We're greedy to improve our standard of living. We have a lust for material wealth. We insist on moving up the economic ladder. If we're already rich, we want to get richer. If we're not yet rich, we expect to get there someday.
Meanwhile, we inhale consumer goods by the boatload, even though we don't really need most of the stuff we buy.
Sometimes we justify our lust for wealth and material comforts as wanting to give our children and grandchildren the chance to have more, economically, than we ever had. If we today can afford those flat-screen TVs and all those iPads galore, imagine how wealthy our descendants can be ...
I'm just as bad as anyone else, by the way. This is definitely a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
It all leads to what I call "Masters of the Universe" syndrome. If we have an itch, we believe we have the power to scratch it. If we have a desire, we have the power to gratify it. If we have an urge, we can, at any and every moment, pleasure ourselves in its satisfaction. This is our birthright, and no one can take it away from us.
Scratch that itch. Gratify that desire. Put ourselves in a never-ending urge-satisfaction-pleasure loop. It sounds like the justification for looking at porn on the Internet ... but let's not go there!
Rather, let's ask the question, is all this dysfunctionality ipso facto 'unnatural'?
We tend to imagine that anything that is 'natural' isn't dysfunctional.
It's natural to want to feather our own nests and pass our nest eggs along intact to our heirs. So how can it be dysfunctional?
Natural, Yet Dysfunctional
There are lots of things that are natural, yet dysfunctional. For example, as most bird lovers know, birds will 'foolishly' fly into a plate glass window/door to fight with their own reflection. When they hit the glass, which they can't see, they will often die.
This is completely natural, since birds have evolved to protect their territories and their mating relationships by attacking interlopers. But they have not evolved in environments where vertical reflectors such as glass windows and doors exist, so they are helpless to interpret that seeming interloper as their own reflection.
Yet, clearly, this behavior is dysfunctional. It leads to unnecessary deaths.
The source of the dysfunctionality, meanwhile, is not the birds. It is us. We developed glass and put huge panes of it in our homes and office buildings.
Another example is that of a fox whose leg gets caught in a steel trap chewing off its leg to get free. The fox's need for freedom is absolutely natural. But chewing off its own leg is dysfunctional. Again, the source of the dysfunctionality is us, the inventors of steel traps.
Raccoons raiding bird feeders and garbage containers is yet another example of things that are natural, yet dysfunctional. Raccoons have evolved as opportunists who will feed on whatever they can find. But we humans have given them extra opportunities that Mother Nature never dreamed of.
In and of itself, kudzu (left) is a lovely plant with attractive blossoms, a member of the pea family.
Known as 'kuzu' in Japan, it was introduced into that country, and also into Korea, from China. In those parts of the world it has been no nuisance, since the kuzu vine dies back each cold winter season.
In the American South, that doesn't happen.
The lesson here is that natural behavior can be dysfunctional when a thing gets transplanted into soil that it did not evolve for.
We humans are such a transplanted thing.
For example, we evolved in the savannas of Africa, where not many sweet things grow. But sweet taste is what sugars produce in ripe fruit, and it is a sure sign that eating the fruit will give us much-needed energy. We adapted to our primeval situation by developing an inborn craving for sweets.
Fast forward to today. Today, we face an obesity pandemic because we have learned to grow and manufacture foodstuffs galore that pander to our sweet tooth. For similar reasons, we consume too much salt and fat.
But here's the odd thing. We transplanted ourselves into the economic and cultural soil we now find ourselves in.
A lot of that had to do with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. We discovered a lot of stuff then ... including the idea that discovery was power. From those times forward, scientists teased out the laws of nature and then applied those laws to such things as agriculture and manufacturing. We subdued and mastered the Earth in service to a vision of unlimited economic growth. We learned to produce and sell the things consumers most wanted to buy.
What we could not subdue was our sweet tooth. We wanted to consume things in vast quantities that weren't good for us.
It was entirely natural that we would want to do so.
Yet, at the same time, it was vastly dysfunctional.
Now we have arrived at a point in time when our natural-yet-dysfunctional appetites are causing us to nibble away at our own sweet seed corn. We can't seem to restrain ourselves from plundering the natural world from which all good things — including our own species and all that nourishes it — flow.
No comments:
Post a Comment