From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Mon May 17 1999 - 19:22:24 MDT
At 11:32 AM 5/17/99 -0600, <David_Musick@juno.com> wrote:
> "Civilization is protest against nature;
> progress requires us to take control of evolution."
> -- Thomas Huxley
>
>Civilization is a natural, biological phenomenon.
>There is nothing in civilization that has not been a well established
>aspect of life for billions of years.
>To think of civilization as somehow "unnatural" shows a profound lack of
>understanding of life and nature as well as a profound lack of
>understanding of civilization.
Yes, but by your understanding everything that biological entities do _is_
natural. Ergo, of what use is the term?
In my view, people use "natural" in three ways. One is the technical sense,
i.e., something is natural if it is part of the natural world. By this view,
anything that is, from rocks to space shuttles is natural. The things that
would be unnatural would be things that exist outside of the natural
world, outside of reality.
Another is the more common place usage, which just means whatever
the user of the term believes to be normal or acceptable. Under this
usage, to the average Americans, e.g., polygamy is not natural, while
monogamy is.
The third is to mean not human made. By this definition, rocks are
natural, but space shuttles are not. This is perhaps as commonly if not
more commonly used by most people.
Huxley was probably implicitly thinking in terms of the third usage, but
the lines were blurry because in the time he was operating most
people considered there to be a strong separation between the
realm of human society and everything else. In essense, if we look
at it this way, we can see Huxley, who didn't have the benefit of
ethological studies and the like, likening human civilization -- the
only one we know of at any rate -- as something sui generis. To
use a metaphor, it's almost like someone comparing prokaryotes
to eukaryotes. The differences might astound her so much that
she fails to remember the similarities and continuities.
Aside from that, it's just one quote. We'd have to read the context
to know what the heck he's rambling on about.
Anyway, take a deep breath... This too shall pass.
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
Read boring stuff at:
http://www.monadnock.net/summa/
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/4612/ust/ust.html
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