Saturday, February 7

A QUESTION

I was pondering during my navigation south on bicycle today what it means to be 'natural'. What at first appears to be a simple question of organization of substance evolves into a more meaningful ethical dilemma. The particular definition of ‘natural’ with which I am concerned implies a non-man made composition or process. I think this is a fair characterization of the word. The key to my definition is ‘non-man made’. This strangely excludes man from nature, insinuating that a man-made material is not ‘natural’.
Well I jumped from this to thinking about banishing the incompatibility of the phrase ‘man-made’ and ‘natural’. That is, theoretically moving all things ‘man made’ from a separate category into a possible subcategory of all things ‘natural’. So that leaves ethics as nothing more than a framework for the behavior of one type of species called homo-sapiens. So if you look at the cosmos from this sort of omnipresent, supra-human perspective, all the silliness of do this and that, politics, table manners, spaceships, bicycles, nuclear war or whatever it may be can all just seep into the mucky muck of the world as a sort of wonderful non-partisan existence.
For example, George Bush can blow us all to hell and it’s a natural occurrence in nature, just as a nuclear warhead is equally natural as a toadstool. To believe this, of course, one must believe that mankind is not separate from nature. But of course, being a human, don’t I have some sort of obligation to my own set of ethics, and therefore must I consider myself as something apart from nature. Are the two things compatible?
Re-reading this, I see that my idea is completely incoherent, my writing poor, and lots of other bad things are happening. It makes sense beautifully in my head, so I will work on this and try to express myself better some other time.

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