am "I"? Something in some way tightly connected to this hunk of matter at particular spatio-temporal coordinates, to be sure. Certain patterns of brainwaves, yes. But I don't have to be just that. People identify with their good friends, parents identify with their children, patriots identify with their country, and so on. We all consider our "selves" to be something beyond ourselves (unless we really are concerned just with fulfilling basic needs, and honestly, that sounds like the most boring life possible to me.)

It is reason which lets us take up aspects of the world around us. If I identify with a certain task of domesticating wolves, for example, I have to know what wolves are like. I have to work with their natures as given - I have to accept the world and wolves as they are. To do otherwise will not result in the end I want nor in a dog that can benefit from my involvement. It may be an excellent way of getting mauled, however.

Of course, we also have people working with each other. When working with rye and wolves, human beings are not quite the same as the domesticated. With other humans, one might be concerned that I am giving a recipe for domination. But I am saying that we need to treat whatever we identify with as the sort of thing it is. Human beings aren't plants and can't be treated as such. If I were in a relationship, I would need to attend to my lover's needs as they in fact are. Failed and sickly relationships are the result of this not working, for any number of reasons. Good relationships are when both parties can in fact do this. Identification cannot be merely good intentions - it must involve trying as hard as possible to understand people and situations as they are in themselves. (Just trying to have good intentions usually results in trying to look good. Trying to have good results from within the world as it actually is and acting accordingly, is in itself a good intention.)

To act irrationally, by contrast, is to act counter to the way the world is, to act based on our own subjective whims and fancies, on what we "feel in our hearts" regardless of whether that stands up under scrutiny. It is, in short, to choose our current selves and our presently-limited preoccupations over what we could be, to choose deception and its short-term smothering comfort over truth. It is to become that deer that will starve to death unless it is ripped apart by wolves first. the deer that cannot even take care of itself because it could not take heed of its environment.

This is why I champion unending, thoughtful and careful analysis of our opinions and get tired of emotionalism, tribalism, and relativism of the sort that descends into mere etiquette and shuts off genuine debate. Reason is sometimes held up as the tool that divides and separates, but that is only its short term function. It must divide the true from the false, the real from the fantastic, and as long as society prefers its own whims, reason must break it. But this is for the goal of a better society, one in which the good is accessible to all in self-sustaining fashion, because people can take up themselves, each other, and the world around them as it is and as they are part of the whole. True, this is an ideal and most likely never reachable. But even though most of us will never reach the north pole, the direction North on the compass or GPS is still necessary for navigation.

Reason, ultimately, is justice.