A homily on human nature

By Michael Timm

To ask what is natural supposes two avenues of inquiry: What is the way things actually are? What is the way things are supposed to be?

Tension arises because ideas conflict about the nature and content of the natural, especially if related to the second question. Is it something that once was, independently of and prior to the appearance of and observation by human beings? Or does it include humans and our behaviors and their impacts? If so, does it include all actualized behaviors or only a subset of those possible? And if it includes a significantly large set of possibilities, does such inclusion negate the value of the natural as a term? Does it become meaningless?

Is it always a politically loaded term, a lever to and from power? We seem inclined to accept arguments based on a degree of naturalness. Regardless of the content of such arguments, does this inclination reveal something real or important about us or the natural? Perhaps a vestigial connectedness with any or all "environments"—a sense that we belong within some larger structure, whether wild or godly, sacred or profane, so long as we recognize a sort of firmament of not-ourselves by which we can measure our own existence.

What about the role of technology—not to mention culture—in what is or is not, should or should not be, natural? Is technology necessarily not natural—counter-natural? There's a feeling I have, which I sense others share and which is not terribly unique or profound but nonetheless relevant: that we humans have not evolved for the world in which we create ourselves. This is the world in which I type at my laptop computer, the world where every other bar patron is playing with their iPhone, taking pictures of themselves or their spouse, where we drive our bodies across cities in metal boxes through concrete alleys, and spend our evenings staring at bright blue undulating screens that soothe by presenting images of people where actual people might instead agitate us from the shared technocultural dream.

I feel, more and more, that we are not only excluding native animals and plants and ecosystems from their historical patterns, but also increasingly excluding ourselves from our own natural cultural environments.

What is the natural state of man—humankind?

If we humans evolved to value family and clan structures because of both the stability and flexibility these provided both individual members and family groups, then what of our modern technologized culture in which digital networks and atomizing technologies divide and conquer vestigial instinct and recreate our humanity as bits of democratized network relations? Is this unnatural? Is it a natural phase of human evolution? Should it be the way? Is it simply another way we are proving our adaptability and the flexibility of our innate human tendencies for curiosity and tinkering and self-improvement? Or is it a turn around a corner toward something inhuman, a reprogramming of our consciousness, a new exclusive playing field for socialization of technological elites? Is it an extension of our clannish tendencies or an abandonment of them? And, if the latter, should we worry?

And for those who might argue that clannish tendencies were not all that great to start with, perhaps it ought to be argued that they at least provided the framework through which individuals could survive long enough to persevere and overcome and discover more of oneself—self-determination. If we no longer participate in small-scale social clan structures, and instead are subsumed into larger more diffuse and decentralized social networks, does the same opportunity for individual/minority/outlier/deviant exist? Faced with the almost infinite connectivity through technology, are we paradoxically more isolated than ever, staring into that vast and almost-empty white room peopled only by specs of personae? Does, then, the minority or the deviant become exacerbated by this artificial isolation rather than strive for some form of integration with the social whole or reformation of it? And, in those other vast white rooms peopled and popular, the homes of eager echoing majorities, do we only become heads of cattle, swarming according to the ass-ends of cattle in our view, those swarming after ass-ends of cattle in their heads' views? (This is how humans made a killing, literally, of herd animals, because geography ensures there are always cliffs somewhere.) Who would guide us across this new digital geography? And where will we go?

When I see a deer in the vacant lot behind the Cudahy McDonald's, just looking at me on my bike on the asphalt K-Mart parking lot as I simply stare back, as not 100 feet away motorists obliviously order their Big Macs and fries at the drive-thru, I whisper "Hello, Beautiful," and think first that it's incredible how humans have altered the landscape so that there is a deer behind this urban McDonald's. But as I stare longer and the deer trots on, toward the foliage by the railroad tracks behind K-Mart adjacent to the McDonald's, I think more about how our human-created landscapes intended for humans have affected us. The deer has found its little corner of nature among the undeveloped land, and no matter how much we shortsightedly constrict environmental corridors with encroaching development, plants and animals—admittedly not all of them, but almost certainly some of them—will find a way and a place to survive. They'll adapt or they'll perish in our places. But what about us? We've adapted to what are in many ways self-hostile environments. Cities support high population densities with relative peace, all things considered, but also spew carcinogens, prop up commercialized medicine, feed upon industrialized agriculture, and inject artificial time structures into human life. The electric light, the indoor toilet, the washing machine, the automobile, the clock, the computer, the cheeseburger—these are all marvelous inventions and we take them for granted such that they populate the environments we find natural for ourselves.

But just as our domestication of plants and animals benefited increasingly dense and specialized human populations, the plants and animals benefited from the bargain—getting humans to devote time and energy to tend and care for their survival needs and assisting and accelerating in reproduction of their relatives to the exclusion of would-be competitors. Our technology is domesticating us in similar fashion. We are caught in a bargain like the domestication bargain, only operating across different scales of our experience. No longer is our physical labor alone domesticated—our social relations and psychological health, once and perhaps naturally catered to by fulfilling clan obligations, are also domesticated by the very technologies and legal and social structures we believe we've developed to enhance our lives.

This technological domestication may or may not be natural, but it gives me, at least, pause. Sometimes much more than pause. That deer behind McDonald's—a coyote shot and killed by local police—a dead beaver on the sidewalk—a frog smashed on my parking lot—these are all examples of organisms which discovered themselves suddenly in an alien environment, not always actively hostile, but most often indifferent to their needs and thus harsh for life. The parking lot seems to me a perfect example and metaphor for one scale, the macroscale, of our denaturing of the planet—developing monocultures of substance that serve particular, explicit human desires at the expense of an arguably natural and almost unfathomable complexity that operates in many ecosystems and depends upon at least some degree of interlocking and counterbalancing plurality. Parking lots are the domestication of rock. And like Hegel's master, who is equally a slave to his master/slave relationship as the slave is to him, humans are enslaved by their asphalt/auto relationship. Potholes demand attention. Cars demand repair. New developments demand parking spaces. And on and on, this is part of a cycle of defending and recreating normalcy that seems natural to our modern world.

On a behavioral/psychological scale, social networking internet applications are domesticating human relationships along digital lines. Humans become enslaved by the satisfaction of connection, while digital connections are predicated upon the atomization/democratization of self into re-presented avatar. Our online behavior is restricted by the format and we play along, morphing and compressing given names into a user name of fewer characters, a sort of bifurcated shorthand self divided. Our avatar, using the term loosely here to mean any online identity, is packaged and marketed for effect within specific but always potentially infinite arenas and ruthlessly subject to the rules governing those spaces. There's no allowance for ultimate psychological satisfaction because identities expressed are endlessly open to fundamental criticism or undermining by users who are not discriminated by any real or earned and demonstrated social hierarchy (witness any unmoderated blog comment section where some immovable object is repeatedly hammered by an unstoppable force). Our identities are just "out there." We caricaturize ourselves in such digital environments, but the caricature becomes more and more real the more time we spend using it. In a network, unlike within a clan, anybody's comments are deemed valid unless a discriminating mind edits or moderates participation (or until a majority cadre of users attacks and subdues the minority voice); and unlike in real space, no proof is required to urge the acceptance of an argument. And so ideas good and bad can be perpetuated virally and without empathy regardless of their utility or value or real-world direct social consequence (such as recipient body language). We are alienating self from self, but we can't turn away because we smell limitless freedom for expression and exploration.

This is something Felicia Day's web series The Guild has tapped into to use for comedic effect, but it seems meaningful to me on several levels: it understands and appreciates but also mocks the intrinsic appeal of, in this case, online gaming communities; it takes humans whose relationships have previously existed only through the internet and examines how they interact in real space; it showcases that even in cyberspace, clan structures (the guild) are resilient, valuable, self-regulating, compelling, and in concert with human capacities; it shows how the absence of physical proximity and observation of body language and psychoemotional context affects communication strategies among the "guildies" when they talk to each other on their headsets (to all of each other at once rather than to just one person in a two-way, real-world conversation).

The flattened frog on my parking lot didn't have a choice about its environment; its species did not create, at least not on a massive scale, the particular environment it was born into. Our species, however, is the predominant earthshaper. And each individual human is also able to shape his or her consciousness, perhaps not fully or easily, but immediately and directly. We have a choice about what kind of world we create to be natural—at least for ourselves. What kind of landscape will we make? Will we rush unreflectively and headlong into an environment as indifferent to our human needs and capacities as the asphalt was to the frog? Is there a more natural alternative?

While we may lament habitat loss for deer and frogs and beavers and all manner of wild things, I wonder also about us. What parcels of undeveloped psychological ground can we turn to at the end of the day when email and voicemail and day-calendars and fast food and web surfing and late-night television—hollow surrogates for clan relations that would perhaps satisfy our ancestors 10,000 or 5,000 years ago—have crowded out one's day? Have we gone from living in one cave to another? Are we restricting ourselves to fertile cracks in the asphalt or vacant lots behind the McDonald's of the mind?

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Michael Timm is a freelance writer. He has written and is seeking representation for a novel, The Philosopher of Milwaukee. He has been assistant editor of the Bay View Compass newspaper in Milwaukee since 2005. His writing has also appeared in the Alliance for Children & Families Magazine, Ripon Magazine, Riverwest Currents, Shepherd Express, and Wisconsin Trails Magazine. He earned his B.A. at Ripon College in Ripon, Wis., in 2004 studying both anthropology and English. His totem animal is the platypus.