| > "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." — Lao Tzu > Nature is an enormous flow of energy, yet nature makes no effort. I don't get these. What are they referring to? The nature I'm looking at, at all scales, from viruses, to animals, to storms, it's all so violent. Is it just that it's all in the eye of the beholder? |
| One way to read it: nature as a whole makes no effort. It wouldn’t even make sense to say that it does. Does a star make an effort? Yet nature encompasses all that happens. Another interpretation may be connected to Luke 12:27 (yeah I had to look it up, I actually thought it was from Ecclesiastes, lol), which, paraphrased, is that flowers do not work to be beautiful—that’s just what they are. They can’t (be generous with the reading of “can’t”, if you would) be otherwise. To expand: humans want what they are not, and that creates work, and stress, and so on. I want to be pretty like a flower. But I’m a person. So now I must spin cloth, and do a bunch of other work, to attain that want, or else suffer unmet desire. Animals and plants (perhaps) have wants (like: a rabbit may want food, or not to be killed and eaten) and pain and such, but don’t work in that sense. They just are what they are, and do what something like them does. This may fall apart in particular examples, but the broad poetic sense isn’t so bad. (Yes you can nitpick this to death with stuff like “but maybe what humans are is animals that want very very much to be what they’re not, so that is their nature” but c’mon) [edit] cf Vonnegut’s (serious? Joking? Half-joking?) suggestion in Galapagos that humans’ big brains are a curse that causes most of our trouble, and we’d be better off as something like smartish seals. |
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| ▲ | wat10000 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think this is a romantic notion of what we’d like nature to be like, not what it actually is. Nature is in a constant struggle for survival. When I see a rabbit freeze in abject terror, then flee at maximum speed because a well-fed 200+lb apex predator is passing by, it sure looks like work and effort. | | |
| ▲ | throwaway_2494 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >then flee at maximum speed because a well-fed 200+lb apex predator is passing by, it sure looks like work and effort. I think the 'effort' being described in the article—despite using analogies of overgripping and physical strain—is mental effort. When the rabbit has escaped, he returns quickly to a relaxed state. A typical human reaction would be to continue to worry about the predator, to form plans to rid the whole _world_ of all predators, to build a fortress with grass to eat on the inside... This whole saying that "Nature is red in tooth and claw" is overstated. Most animals have normal, humdrum days like we do. However, I think it was the Buddhist teacher, Ajan Cha who said: "We live in a world where we must eat to survive, and some of us are uncomfortable about being eaten." But this does not mean that every animal lives a life of unremitting terror all the time. I’m wary of your use of 'romantic' as a descriptor here. It's a rhetorical shortcut which makes it easy to pre-emptively dismiss a position as naïve without further examination. | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Only a touch of judgment? I must have been too subtle, then. I’m not convinced that most animals have humdrum days. It’s hard to judge the “natural” state of an animal when I’m a terrifying predator, but even when I’m pretty sure they aren’t aware of my presence, their lives seem pretty stressful. The prey animals seem to be constantly worried about attacks, and the predators are always hungry. | | |
| ▲ | throwaway_2494 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Come on you can't come up with a single five minute period when observing animals where they seem to be calm? That does not fit the evidence. And besides you can read thousands of articles on HN about anxiety in humans, a mostly useless anxiety focused on societal 'threats' which we suffer from just as much. At least a deer is on the lookout for something real. Also if you compare animals lives to human ones, with our propensity for war and torture and persecution, I think the animals _do_ objectively live calmer lives. You don't see them systematically tearing each other to pieces over made up goods like money. I think this trope that "nature is a constant struggle" is a projection of human values (or lack of) onto nature. | | |
| ▲ | phantasmish 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I regard the experience of most animals as being something like living in a slasher movie their entire lives, and Lovecraft’s work as coming closest to describing life writ large, stripped of pleasant lies. … but I still think it’s a notable feature of humanity that we can escape much of that for long periods, yet always seem to invent problems for ourselves, can find trouble and discontent even when they don’t seek us out. A rabbit may contend with predators, with hunger, but it doesn’t seem they’ll drive themselves crazy with worry and want when sated and resting in their den. They deal with what’s in front of them, in rabbit-ways, and that’s that. What will they do today? Rabbit stuff. If they’re left to do rabbit stuff without external resistance, will they be content? Yeah. Tomorrow, will they be upset because they’re still going rabbit stuff? No. | | |
| ▲ | throwaway_2494 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | I still don’t buy the “slasher movie” framing of nature at all, and the only function 'pleasant lies' serves here is just low effort dismissal. :shrug: Alas, I'm ceding ground by even arguing within your chosen framing. It's all very self defeating. | | |
| ▲ | phantasmish 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Frequent risk of sudden violent murder. And, like, credible relatively-high risk, not the “well a person might be murdered at any time, too”. Like fictional humans in a slasher-movie universe. The “pleasant lies” mostly involve pretending about meaning, and avoiding thinking about huge scales. That’s the lovecraftian bit. Large-scale reality dwarfs and overwhelms us. We eke out sanity by ignoring it, by even being able to forget about or never thoughtfully engage with it. My point is just that I largely agree with the other poster on the “nature of nature” as it were, but still find insight in the quoted passages. I don’t think they demand we regard nature as particularly safe or easy, for them to work. | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Don’t forget terrible diseases, constant problems from parasites, etc. There’s an ancient debate over whether wild animals age in the way humans do, or indeed at all. Of course they do, but this isn’t at all obvious since few wild animals live long enough to die of age, or even long enough for aging effects to become obvious. |
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| ▲ | wat10000 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > At least a deer is on the lookout for something real. That is pretty much my point. Humans have the luxury of being anxious about stuff that’s not really a threat. Animals mostly don’t. The ones who do are the ones who have come closest to achieving human luxury. My cats are often calm. They also get upset when they want to go outside but it’s cold. Maybe I’m just projecting and my perception of animals as constantly worried about eating or being eaten is not real. Or maybe you’re projecting and your perception of calm is not real. Judging the mental state of animals is very difficult. |
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| ▲ | phantasmish 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think it’s mostly an observation about unforced discontent, which is a notable (defining?) feature of human existence that’s apparently (at least) much rarer in the rest of nature. I doubt people much closer to nature, death, and killing than most modern OECD-state humans weren’t aware that animals suffer, nor that they must sometimes run to catch their food. It might be worth interrogating the original language of the work, which I’ve not done. The translator may be depending on the reader’s cooperation here. | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | I do think that’s true, but largely because animals mostly don’t have the luxury of being out of survival mode. They can’t have unforced discontent when it’s constantly being forced. I’m sure the ancients were aware that animals suffer. I think it’s noteworthy that the passage in Luke was talking about plants, not animals. It’s hard to imagine effort and discontent in an organism with no brain. In any case, I’m definitely not taking life advice from an apocalyptic cult telling me not to plan for the future and give away all my possessions because their god will provide. |
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