A Proposition-- eliminating the "Appeal to Nature" fallacy

The fallacy of the "Appeal to Nature" rests in a dualism-- the erroneous notion that humanity is fundamentally separate from nature. This engenders the belief (on which the fallacious appeal depends) that any modification humans make to their environment is prima facie "unnatural"; it also engenders the belief that, as separate from nature, humankind is somehow immune to the consequences of its modifications. To re-introduce humans (and for the theologically inclined, God) into nature (cf., for example, the work of Hans Jonas, or Lovelock and Margulis's Gaia hypothesis) helps us greatly in eliminating this dualism. If we further understand that "nature" is not static, we can deconstruct the fallacy by retaining an inherent value to nature as an (all-inclusive) entity on which we all depend, while simultaneously rendering "unnaturalness" a meaningless category. Rather than judging a phenomenon, action, or concept on whether or not it is "natural", we therefore judge it based on its consequences for the natural system (and/or particular elements thereof) of which we are all part.

Is this tenable?

Hero Worship

"I don't really know why I care so much. I just have something inside me that tells me that there is a problem, and I have got to do something about it. I think that is what I would call the God in me.
All of us have a God in us, and that God is the spirit that unites all life, everything that is on this planet. It must be this voice that is telling me to do something, and I am sure it's the same voice that is speaking to everybody on this planet — at least everybody who seems to be concerned about the fate of the world, the fate of this planet."
- Wangari Maathai

I think I have a new hero.

Who's on First

While mucking around in my files of undergraduate papers today, I found a reflection I'd written for a course I took on Oberlin College's memorial arch (which structure commemorates the Oberlin missionaries killed during the Boxer Rebellion).
I actually ended up hopping between two of the arch's columns, rather than walking through it, as I said I'd do here. But I rather liked what I'd written:

(Rebecca Levi, 2007)

I’m walking through the arch.

I should state up-front that this isn’t at all to discount its deeply problematic nature. And I do, despite all my talk about the complicated nature of the issue and my disdain for symbolic gesture in favor of action, find it problematic. While I believe that the Oberlin Band had none but charitable intentions, I also believe that missionary work is at its core a fundamentally destructive enterprise, and cannot, by its very nature, ever completely free itself from its associations with racism and cultural triumphalism. Additionally, there’s no denying that, well-intentioned as the Oberlin missionaries may have been, that their very presence in the Shanxi Province of China directly rode the coattails of Western Imperialism. And the exclusion of the scores of Chinese people also killed in the Boxer Rebellion—even those directly connected with the Oberlin mission—is inexcusable. The addition of the plaques is too little, too late. In this sense the arch is at worst a paean to cultural Imperialism, and at best a monument to liberal naiveté.

So my decision to walk through the arch is not a dismissal of the concerns raised by King’s (then-college president Henry Churchill King, who commissioned the arch) folly. On the contrary, it is a shouldering of their burden. After all, I am heir and subscriber to that same liberal mindset of the Oberlin Band, that mindset that says that one can go out into the world and make it better for one’s having cared enough to act; that mindset that led to our late, lamented motto: “Think one person can change the world? So do we.” Since 1900, our understanding of just what it is that changes the world for the better has evolved, but the belief that we can and must be the agents of that change, I think, endures. With the desire to change the world must come the willingness to examine all the consequences of (and the motivations behind) the change we wish to effect. When I walk through the arch this May, it will warn me of the price of not fully and objectively examining one’s aims.

And a word about the structure itself. When it was built, and even years after that, it may well have been what I characterized it as earlier, “at worst a paean to cultural Imperialism, and at best a monument to liberal naiveté.” But that was a century ago. Since then the arch has generated years worth of controversy and dialogue. Can the reaction to a symbol change the meaning of that symbol? I believe it can. Ironically, one reason I have decided to walk through it is that so many people have walked around.

Two summers ago I visited Israel for the first time in my life. When I found myself at the Kotel—the Western Wall, the last remnant of the Jerusalem Temple, and the holiest site in Judaism—I realized I didn’t quite know what to make of it.The wall represented the last gasp of the Temple cult, whose demise marked Judaism’s shift from a hierarchal, priestly creed to a religion based on study, knowledge, and disputation—in my opinion, the best thing that ever happened to it. So I wondered why I should be praying at a structure that represented longing for a past that was better left in the recesses of history—where we came from, but where we were surely far beyond.

Then I saw the branches growing out of the cracks in it, and a pigeon sitting far above my head in a little nook. I felt the stones—dented and worn now, not smooth and uniform as they must have been in Herod’s day—and I saw different people praying their own prayers, and I realized that monuments take on new meaning as they experience history and people imbue them with their own interpretations and stories.

I understood, then, that even old stones can change.