He expanded this to "Tools exist for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treat nature as an enemy, they are by definition a rebellion against the way things are. In benign environments technology is a stunted, laughable thing, it can't thrive in cultures gripped by belief in natural harmony" [1]
[1](pdf warning) https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Ambassador.pdf
Nature isn't kind to anything. I completely agree with you, but that needs to be said better since the root concept here is how humans, but nothing else, has fallen out of line with nature. Bullshit. Yea, it's pretty to see a monarch butterfly and how peaceful it must be... except it's probably the lone survivor of its swarm after a flock of swallows decimated all the other butterflies it was with just 20 minutes ago. Animals and plants went extinct pre-humans. All. The. Time. They get slaughtered or diseased without us.
The only difference between humans and everything else, we as a species collectively said, "no" to nature ruling our lives. I mean, for fuck's sake, we're such assholes about it, we setup animal sanctuaries and clinics to rescue wild, injured animals. Any other form of nature would have called it "lunch".
I'm going onto a soapbox now. I blame modern animal/nature shows for this gradual misunderstanding of "nature". If you're old enough, you remember old school nature programs showed how metal, destructive and viscous wildlife actually IS. All the shows I see my nieces and nephews watch... they haven't watched footage of a bear tearing into a still kicking deer or wolves taking down a screaming baby bison or moose. They need to know if they see a bear, wolf, snake or cougar in real life, it's not going to be cuddly or do a song/dance number. It's going to fuck them up and they need to keep their distance. Going to stack one more soapbox for me to stand on... and this will get me flamed... koalas and pandas deserve to go extinct. Mono-food source creatures are asking for trouble and need to evolve to diversify their diet to properly outpace extinction.
I mean, there's water, nutrients in the soil and the importance of mycelium in the dirt. Most plants you can throw in a dark closest for like a week or two easy, then take them out and they'll come back to life. Don't forget, ground level plants in a forest or jungle barely get shit for sun. I'm a cheap bastard that buys "dying" clearance plants from Lowes and Home Depot, then bring them back to life. My dumb redneck green thumb has a lot more respect for plants.
Shit, watch some wild bonsai collectors on youtube. They massacre small trees to bare wood, purposely put them in too small pots, under nourish them and the fuckers still grow.
Plants are no where near as fragile as a koala and panda. Hell, there was an oak tree on my parents property that was struck by lighting some ten some odd times in a five year period (Florida). We cut it down to a 2 or so foot stump since it seemed too dangerous to keep up with all the damage. Fucker started brand new shoots and refused to accept death. After 10 years from cutting, it grew three solid trunks about 10 feet high or so. A bit taller than a house, never measured it.
"There's no *deserve*.... Why are you throwing morality at this?" -Fern_Blossom, current comment
This was an exercise in friendly ribbing. I think we should save the koalas and the pandas, if we can. We've destroyed enough already. And c'mon, they're cute.
Indeed, it's not kind to anything.
However, even by saying "no" to nature, we're still transforming it (or it transforms itself through its parts, of which we are one type) and part of it; we're not extracting us or whatever from it, in the long term.
In any event, it's technology that will make us more elvish. When we choose so, and some people will. It's also technology that will give us access to huge amounts of energy without destroying nature and it is technology which will allow is to live out in space leaving our original world as pristine as it can be.
If you ask me this piece is about optimism vs pessimism wrt technology.
One for beauty, one for immortality, one for grace, one for safety...
With enough force-fields, delicately interwoven with the art of the mind of a god and the skill of the hands of a god, who is to say that the gap between the humans and elves is anything other than a sheet of silicon?
Men are culturally diverse and capable of building great cities and societies. We are adaptable, industrious, but not particularly loyal. We tend to be fearful and vengeful. We don't form a symbiotic relationship with the land (Elves) or have a single-overarching purpose to acquire wealth (Dwarves). We conquer our natural environment and bend it to our will as best we can.
The Elves and Dwarves are very one-dimensional in Tolkien's work and they sort of represent specific things.
We are all humans, dwarves, elves, halflings, goblins, orcs, whatever, each race just highlights one of the facets of complex human society and behaviors.
The same inflection point is reached in Diamond Age when technology advances sufficiently to allow for "seed" tech to displace "feed" tech.
There are wolves in the forest. They're not generally dangerous to humans, unless you're doing stupid things or you're child, but they're dangerous enough and they'll kill dogs.
Finding clean water is a challenge. Mosquito can turn your life into hell without modern repellents.
But still I think that it's a worthwhile movement to bend a nature towards human and fill a missing pieces. Because despite all the dangers and inconveniences I just love being in nature compared to the city.
Probably the technology and science is not here yet. But imagine that we develop ways to eradicate mosquitoes completely. Eradicate infected mites completely (issue with viruses and bacterias, not with mites, of course). Find a ways to generate clean energy (hardest thing is to generate heat in home, it requires lots of energy). And so on. My dream is to live like an elf in the forest, but without all the negative consequences. It's impossible or too costly atm, but I don't see it as impossible in principle.
https://southpark.cc.com/video-clips/ji7j1k/south-park-god-d...
The problem is that we much prefer convenience now in our comparatively short personal lives than thinking about the long-term consequences. The view that our relationship is with tech rather than the world and the view of the world as basically a negative thing is a strong part of that.
Lots of interesting viewpoints here, but i think this one's missing: We have a symbiotic relation with our technology, but we make the technology, there's room to adapt it to have a symbiotic (or at least sustainable) relationship with nature.
But humans are a small element of nature. They originated from this environment, live within it, return to it.
We are from nature, and every one of us is thus destined to die, most likely painfully, and our deaths will most definitely inflict pain to other members of our species. Until we can bridge this gap, be no longer bound by the short lifespans we have, humans and nature will remain enemies.
Only after the gap is closed, there can be talk of peace - and then, still, we will need to become immune to nature's other trappings, because most of humanity can't survive in a purely natural environment anymore. Once heat, cold, pathogens in water and hungry predators stop being a threat, we can finally start living in respectful symbiosis with the natural world.
Alternatively, we could just learn to abandon all our morality: stop caring about suffering and death, treat ourselves and each others as just an ephemeral phenomenon, appearing one moment, gone in another. I don't think any one of us is ready to go to that extreme, and it would require extreme degree of self-lobotomizing anyway. Our survival instincts and our capacity for empathy are built into our firmware, we can't just shut them off for the sake of "being one with nature".
Well done. That's a Tolkien Elf. They are immortal, which is the first part of your declaration. Yet they are not immune to "natures other trappings", rather they are more resistant to it, but it seems that crucially, this is not viewn as a threat. This may be due to elves having less selfish natures than humans and more willing to "become part of nature". So it turns out having the right mindset (or nature) is also important. Also, Tolkien elves care deeply about their own kind, so i'm not sure how to reconcile that with what i just said.
Nature is not "an enemy", it's where you're coming from and what you're made of and what you're living in.
It's something to deal with, for sure. However treating nature as "the enemy" is precisely the model of thinking that brought us here and now, on the verge of being erased by the consequences of our own actions, human-as-a-conquerer.
Before talking of nature's trappings, we might as well better talk about human's owns. Our survival instinct saved us within a specific frame in which we could act. When our whole biome disappears or stops working for us, being part and dependent of it, we disappear as well.
Humanity has spent much more of its time on earth living with a very low technology level than that we enjoy today. If Nature wasn't kind, how did we make it for those hundreds of thousands of years?
It is really only since the industrial revolution that we have become crazy-reliant on tech. Tolkien's works were very much about the 'war' between the pre- and post- industrial revolution worlds. Hint: the bad guys are the industrialists (Morgoth being one example).
Something like 90% of Earth's surface is outright deadly to humans: about 71% is covered in water, in which humans cannot survive; then there's deserts (both hot and cold) as well as high mountains, which also don't allow for human habitation without technology.
But it's not just geological features. There's also deadly diseases, lots of predators (humans wiped them out completely in most of their habitats), weather and poisonous plants.
The average urban human wouldn't survive long in nature. Heck, there's a good chance they would catch a serious disease just from drinking contaminated water from a pond or a small brook.
> If Nature wasn't kind, how did we make it for those hundreds of thousands of years?
For hundreds of thousands of years there's only been very few of us. In pre-argicultural times, no more than 10M humans lived on the planet [0], probably even almost going extinct in the wake of the Toba supervolcano event 70000 years ago. Indeed several genetic bottleneck events have been identified (ice age, weird cultural shifts [1]) suggesting that the survival of our species wasn't a sure bet throughout history.
[0] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/internat...
So it really is a complex system of adaptation to external conditions, modifying inanimate aspects of the environment to meet our needs and interactions with other species.
Human technology and -activity is not unmatched in scale (cyanobacteria are still the champions - completely remodelling Earth's atmosphere), but no other other species had the means to do it so quickly. We seem to strife for a mixture of artificial (houses, streets, technology) and versions of nature that we're fully in control of (from fish tanks and zoos to parks and gardens).
This need to "tame the land" even extends to other parts of the universe, hence the concept of "terraforming", even though adaption even if by artificial means would be much less complicated, quicker and "more natural".
No buffalo walks up to a lion and gives itself up, the lion evolved to take, brutally and with often needless cruelty.
It’s a mistake to view nature as “good” and technology as “bad”. The only similarity between them is their complete and utter moral neutrality.
Only a few of your fellow humans care about you, for sure, and only your technology is fully disposed to your orders; nature does not want you here anymore than it wants you gone.
Anthropomorphizing nature is a good way to end up disappointed, it’s not a being - it’s a composition of very complex systems, to quantify its “kindness” is not possible.
Humanity as we know it, has always had an incredible technological advantage, even just fire is orders of magnitudes higher advantage than something evolution can give you in a similar timeframe. In fact it’s so powerful, the first technology, that it literally modified our evolution to give us larger brains and closer societies - in some respects highly developed language owes its existence to fire.
Every tree murders the Savannah below, every Savannah fire is a attempt to get back more land for the grass.
Nothing out there is peaceful, even with all hostile predators removed, the battle of each system component against the others continuous.
The majority of humans died. Sometimes almost to the point of extinction. The ones who got lucky or got the right genes survived at least long enough to pass their DNA on to the next generation. Which is the one thing natural selection optimizes for. When you say "we" made it across hundreds of millennia, you're excluding the countless evolutionary dead ends that far outnumber the rest.
Nature isn't kind to us, and we aren't immune to many of its dangers because on average it's not enough to kill us before we can create offspring.
We rely on technology to handle the rest. Like avoiding sickness because even when not deadly it's not pleasant.
"Tech" is a fairly undefined word, and we subconsciously draw lines where it makes sense / suits us. I will however postulate that:
1. Yes, humans spent a lot of time without technology; but it sucked and we died and suffered a lot
2. Technology isn't just iPhones - it's fire and clothes and clean water and toilets.
I don't know if this is a self-evident or hugely controversial or even politically incorrect thought, but hoping I'm in safe-enough space to explore it: I wonder how much of very definition of "human/humanity" has to do with tools we use.
Some thrived, but a lot did not. Humans were down to a tiny population at one point.
And low-tech is still tech. Fire, tools, pots, and agriculture are all ways to overcome nature.
Nature isn't kind to humans. Sure, we've acquired many of these elvish capabilities: we can live longer if we use fire to scare away hungry bears, we can heal faster if we have some bandages or build a hospital, we can travel fast if we sit in a vehicle. But our relationship is fundamentally with our technology, not with nature. We've developed a symbiotic relationship with technology. Nature is still a deadly Other.
So unless we someday genetically engineer ourselves to be more elf-like and resilient out in the forest, I don't think we'll ever adopt an Elvish outlook. We fundamentally improve ourselves via that which we create, and defend ourselves from the hostile environment which existed before us. In fantasy everyone's made by a benevolent creator, in reality we've evolved under the rule of survival of the fittest. The elves didn't dominate their environment because they didn't need to.
(PS: In Tolkien, there actually is someone who's out of harmony with the natural order from day one, and has to go engineer his own world as a response. Complete with orcs and trolls and enormous fortresses that keep nature out. He's known as Morgoth and when they finally catch up with him they throw him in eternal jail!)