I was thinking the other day that humans’ development of reason was perhaps anti-natural. For example, in morality. If someone looks at alot of pornography, they are considered disgusting and immoral, even. Then they are not accepted into most social circles… However, this need for sex, or some interpretation of it, comes from nature, does it not? It is instinct that attracts us to the opposite sex and drives us to create offspring. Why is it that humans condemn other humans for being just that? I think its because of the mind… The mind condemns anything that comes from carnal desires, and this is essentially denying its own vessel. How did this happen? How can there be such discord in an organism? Perhaps the early homo-sapiens created enough commodities for itself that it could afford spending time not hunting and therefore developed a mind as a result of this free time… Just a thought, please do tell me what you think…
P.S. I guess this would mean that our search for truth is bogus, right? And that this debate was purely a pastime for animals that didn’t have to spend time worrying about what animals to hunt, right?
yeah, i think a lot more people find porn watching acceptable than you are prepared to recognize.
but really, morality is actually quite natural for something that relies so heavily on brain power as humans do. take “thou shalt not kill”, for instance. insects do not have this idea, because they reproduce so frequently and easily that their survival is just about guaranteed due to sheer numbers, and the weak are weeded out by casual in-fighting. but in humans, it takes around 12 years to produce a mature offspring, so caring is required, and society and its survival come from that. removing a human from society, in a society where humans can be so difficult to create and nurture, is certainly going to be a bad idea, naturally.
as far as the anti-sex sentiment in many modern moralities, i rather think this comes from several things. one, STDs. STDs could blow entire societies away in the past. another, the idea that “every sperm is sacred”. some pretty great philosophers preached this, and folks believed them. fornication, producing offspring without 2 strong and caring parents, would result in a waste of the offspring, and reduce the ability of the society to prolong its existence. human beings aren’t endowed with the physical survival tools that many animals are, and as such, have to be quite careful determining when is a safe time to reproduce. so, it would be a bad idea to engage in sexual activities before the time is right.
i rather have a feeling that many of the anti-pleasure morals come from that alone. sex, being an extreme form of pleasure, and being seen as quite dangerous in some cases (both mother and child could be lost, if it wasn’t timed carefully), could lead to a slippery slope for other types of pleasure.
i wouldn’t doubt that every moral in existence could be traced to some natural desire or need of humans and human society. it actually seems quite natural to me.
It comes from when Eve and Adam ate the fruit of knowledge and were able to discern opposites. Please do not take me literally on this one. That story was however about the fact that humans make judgements about the difference between good and bad, etc. It may be because our brains a larger in relation to our bodies than other animal’s brains to their bodies. It would however, be interesting to know what whales and elephants thought about the whole thing, since their brains are so much larger than ours.
The human mind is a natural phenomenom, arising from the function of a natural organ in a natural creature. It is “all” natural.
That being said, the religious framework you seem to be rather trapped in takes it as a point of pride that humans are made in the form of the Creator, and should be above the “baseness” of the “natural.” It teaches us to see nothing but shame in the things that do not bring us closer to what some believe God is.
That also being said, I do not think such a moral sense is at all “unnatural” either. It is instead one of the many “natural” ways humanity has tried to differentiate itself from the rest of the animal kingdom.
My friends and I trade porn pics all the time. I used to work at a porn site, and no one I know looks at me funny when I say that, they are all interested to hear more about it. Many of my friends log offline saying “I am going to go watch a porn jerk off and go to sleep.”, I don’t think porn is taboo at all. At least not in the social circles to which I belong. I know people who have massive porn collections and are completely public about it.
Also, on the issue of “natural” and “divine” my ex who is Jewish from Israel explained to me that people speak to god in many different ways. (This was in response to my telling her the story of Jesus ejecting money-lenders from the temple) She said, who was Jesus to judge that someone shouldn’t be lending money in the temple? Perhaps that was his way of talking to god. Personally I have gravitated toward a hedonist lifestyle all of my life, but I become probably more and more conservative as time goes by, not because I am less of a hedonist, but because that which brings me pleasure as an adult is different from that which brought me pleasure as a child or a teenager.
For instance, I used to base much of my ego on whether or not girls wanted me. Now that I have been married, and am getting divorced, I am at a time in my life where I have more interest from girls than I’ve ever had before, but it’s much different, I am much less interested, and much less likely to go home with one of them, because I find it much more pleasurable to speak with that one girl whom I really like than to go home and fuck the girl who I just find attractive.
It made a whole lot of sense to me. However I have what can be termed more loosely as deism. I don’t necessarily believe in a god per se, just that we belong to a structure greater than ourselves, and if sentience is possible at the level that we are at, then anything more complex in the structure than we are, must also be sentient. Therefore I don’t claim to know exactly what someone else’s place within the structure is, because I have my own piece to be taking care of, and am given only the understanding of that particular part.
Although some others animals have been shown to be self-aware, humans take this to a unique extreme. We are able to see into someone else’s mind and “know” what they think of us. I believe this is the source of shame. We don’t like people seeing us defecate or having sex and so we tend to assaciate those things with a sense of shame. I think that’s where our sactions on sex come from. Look at chimps. They have to capacity to be, to some extent, self-aware, but they go at it in full site of the whole community. Just like a little kid will sit there and pick his nose when everyone is looking, but when he reaches the age of 6 or so, he only does it in private.
I’m taking a wild ass guess here, but that’s what I think. Looking at sex is “natural” and we want to do it, but we don’t want other people to see us doing it.
When I made the example out of porn, I didn’t mean to offend anyone, but it I have seen other people deem it, and I quote, “disgusting”. I emphasize the word example, what I said is not about sex exclusively, it was only the first animal nehavior out of many that I could think of. Also, by “mind”, I didn’t mean feelings or just self-awareness, I meant that part of humans that philosophize and wonder where life came from, what is our purpose, is there a higher being out there, etc.
But aside from that fact, I agree with alot that is being said, for example, that humans must be careful with who they mate with because of STD’s, and that it is necessary for humans to nurture their offspring, etc… When I said natural, I meant in comparison to other animals. It is often an insult to be called an animal, but why? I think this happens because the rational mind was something that was developed completely against humans’ state, i.e. an animal state. We all eat, sleep, reproduce, and die like every other animal, so we are obviously animals, but then why does our mind condemn animals? So I ask this question again, is it not natural, i.e. not an “animal” thing, to have a rational, philosophizing mind? Could it be that this mind is just a creation of humans? I think it is. And please, try not to tackle the example, but the question. I didn’t mean to offend anyone, I just want to debate here.
In my worldview (and I don’t claim that I follow it to the letter) I believe that we should accept everything. However, there is the practical application. I view every action we take as a step toward some goal or another, if we conceivably believe that someone’s actions are not conducive to our goals as a society, then we should stop it. Thus we have laws against murder, or rape.
I’ll disagree with your summation here, and say that I think the reason we seek privacy when we defecate or when we have sex is because we are vulnerable to predators while doing so. Therefore we find a place that predators cannot reach us. As humans prey on other humans, we evolved into avoiding other humans. In the case of defecation, also we didn’t want to do it in the common area, so we probably would go off away from the common area, defecate and then come back.
Jass: Whether we call people an animal or not is a semantic thing. Basically when one is accused of being an animal, I think it more or less refers to a lack of control over their instinctual urges. For instance, when frightened we lash out and fight, when fighting is unecessary, and we can hurt someone. This is just the fight or flight response that is natural in humans and other animals, however the lack of ability to curb that response is what would make someone refer to us as an “animal”. I don’t think the implication is that we are unnatural. Though there is a common misconception that humans can perform ANY task that is unnatural, which is impossible, for if it can be performed then it is natural.
There are examples of spontaneous fission occurring on Earth, and many people still think that nuclear explosions are “unnatural”
And no one was offended by your estimation of porn.
If you jass are arguing that the content of a lot of our shared and traditional beliefs are in opposition to a lot of what is natural, I would agree with you, as would, probably, the majority of Wiccans and the majority of feminists, to name but two factions.
Our social organization has been oriented around “control” for about 10 millennia, roughly corresponding with our changeover from hunter/gatherer to stationary tillers of the soil & builders of cities. (Admittedly the evidence for a different mindset being typical of the previous period is rather thin, as recorded history also more or less dates back only to that changeover).
At any rate, regardless of whether or not this mode of doing social org is or is not a passing phase of 10,000 years’ duration, conceptualizing it as a mode rather than as “how things have to be” or as “human social nature” allows us to consider it.
Control is almost by definition anti-natural, as it consists of an attempt to intervene in what would otherwise occur, and/or to make things occur that would otherwise not happen. Put that way, I suppose every exercise of will is control-oriented, but when you direct control towards other people in a big way and towards as many aspects of their life as possible – and towards other species and the environment as a whole as well – you are going beyond “merely being a creature in possession of a will and a tendency to have an effect on the world surrounding you” and are instead imposing order of your own design on a world that might otherwise have an order of its own.
I guess what I’m saying is that control is also natural, but that making it a First Principle of Utmost Importance is probably counterproductive in the long run, although we’ve sort of been doing that for a long time now.
Read Marilyn French’s Beyond Power, not as an effectively researched repository of concrete data (some of her references and footnotes are poorly chosen and often just plain wrong) but as an explication of a theoretical viewpoint (i.e., treat her references as parables and illustrations not as supporting evidence).
I would tend to doubt that humans had any significantly different ‘mindset’ before agriculture–beyond what could be attributed to the effects of population pressures, anyway. Surely the tendency to control one’s environment is dictated by one’s percieved need. No need, no need to contol! So hunter/gatherers, being migrational, probably didn’t feel the need to defend their territory until increasing population made cultivation a necessity. That’s not to say the tendency wasn’t there, only that it wasn’t acted on over a large scale. And it’s probably not safe to say that their culture was any less ‘conflicted’ than ours, or that they were living in some sort of idealized, harmonious state of nature. They surely had rules and penalties for not abiding by them. The main difference is that with greater population, you have more levels of hierarchy and less ability to ignore disruptions in the social order. So, in that sense, control is very productive in the long run. One observes that the only societies that Wiccans and the like can plausibly claim to be non-control based are the extinct ones…
For what it’s worth, I suspect that the conflicted nature of humans is actually a good thing, and while that’s not to say that we don’t need law or order, any attempt to abolish the diversity of human behavior is doomed. Think about it: what behavior that humans are capable of isn’t acted out by some goof ball somewhere? This insures that, if (for example) using porn ever becomes a survival trait, the species will continue. Or if airing out totally baseless theories becomes advantageous… Then I shall RULE THE WORLD!
AHunter: I don’t know how you can say any form of control is unnatural. Look at how rigid and controlled Bee, and Ant societies are.
I think that human society is something like a big hive of ants or bees, but it’s broken down into smaller increments that resemble packs like wolves. I’d be willing to say our society is something of a combination of the pack and the hive. Both of which occur in nature. Without control you can’t have multiple creatures acting toward the same goal. It’s the reason that we are at the top of the food chain and not extinct.
Agreed. And once you’ve dropped anchor and started tilling, you’ve got problems you never dreamed of as hunter/gatherers, not the least of which is that the territory is rife with people who have absolutely no concept let alone word for “land that belongs to someone else” or “perfectly good food that we shoudn’t eat”.
Yeah, agreed once again. The tendency is always there, but just as part and parcel of the rest of our impulses and inclinations. You get a different scene when you have a culture-wide need for control in order to survive.
We as individuals go into a greater “control-things” state of mind when we are threatened or driven to a state of near-panic. I’m guessing that it works in a similar way on a bigger scale, and that our “panicky” need for control served a useful purpose. I’m inclined to think something has changed or is in the process of changing, though. (And again, we are kind of post-agrarian now – not that we have ceased to till the soil but that technology and modernization has given us room to function with far far less insistent control over the populace, and it is reflected in increased democratization and loosening of formerly rigid behavioral constraints.)
