Beyond Correct and Incorrect Nature: A Metaethics
1.1
If, in the early hours of morning, you hear birds singing to the emerging light, you might think you are listening to nature. But this is not nature. In the summer, if you stay in a room by the beach, you may hear the sound of waves crashing against the shore and think that this too is the sound of nature. But it is not. Rather, it is what the inside of a human head sounds like, the echo of subjectivity.
We do not know what nature sounds like, or looks like et al, because to us nature is inaccessible. It resides outside of our capacity to comprehend it. We cannot know nature, we are like a theatre with no access to the back stage, no way to see behind the curtains, only the illuminated playing area. Draw a circle within a circle. Human understanding is the inner circle. The outer circle is a wall. Nature resides outside the wall, nestling against it and cradling us inside.
We know nature exists in a similar way that iron filings invisibly fan out around magnetic fields. There is a negative space that applies pressure to our reason that tells us that even though we cannot hear birds with anything other than our human perceptions, we know that birds must exist within the democracy of objects outside of our language and our human, all too human, subjectivity.
To talk of nature is to talk of some absolute universal outside of our humanity. Even when we point a microscope or a telescope at nature we are only ever pointing these tools at ourselves. They are mirrors reflecting our own symbols and ideas back at us from the vantage point of a material world we cannot step outside of ourselves to perceive. We cannot know nature.
1.2
Because we cannot know nature, it is perfect. It is uncorrupted by our thoughts and interventions. To say that it is perfect is to say that it is absolute. It does not make mistakes because it cannot make mistakes. This is a more difficult idea for us to agree with than might first seem the case. We might readily say that the ocean cannot make a mistake because it just is. What would an incorrect wave even look like. Although, we might more readily suggest that some trees do not grow as correctly as other trees, perhaps failing to live up to their full potential because of poor environmental conditions.
We are even more apt to call out the correctness or incorrectness of nature as we feel it approaching closer to our human biology. A dog born with three legs instead of four must be incorrect because we know that symmetry is correct and our understanding of genetics reinforces the same. As pattern seeking machines, we have developed systems of correct and incorrect nature, and not just on a physical front. There even appear to be correct and incorrect ways of thinking and behaving.
Sometimes we even say that nature is unfair and that nature is cruel. When we judge that nature has delivered incorrect results with babies and children we are prone to call out nature as the most despicable force in the universe. And yet should we not call out here our own human subjectivity. Were it not for the stories we tell ourselves about geometry - the symmetries we seek, the lines of time that should maintain particular lengths, the frames we place morality into, the trajectories of a good life - we would have no reason to point the finger at nature.
However, in the same way that we cannot know nature, we also cannot live without our stories. If we do not have stories, we deny life, and we die like god died when religion lost its stories. Every story we tell is a story about nature, and even though they are really stories about ourselves and never actually about nature, they keep us alive all the same.
1.3
Let me share some stories I tell myself within the brisk August air as I walk my blanket swaddled baby around the Hamilton streets. One story is that I’m going live forever, for a while. Another is the story of how I knew enough about life to ensure this was a safe and sensible place in which to introduce a new little life. I tell myself a story about how his life will be filled with more joy than sorrow so long as I have any say in the matter.
There are also those stories we are told by our parents about how love should feel, by talking animals about how slow and steady will win the race, by the news about how it feels to be on the right side of history, and by our schools about what success looks like socially, intellectually and economically. It takes a lot of stories being told and retold and shared all the time in order to keep everybody alive.
At certain times in our life, especially during periods of transitional change and sustained personal reflection, we ask questions about these stories and whether we should keep listening to them, or perhaps listen out for some new stories instead. The one constant that always remains in place is that a story must be told. Our subjectivity requires stories like lungs require oxygen.
The stories that stay around the longest are the ones that are the easiest to understand. They make the most immediate sense to us on a gut level because they mirror the shape of the gut of nature, of the invisible, incomprehensible pressure of nature cradling us and nestling up against the wall that is the limit of our human comprehension. The closest we can get to a sense of nature's presence is through reflecting on the shape of the stories that keep us alive. The cosmic joke: that our most readily accessed stories are the ones told to us by an inaccessible nature.
1.4
This does not necessarily mean that the most easily and readily understood stories are the best stories for us. The easiest things rarely are. Rather, the best things for us most often make us sweat. And, if we are going to share and understand new stories beyond the correctness or incorrectness of nature as it relates to our babies, our children and the adults they grow into, we are going to have to really sweat as we put our shoulder to the wheel of our civilisation.
Civilisation flows, like our most retold stories, because civilisation is our most retold story, according to the path of least restriction. Like water flowing down a mountainside, civilisation takes the most direct route towards its ends, towards the discharge of its energy in service of how readily it can multiply. Civilisation moves in whatever direction enables people and economy to increase in number, and the sort of people that are most economical to this process are those that are the most alike.
A brick wall is easiest to build when all the bricks are uniform. So too does a civilisation most readily grow when its people reside within a narrow statistical average. The buildings in our cities are built with the cheapest possible materials and dimensions necessary to fit the maximum number of people to generate the greatest value. This requires a human template that most readily conforms to these dimensions, not only physically but across all domains, from the social through to the philosophical.
What is the value in supporting the lives of people who fall outside of the average? Perhaps it depends on what story will flow most easily down our mountainside. We might be most able to believe in the story of civilisation if we believe we are kind and not just mechanical. Or we might tell a story that our civilisation will be even more efficient if we can utilise everybody's strengths. For me, I do not want to require a strategic hook - I just want a story that allows every baby to be born and accepted as a perfect product of a nature we cannot fathom, for each one of them to be cared for and loved unconditionally forever.
2.1
If this runs contrary to how civilisation wants to discharge its energy, so be it. Societies, communities, schools, families; I do not care for the idea of the group, the many. I care only for the individual, in all their diversity. The group is most always wrong, consistently late to the truth. Only the individual can be agile enough to realise what is right at any given time.
The momentum of civilisation should not be our human goal, but rather the humble, dignified freedom of every person. So, vigeat veritas et pereat mundus - let truth prosper though the world perish. And if it does not perish, that is also fine.
Humble freedom is a good term to express what all this is gesturing towards. The humble freedom to accept nature as an inaccessible idea, beyond correctness or incorrectness, that delivers to us the world, but also, critically, the humble freedom to not feel responsible for making perfect choices in our imperfect capacity. There is something to be said here for the notion of quietism, of accepting things as they are, from our position of limited knowledge, without actively seeking to change them.
I would go further and say we cannot change things even if we do seek this action, not in the way that we can be sure we are making an impact in the right direction. Which parent, which teacher, can say with certainty that the children they cared for turned out a certain way, for better or worse, because of their intervention. I'm not talking about extraordinary acts of trauma or salvation here, but simply that we are surely overestimating the contingency of our actions if we see pedagogical influence as responsible for the result of the life of a child. Nature is perfect, but nurture is not.
2.2
In my life I have known three Michaels. Two of them were mates I went through school with, and one was a student I taught. The two I went through school with both excelled socially and academically. They were nice young lads, on the path to post-school prosperity. The Michael that I taught, the student, however had every card seemingly stacked up against him.
According to his lengthy diagnostic record he was diagnosed as autistic, had a significant intellectual disability and had challenging communication and associated mental health needs. I always remember how much he loved pulling electronic machinery to pieces. But, where are the three Michaels now that they have all been out of school for some time?
The two Michaels who are my mates, with all their educational successes behind them, they have both struggled to find stable careers, one of them has experienced complicated relationship challenges that has caused him a great deal of grief for the past fifteen years, whilst the other has struggled by not finding any significant personal relationship in his life so far. Both now struggle with mental health and physical needs, and so on.
The Michael I taught, the one with his cards seemingly stacked up against him by nature - for the past half decade he has been working in an electronics workshop fixing up broken machines brought to him. He says he loves heading into work each day, he has a great network of friends around him, and his family told me recently that his quality of life has never been higher.
2.3
What are we to think in the face of such unpredictable narratives, of trajectories that many times over show us that we cannot read the future, except to consider how we might face this uncertainty with a humble modesty, and the freedom to not be weighed down by choices before us when we are raising and teaching the young people that nature has presented us.
As a special educator, there have been many days in which it has seemed incredibly important to take a firm stand on the decisions that should be made regarding the lives of the children and young people I have been employed to support. There is a phrase in ecology, coined by Aldo Leopold, that seems pertinent here, not least because the idea of neurodiversity rises from some of what we have gleaned of biodiversity - the phrase is, to think like a mountain.
Leopold noticed that wolves on mountains were being killed by hunters, allowing deer to live without risk of being preyed on by the wolves. Soon, the deer ate all the grass, all the bushes, and starved. What was the lesson learned? That we are not great judges of recognising the results of our actions within the more complicated, chaotic ecosystem of our world. Nature is perfect, but we are not.
I am reminded of the joke about the church minister and the gardener. A church minister is walking down a street and sees a beautifully tendered garden. The grass is like a bowling green, the flowers, glorious in their colours and their engineered bedding arrangements, smile their faces towards the sun, and the minister sees the gardener and says, oh what a testimony to the grace of god this garden is. The gardener looks up and says, oh no, you should have seen this place when it was left up to god.
2.4
Is there not a punchline reversal here. The intention of the joke is to point out that left to its own devices, to god, nature is a tangle of unsightly mess. But, with some nurturing, it can be made good. However, what I would say is that before the gardener was present, nature was neither correct nor incorrect, it was beyond our subjectivity, beyond human judgement. The presence of the the gardener is the birth of subjectivity, and with it the need to tell a story about nature, to do something with it, to turn the garden into civilisation.
So, what to do? What is the right decision? My son is fourteen months old, I have a daughter who is eleven. I have already experienced many minutes for which there was time for decisions and revisions that a minute would reverse if such a thing were possible.
My consideration, my humble freedom, as a parent and as a special educator, is to recognise that so long as my intentions are authentic, that is, so long as I am considering the stories that rise out of our inability to know nature and I am leaning into what feels right for the individual, for my son, my daughter, my students, on their terms, not within the scope of what appears suitable to civilisation, if I can think like a mountain, can think of the three Michaels, then I might approach commitment to an ethical act of nurture, regardless of the outcomes.
What else is there to do. The garden needs to be tended, but there are many variations on the theme of a garden that have yet to be considered. Nature is perfect, but we do not need to be.
