Unnatural Things (Part II)

In a previous post, I talked about some ideas of 'natural' and 'unnatural'. It struck me that if you defined 'natural' as 'found in nature', it still isn't a complete definition for some purposes.

For example, if you said, "That's natural behaviour," when watching young people at play, you would actually implicitly be saying, "... for young human beings in that particular cultural context." What's natural in one context is not necessarily natural in another, because it would not normally occur in that context.

Which brings me to the next point. Should we define 'natural' as 'occurs in nature, given a specific context', or as 'is the modal occurrence for that situation', or as 'is within the normal distribution of behaviours, to n standard deviations'? Or should we use yet another definition?

The problem is that etymology's main clue constrains our choice somewhat; 'natural' comes from the Latin and implies 'inborn' — something that proceeds from the course of events in the natural world without human intelligence intervening. It is natural that some people are born with genes which predispose one towards alcoholism; it is not natural that alcoholics should exist, because it is rare to find ethanol in large quantities in nature — there is no common natural process that could create large numbers of alcoholics.

Some might argue (as I have, playfully, in the past) that mankind is a fact of nature, and that therefore everything (cable TV, skyscrapers, space telescopes, iPhones, Gucci handbags etc) that we create is part of nature. Well, in that case, we should throw out the idea of artifice, of organic growth, of natural methods of doing anything and just accept that our sad lot is to defeat the rest of nature before we get round to understanding it.

But that's just dodging the argument. Why shouldn't we think of Man as part of nature? And why shouldn't we then think that any activity we indulge in, for which a sufficiently large number of us exist, is also a natural thing? Take the relatively innocuous cultural behaviour of wearing earrings so large that they distort the earlobes. This can be found in primitive (technology-wise) tribes as well as on the streets of New York or Singapore. Is this therefore a natural thing?

Is it natural to indulge in bodily mutilation by surgical removal of unsightly body parts? We do it with nails and hair, which regenerate; we do it with skin, which sometimes doesn't quite regenerate the same way. We do it with parts that don't regenerate, sometimes out of philanthropy and sometimes as some odd aesthetic or religious practice.

Think about circumcision, for example — some people say it is a healthy thing to do, some people say not, and it's impossible to say under what circumstances it is optimally healthy. Personally, I'd have the shuddering heebie-jeebies if anyone told me they were going to chop off the tip of one of my extremities. My fingers and toes cringe, that is.

So many questions, and so many answers. Sigh.