The Allure of the “Natural”

[music]

0:00:08.0 Aaron Powell: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:09.8 Trevor Burrus: And I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:11.4 Aaron Powell: Our guest today is Alan Levinovitz. He’s Associate Professor of Religion at James Madison University and author of “Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science.” Welcome to the show, Alan.

0:00:24.0 Alan Levinovitz: Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

0:00:27.6 Aaron Powell: I think it was the year that I graduated high school. One of the biggest stories was Dolly the sheep. So, maybe that’s a good spot to start. Who was Dolly, and why did she cause such a stir?

0:00:40.2 Alan Levinovitz: Well, Dolly, yes, for those of us who remember, was really big news, she was a clone, she was a cloned sheep. And as you might expect, objections to cloning her took a familiar form. People were accusing the scientists of being like Dr. Frankenstein and also another familiar refrain of playing God. And so the example of Dolly the sheep, which I bring up briefly in the book, is a really good one for thinking about the broader issues of biases against what people perceive as unnatural, and also the connection which might not seem very natural, if you’ll pardon the pun, to some people, between rejecting what is unnatural and religion, which is the case that I wanna make in the book. And the idea of playing God is a really nice way of connecting the two.

0:01:35.2 Trevor Burrus: In that… I remember that, Sarah and I are roughly the same age, it struck me as interesting. And this comes up a lot in genetic modification in general, that it’s philosophically difficult to differentiate between, say forced breeding and strict genetic modification via the genome. Maybe if you’re using microscopes and stuff, that makes a difference, but carrots and cows and everything else looks way different because of what we did to them. So in that… Between those two extremes and in the middle, some people would say there’s a natural and there’s an unnatural, but is there a really good definition of natural at all to begin with?

0:02:17.3 Alan Levinovitz: I actually think that there is. There are some philosophers who wanna argue that everything is natural, humans are natural, therefore, all of our tools are natural, there’s no difference between a skyscraper and an anthill, I don’t think that’s a helpful approach. My rough and ready definition of natural is, organization without human intention. And unnatural is organization by human intention. And of course, these exist on a spectrum. You do have things that are purely natural, which is to say, anything that existed before humans. So, if you go back far enough, when humans didn’t exist, everything was natural because human intention didn’t exist. And then as soon as humans appear on the scene, I think it’s reasonable and helpful to distinguish between those forms of organization or those actions that are influenced by or depend on human intention, and those that aren’t. New York City is less natural than Yellowstone, even if Yellowstone Park is not completely natural, and even if New York City does have some natural elements to it.

0:03:21.2 Aaron Powell: Is there a difference between natural and nature?

0:03:24.5 Alan Levinovitz: Yes, not just grammatically, but a niche…

0:03:27.5 Aaron Powell: Well, I guess… What I mean is, are things that are in nature by definition natural, or is everything that’s happening in nature? Because we get the kind of going back to the arguments about going back to nature, pulling from nature. So it seems to be a thing, like a unified thing in the way that a lot of this is used, whereas the way that you’ve described natural is more a characteristic.

0:03:54.4 Alan Levinovitz: Yes, I understand what you’re saying. But to the extent that nature is a place where the forms of organization and the types of activity are predominantly non-​willed by humans, I think it is a place. So when people say, “Go back to nature,” I think often what they mean is occupy a home that is more like the kinds of homes that exist with animals, the form of the home itself was not something willed by humans, or invented by humans. They mean to eat foods that if you existed before humans, you might have seen those kinds of foods. So nature is the idealized place in which human intention is absent. And in that sense, you can see the same sort of thing in terms of a phrase like, “Act naturally,” what people mean I think is something like, “Don’t intend your action, but allow it to be spontaneous.” And that’s an interesting connection as well between spontaneity and naturalness because spontaneity, again, has the sense of un-​will, the word “organic” is related to that idea of spontaneity.

0:04:58.9 Alan Levinovitz: So something that is natural, something that is organic. In other words, it was bottom-​up and spontaneous rather than top-​down and willed by some individual or set of individuals. And all of those, of course, it doesn’t take a lot of reflecting to realize that there are positive associations with the idea of what is organic or what is spon… A grassroots movement is much better than something that has been astroturfed, which is a really interesting phrase, it captures the feeling of betrayal that here is this thing that was natural, it was grassroots, it was real grass, and then it was replaced by a simulacrum of the grass made to look as if it’s grass, but actually it’s plastic and it’s astroturf, and it was top-​down. So right there, you have a lot of the things that I’m saying captured. And also, makes a difference, there is a difference between grass and astroturf. I don’t wanna say that there aren’t important differences between the two, or even that you can’t value what’s natural. In other words, I don’t come down saying it’s absurd to value what’s natural, it’s just that you shouldn’t worship it.

0:05:57.4 Trevor Burrus: Yeah. On that positive connotation, because the way it’s used, as you pointed out, is you could just say that people use the word natural or artificial or whatever other sort of opposite of natural word we’re gonna use, as a peer category to say, “Well, I prefer natural remedies to the remedies given to me by pharmaceutical companies,” or something. You could say that that sentence could be just entirely positive without any normative connotations whatsoever, that they’re just talking about natural versus artificial created by big pharma. But everyone hears that as saying, “I endorse natural remedies, [0:06:40.7] ____ claw natural, because there’s something metaphysically important about naturalism.” And as, I think, in your book, and you point out, it has a religious connotation, or can have religious undertones to it.

0:06:54.1 Alan Levinovitz: Absolutely. So the aesthetic part is certainly an important one. I think it would be a weird… And again, these philosophers who wanna claim that everything is natural end up going down this path, it was a very strange position to take that, you’re foolish to… Or it’s an illusion that Yellow… You go out hiking on your own, you can’t see any cars, you can’t see any phone lines, you can’t hear the sounds of the city or whatever it is, I think it’s just a weird position to take that that’s a mistaken aesthetic preference. I think it makes a lot of sense. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have something in their life where they prefer the natural, whether it’s natural plants versus artificial plants, can be disappointing. You’re like, “Oh, it’s just a bunch of plastic plants here.” I also think that there’s a metaphysical feature to that aesthetic preference, which is this, natural… The force of nature that organises things, something exists beyond and before human beings, and you don’t have to be religious in the traditional sense of believing in God to think that that’s just incredible.

0:08:00.9 Alan Levinovitz: It’s incredible that somehow things come together and organize themselves, and life forms exist, and planets exist… It’s just absolutely mind-​boggling. And so, if when someone prefers what’s natural, and natural birth is a great example of this, what they’re saying is, “I want to connect or feel a relationship to that force because that force is incredible, and mysterious, and beautiful, and awe-​inspiring.” I say more power to you. It’s when people want to also say that force is like the monotheistic God of Abrahamic religions, it is all good and all powerful and lays out laws for how we ought to live life, our lives, and therefore, any departure from that form of organization is bad or unholy or impure. And I think all too often, people who prefer natural medicine or natural birth end up making that leap, rather than staying in what is a sort of metaphysical preference, but one that doesn’t also assert the divinity of nature.

0:09:09.6 Aaron Powell: Is there an assumed or implied or unconscious impurity of man attitude in that? To pick up on your Abrahamic thing almost like an original sin, because obviously, lots of animals change the natural environment in all sorts of ways that can have long-​term effects on it, and through their interactions with each other, they change each other, there’s evolution, but there’s also social changes. Humans are doing things to change our environment, but it’s not like we’re alone in that, but that sort of stuff doesn’t seem to bother… Ants re-​figuring a landscape, or whatever, is not a big issue. So is there… Is part of this that there’s something impure about humankind, ourselves, or the kind of thing that we do that distinguishes it from what’s natural?

0:10:07.4 Alan Levinovitz: Absolutely, there’s an assumption of human impurity or absence of wisdom, or hubris is another form of the same thing. And again, on the one hand, I appreciate that if what people are wary of when they’re wary of unnatural interventions is something like, well, there are systems that are homeostatic or approach homeostasis, the human body, ecosystems. And humans, through their technological and intellectual power, have the ability to intervene quickly in those kinds of systems and affect enormous changes, which can be good, depending on how you’d find it, but also can be very bad. And they are of a scope and scale, I think, that’s reasonable to say other organisms can achieve. If that’s what people are wary of when they’re wary of the unnatural, I think that’s very reasonable. However, that needs to come with the flip side, which is that we’re also capable of extraordinary good, and you will never see, for example, people… People often blame the unnaturalness of something for the harm that it causes, but they will never praise the unnaturalness…

0:11:25.6 Alan Levinovitz: No one will ever say… People often say, “Oh, you shouldn’t have built… ” It wasn’t natural to build houses, that area of Florida, which is why they’re all collapsing. But no one will say, “Oh, the eyeglasses are beneficial because they’re so unnatural.” You never see things praised for their unnaturalness, so there’s an asymmetry to it. And I think that goes to your point, which is that we have this deep bias or skepticism about the abilities of humans to affect organisation wisely. And I honestly think that this has changed over time, and it’s different across cultures. Another question I get is, has that always been the case? And it has not always been the case, in part because nature was more dangerous than it is today, our encounters with nature are sanitized, you don’t run into the wolves that used to be in Yellowstone Park, or the bears.

0:12:12.5 Alan Levinovitz: But that said, there has always been a kind of preference for spontaneity, this was something I was really surprised by in my research, cross-​culturally and trans-​historically. In classical China, the term “ziran” literally means self-​so or so of itself, it’s often translated as nature, but it’s that which is so of itself as opposed to that which is modified by humans. And that was romanticized by certain strains of proto-​Daoist thought. And I think the idea is something like, how could humans improve on the spontaneous forms of organization? Look around, it’s the kind of God’s answer to Job, right? “Did you make the whales? Did you make the mountains? Did you put the stars in the sky?” Well, if we didn’t do any of those things, how could we improve on that? Surely any intervention is likely to be bad.

0:13:02.5 Trevor Burrus: You mentioned that before regarding spontaneity and authenticity, and these are almost… They have almost synonyms in the way that people use them, like what comes out spontaneously is what is authentic. So if you’re a musician, it’s preferable to do something off the cuff and just bang on a guitar and sing something, versus sit down and meticulously sculpt out a song and every note and…

0:13:32.5 Aaron Powell: Manufactured pop music.

0:13:34.4 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, and that’s interesting too, because there’s something very post-​war rock and roll about that. It may be kind of a universal truth, but I don’t think that Beethoven… They said, “Well, Beethoven, you should just sit down and just write a symphony as quickly as possible, off the cuff, as authentic as possible.” No, they liked the meticulousness of it. But when it comes to folk and country and rock music, there’s an authenticity to it, and I think that’s very much, again, tied up with concepts of natural, that the order… The intentional ordering of the notes is sort of like in an intentional ordering of a city, whereas a rock song can be like a forest kind of thing.

0:14:13.8 Alan Levinovitz: Again though, this is… I don’t think it’s a contemporary thing, so you think about the… I’m no classicist, but the… “Sing in me… Sing through me, Muse.” This idea that what poets and artists are doing is not in fact imposing their own artifice onto the world, but channeling, acting as a conduit for the forces that are, again, beyond and before humans. It’s a beautiful and powerful idea. It’s just not true. It’s just not how it works. The musicians that are… Your Charlie Parker improvising on the sax, or someone playing a blues guitar, so they spend hundreds of hours doing scales, and training themselves so that in that moment they could produce the spontaneous thing. So I do think there’s something deeply problematic about the illusion of spontaneity that we attach to art, which itself has the artificiality built into the very word, but I… It’s a nice connection that you’re making, and I think we would do better to understand genius, not as the absence of needing any editing or interference or help, which is… But something else entirely. So we really do romanticize that, as if something is lesser when it needed to be crafted. It’s absurd, but it’s true, I hadn’t really thought about it that way.

0:15:37.8 Aaron Powell: Is there a connection between this quest for spontaneity, and I suppose, looking for easy answers that don’t require putting in the work? So we have a natural… Solving cancer is a really hard problem that a lot of people are putting a lot of effort into, and we’re grinding away at it, but we haven’t solved it, but if we can just have realized that it’s actually just lemon juice or something, can cure it, then we found an easy answer, and if I can just noodle on the guitar and be a genius, then I don’t have to spend those hundreds of hours practicing the chord so I can improvise well. Is it like a back way around expertise?

0:16:16.3 Alan Levinovitz: Yes. And I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily about ease, it’s related to something that I think is very important and neglected in all sorts of features of our analysis modernity, which is something that historians of technology and philosophers of technology call “epistemic opacity.” Which is basically, when you are unable to know how something works, and the classic example of this, of increasing epistemic opacity is automobiles. So, used to be you could pop the hood, and anyone with a working knowledge of a car could figure out what was wrong, pop, smart, plug in, and now you pop the hood of your Prius, and like, ‘What the hell is going on here?” Same thing with your phone. And what I believe contemporary, but also previous attachment to nationalists is, is people want epistemic transparency. It’s extremely disempowering to feel like you don’t understand how anything works. And so the cancer is a great example, which is that you become a patient in medicine, you go in, you don’t understand what these chemicals are, you don’t know how they’re made, you don’t know where they come from, you don’t exactly understand how they work, and that opacity is very disempowering.

0:17:26.5 Alan Levinovitz: And I used to scoff at that word “empowerment,” you’d see it all the time. Every single alternative medicine practitioner uses this word. And I was just like, “Why do you… Who cares? Isn’t what you care about curing your illness? Isn’t that what matters?” But now I’ve realized that epistemic opacity is very alienating. It just sucks to move through a world where you feel like you don’t understand how anything is produced, or how anything works. And especially when you’re sick, seeking a kind of transparency in the intervention, even if it’s difficult, is empowering and that empowerment is important. And so it’s really, honestly, in a lot of ways, may be more sympathetic. Vaccine refusal is at least in part a rejection of epistemic opacity, and the desire for epistemic transparency, whether or not it’s real, whether or not you actually understand how the sun does photosynthesis or your garden works, at least feeling that way is really important. And so we need to attend to that disempowerment, and deal with it, or there’s always going to be this romanticization of nature as a reaction to increasing epistemic capacity.

0:18:34.0 Trevor Burrus: In the political sphere this seems to have some interesting political effects, largely, I think rhetorical. I’ve given a lecture a few times discussing different political ideologies and how they view themselves as returning naturalism. We could take socialism and say, the way that people really are is communal and non-​possessive and… The system, whatever, however you wanna describe it, came in and perverted them away from the authentic track, and so we have to get back on track. And libertarians, we have this too, the way people naturally are as market-​oriented, and the government came in and perverted the entire thing. And even slightly political tales, you see the iconography of naturalists. So take The Hunger Games, the capital city is shiny, they wear ridiculous clothes, and in Katniss Everdeen’s authentic natural environment, they’re wearing nice olive colors and browns, and they’re [0:19:38.4] ____ cut with bows and all this kind of stuff. Firefly, the frontier is always natural, and in the middle is this very steely, very cold and personal alliance, and we think about that with capital city, so there’s just… I feel like reading your stuff, there’s just a lot of political stuff to this, that sits in the back of our brains. We often don’t know we’re invoking it, but it sits there in the back.

0:20:01.0 Alan Levinovitz: It’s tremendously powerful rhetorically. I can’t stress enough how powerful that idea is, which is why as you pointed out, everyone wants to claim it. So you’ve got people… You got communists who are claiming that barter is the natural form of exchange, and then when you got currency, that was perverted. You’ve got crypto enthusiasts, bizarrely, but sort of intuitively saying, “Well, this is spontaneous currency that is bottom… It’s grassroots, it’s the new natural form of currency.” And I think part of that, you mentioned authenticity. I think the connection to authenticity is really important because people believe deeply that origins disclose essence, and so if you want something authentic, you wanna get back to how the author made it, it’s all there in the etymologies because they do tell us a lot about how words work.

0:20:45.7 Alan Levinovitz: And so, the further you are from what is natural, the further you are from the original form of the thing, and that means it’s less authentic, it means it’s more distant from how we ought to be, the essence of the thing has been corrupted, and so it’s rhetorically very powerful to say, “Well, originally, this is how people did this.” I’m teaching a book right now called “The Case for God” by a popular writer named Karen Armstrong. And one of the things she keeps saying in the book is, “Well, originally, this is how people understood religion, this is how people practiced religion. The implications is therefore better.” Whereas you might say to yourself, “Well, gee, they sure seem to have gotten it wrong back then, glad we have this new form that’s better.” So again, this bias towards authenticity and originality has to do with how we see origins and origin stories as disclosing something essential and important.

0:21:38.8 Aaron Powell: You mentioned briefly in the book, vanilla, and I thought it was an interesting way to frame these questions of authenticity and original. So, can you tell us about the Indigenous farmers in Mexico and what they have to say about “natural vanilla”?

0:21:58.0 Alan Levinovitz: I could talk about vanilla, the plainest ingredient forever and ever, it’s just absolutely fascinating. But long story short, I used to believe, and I think most people who are… If you’re a chef and you’ve gone out and bought vanilla beans, you often think of them as coming from Madagascar or Tahiti. They are not native to Madagascar and Tahiti, so these natural vanilla beans, every single vanilla orchid, which is where vanilla beans grow, every single vanilla orchid has been artificially inseminated by hand in order to get you your vanilla bean, because the only natural pollinators of the vanilla orchid are these melipona bees that are native to Central America, and you had these early silviculturists, which is a word for forest gardeners, who themselves cultivated vanilla orchids, use them… Then had to cure them and dry them. And so one of the reasons, I think, vanilla is so interesting is that people really want natural vanilla.

0:22:53.7 Alan Levinovitz: McDonald’s has had to try to get some form of natural vanilla flavor into its products so that they can say that their ice cream is all natural. People seek out natural flavors in general, but vanilla has never been natural, it’s always been accessible to us only through human artifice. And in a sense, the history of all culinary innovation is a history of one artificial intervention after another, which is helpful though, because it tells us something else about what people mean when they say natural. In England, for example, the word “natural” is regulated when it comes to food, and a part of the definition is traditional preparations. So beer, for example, can be natural, if it’s prepared traditionally. And so here we have… Okay, that’s actually not unreasonable, it’s not unreasonable to value tradition, in the same way that you would value any other kind of… The freedom or beauty or something like that. But we just need to be careful not to confuse tradition or traditional with, for one, totally natural, this idea that…

0:24:00.5 Alan Levinovitz: So you don’t wanna confuse the two, they’re actually different things, traditions are a product of human intervention. And also, you don’t wanna confuse tradition with better, safer, holy. It is simply not always better. And in that sense, there’s a kind of Burke-​y in conservatism that is aligned with that understanding of natural. So, Burke himself makes an argument for… An evolutionary argument for conservatism in which he says, “Well, you get these systems and structures that emerge naturally over time, and revolutions are bad because they represent discrete human interventions that go against the wisdom, the accumulated wisdom of natural political systems that’s emerged over time.” And I think that kind of bias towards the natural in whatever realm you’re in, whether it’s politics or food, can really get in the way of clear thinking about what is effective or ineffective at achieving the goals that we wanna achieve.

0:24:56.1 Trevor Burrus: It seems that… So when it comes to natural food, not only might there not be a good definition of it, but what people think is natural is not actually natural, so it’s internally incoherent, it has no good definition. Even if you apply their definition, probably way more of their tastes and preferences are based in unnatural things that they think are natural due to their metaphysical sense of what is correct.

0:25:23.7 Alan Levinovitz: That’s exactly right. There are certain areas where I think the word “natural” is more useful, and certain areas where I think the word “natural” is less useful. In the case of food, I think it’s incredibly deceptive and does not help conversation. I spend a bunch of time trolling through responses to FDA’s open inquiry into how natural should be regulated when it comes to food, and often I saw people say, “Well, natural foods are made the way God intended them.” You see this from some doctors, the sort of pop doctors that are giving you the natural foods that are gonna cure you. Mark Hyman is this enormously influential guy, he’s like, “Well, it’s very easy to distinguish between foods that are good for you. You just ask, ‘Did nature make it?’ Oh, the avocado, nature made, and the Twinkie, nature didn’t make. So we’re done, we got it.”

0:26:08.9 Alan Levinovitz: And it just seems to me not a helpful way to approach how we think about food. And there’s nothing wrong with liking… For example, so take epistemic opacity, I love going to the farmer’s market. I think it’s cool that I can buy food that was grown near me, it just… It’s neat. I’ll drive past the farm where my food came from, that’s a cool feeling, there’s something aesthetic about that. But to then also assume that I’m gonna live longer because I ate this food, or that it’s even more sustainable environmentally, or that the footprint would be lower, those are the kinds of assumptions that are yoked to our metaphysics of natural that are false, and problematic.

0:26:49.4 Aaron Powell: What about natural lifestyles? We get that a lot, and whether it is gardening on your roof in Brooklyn, or wanting to run off into the monastery in the forest and live off the land. There seems to be this… There’s something unnatural about our current lifestyle, especially urban lifestyles, it makes us stressed out, if nothing else, it lowers our health, and so on, the argument you see from Marxists a lot about neo-​liberalism making us miserable, and the kind of neo-​liberal lifestyle. Is that getting something wrong about the idea of what’s a natural lifestyle? Or is there something wrong with seeing primitive as synonymous with natural in terms of lifestyle?

0:27:46.8 Alan Levinovitz: One way to think… Another way of the many ways to think about what people mean when they say natural, is something that a psychologist, a developmental psychologist, coined the term “the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.” And it’s a vague term, and there’s a lot of controversy about it. But in its general form, I think it’s useful. And what it means is something like, “Look, we are organisms, humans are organisms, and like all organisms, there is an environment, or a set of environments, that is largely determinative of how we evolved. Therefore,” goes the claim, “departures, radical departures from that environment for any organism, including humans, may be likely to cause pathology or trauma.” And that’s not an unreasonable approach. So for example, if more people’s vision is going bad, it’s not an unreasonable hypothesis that we are now using our eyes in a way that’s dramatically different from how we would have used them in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. And then to look there and see if that’s true, and then if it is true, then we can intervene, for example, by putting on glasses.

0:28:55.6 Alan Levinovitz: What seems wrong to me, and it was built into the assumption… Again, this goes to the asymmetry that I talked about earlier, is assuming that the environment of evolutionary adaptedness was paradise. That’s when it becomes religious. The environment of evolutionary adaptedness was not paradise. There are all sorts of things that suck about that environment. Kids died by the truckload before they turned five. You had all sorts of… Just plain ignorance. One of the interesting things I hear a lot of people say things like, “Oh, we’re plant-​blind now. We don’t know what our natural… Back in the day when everyone lived in nature, they were so… They knew so much more. And now we can’t even identify the stars.” Which is, on one hand, it’s true, there are forms of knowledge that have been lost because we don’t need them in order to live in the natural world. On the other hand, we know all sorts of stuff now that pre-​agricultural nomadic hunter-​gatherers didn’t know. So to assume that their forms of knowledge are intrinsically better because they’re associated with more natural lifestyles, it seems is, is a mistake to me. That’s just a problem.

0:30:01.7 Alan Levinovitz: And honestly, and something I say in the book, I actually went to Peru, one of the chapters discusses this, to meet with the Machiguenga, ’cause I had read so many stories, “Are hunter-​gatherers, are they truly enlightened? Are they the wise ones? Should we raise our children like them? Should we eat like them? Should we not wear shoes like them?” etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So I was like, “What are they like? What’s their life like?” And what was the funniest moment… And I tell this in the book, but I’ll just give it away to everyone who’s listening ’cause it was just so funny. There was this… They had just gotten lights, solar-​powered lights, for the kind of main area of this village where the Machiguenga had settled, this group of Machiguenga. I’m talking to this guy, and I said, “Hey, how do you feel about these lights?” And to me, I’m just thinking to myself… ‘Cause it’s very hard, someone who sees constant lights, it’s just, “Wow, this is a… ” “You have no artificial light here, stars shine so brightly. Now you’ve got this big spotlight in the middle of your town square. It must be terrible. So what do you think of these lights?”

0:30:57.3 Alan Levinovitz: And he says, “They’re good. I like them.” And I was like, “Why?” And he just looks at me like I’m insane. He’s like, “We can see at night now.” It’s just like… He was like… It was just so ludicrously obvious to him, why one might want to be able to see at night. So one of the funny things that I noticed in these contexts of natural lifestyle is that they give you an appreciation for the artificial things. All anyone wanted in this village was salt for their food, because their food tastes better, and it’s… One sad thing, in my opinion, about the romanticization of natural lifestyles is that, yes, it discloses some things that we might miss, we overestimate how great our lives are, and there are things that we’re blind to, but it’s pretty great right now. We eat unbelievably tasty food, and it can be easy not to appreciate that if you’re constantly blaming it for all of our woes.

0:31:55.8 Trevor Burrus: There seems to be something to the idea of acting in accordance with our nature, which is maybe more essentialism. Obviously, Aristotle had these ideas in terms of his ethics, but also, as I mentioned previously, in the political sphere, if we’re talking about, what’s the proper political organization? It does… It makes sense to make an argument. It’s like, well, the problem here with Marxism is that people don’t do that. They just… That’s not how they are. They don’t do that. And in the libertarian sphere, we make the argument that people inevitably, naturally, “truck, barter, and exchange,” in the words of Adam Smith, and that’s how markets are, they just come about if you have people, and property rights, and bang, there you go. So, are those valid political arguments? In the sense of… Or is that also committing a kind of natural fallacy for making a normative argument for a certain political or economic system?

0:32:56.1 Alan Levinovitz: I think it is not a fallacy if it’s a pragmatic argument. Robert Sapolsky told me this way of thinking about what’s natural, I think is really wise, where he says, “Natural doesn’t tell us what’s right or wrong politically, but it can tell us what’s gonna be more or less difficult to achieve.” In other words, there are some things about humans that are just gonna take a lot to overcome, they may take centuries of taboos, and regulations, and folklore, in order to finally get to the place where we no longer do them. And there’s other things that will be… That go, sort of, with what it is that humans do, again, do naturally. And so, you can argue, and this is similar again to the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, that some kind of political system will be difficult to execute or impossible to execute because it is so unnatural, but that’s not bad. Unnatural doesn’t mean bad in this context, it means something more like, doesn’t come easily to humans.

0:33:57.6 Alan Levinovitz: And I think we would agree that there are plenty of thing… No matter how libertarian you are, I guess you could… This is sort of like anarcho-​libertarianism that would embrace this. But I think no matter how libertarian you are, you would agree that there are some interventions that are good precisely because they restrict our nature, or change our nature, or go against what it is that comes naturally. And so, yet another context in which, if we clarify what we mean by natural, if what we mean is that which humans… What’s easy for humans to do and which goes with humans instincts, and therefore requires less labor, in the broad sense of the word, on the part of a political system, it’s gonna be more efficient. I think it’s a great way to make an argument. It’s a bad way to make an argument, if you say something like, in the nature of humans is disclosed, the normative forms of government, which simply align themselves with whatever it is or emerge from whatever it is that humans do spontaneously.

0:35:00.0 Aaron Powell: Well, that brings up another thing that you talk about a bit in the book, which is natural law, and the argument that there is a kind of law or rules that can be drawn from what is natural. So can you tell us what [0:35:14.1] ____ What natural law means in this context and how the discussion we’re having now applies to that area?

0:35:23.6 Alan Levinovitz: So for the five listeners who just had aneurysms because they’re already… They’re like, “But natural law doesn’t do what he’s about to say it does. Actually, you should look at the natural law theorists who don’t commit the appeal to nature fallacies, this guy is such an idiot.” I’m gonna just preempt all of them, and say, “Look, I get it, I waited through that swamp for a very long time, I understand there are all sorts of ways in which natural means variously things like rational means, say all kinds of stuff, and there are all sorts of ways in which natural law theorists have very sophisticated accounts of what they mean and how it doesn’t commit the appeal to nature fallacy. But long story short, I don’t think they get out of it, even Aristotle doesn’t get out of it. At some point, an assumption sneaks in that the natural form of a thing is normative, it just… It always happens. I have not yet seen a natural law theorist that doesn’t allow that back in, and even if the theorist themselves don’t make that mistake, on the ground, that’s how it plays out again and again. These are really clear in Catholic teachings on reproduction, for example.

0:36:27.6 Alan Levinovitz: So, if you look through papal statements on reproduction and what constitutes good forms of reproduction and sexuality and bad ones, naturalness in the garden variety, biological sense of what is natural is always threaded through there. And so if what natural law is, or at least the way I would talk about it, the idea that, in the form of things as they exist without human intention, we can find normative claims about how people ought to be. I just think that’s a bad… It’s a bad way of figuring out morality, that’s just not… It’s not a good approach. There are all sorts of ways in which humans are naturally… That are fine to dispense with and reproduction is the case, I think is a really good one, is a really good example of where I just think it’s obvious that some kind of control over reproduction is a good… It’s a human good. And so where you end up in the Catholic church, in my opinion, at least.

0:37:34.9 Alan Levinovitz: And this was true in the ’60s, the Catholic church had no idea what to do, they like the rhythm method, it was a great blessing because it meant that they could finally allow people to be able to control their reproduction, but they also had to say something like, “Well, the natural end of reproduction is babies.” So then you got in this big mess, which was, well, why is it the case as one… I think it was [0:37:54.1] ____ Mencken quipped that you can use mathematics but not chemistry as birth control. And I think it’s a really interesting point. Of course, neither of these is natural, neither the rhythm method which was only revealed by God in the 20th century, or condoms are natural. And so for me, the best way to get around these objections is to just sidestep that as a kind of source of norms and just talk about what’s good for people, is this good for people or bad for people? Does it achieve the ends we wanted to achieve? You can make all kinds of arguments against birth control, that don’t involve some kind of secret deduction of norms from the way humans naturally are.

0:38:34.6 Trevor Burrus: All this sort of poll of natural thinking about natural and organic and authentic things in our head, seems like it creates, or can create some pretty bad government policies in terms of the kind of things that people demand, you mentioned birth control. Environmentalism seems like a place where people live there too, enamored with thinking about what’s natural versus what’s not natural, they might get caught up in bad policies. There’s a pretty good debate over whether or not paper bags or plastic bags are better for the environment because of the transportation costs of paper bags versus the… You can just fit a bunch more plastic bags on a truck, but it’s paper, it’s natural, so that seems like it’s good, so people are gonna vote for paper. Those are just a few that pops in my head. Is there any other places where you think that these kind of fallacies really lead government policy astray?

0:39:27.6 Alan Levinovitz: I think the classic… Not classic. I mean, classic makes it sound old, but a very relevant contemporary example is nuclear power. Even people who were sort of previously anti… I think middle of the road people are starting to… IPCC guidelines all assume nuclear power is gonna be a part of a clean energy bill. And I think, again, understandably, that nuclear power represented a kind of hubris. If you think about genetic modification and nuclear power, two sides of the same coin, and here’s what I mean, it’s like these basic building blocks of reality in the human… In organisms it’s DNA, and in the world it’s the atom. And I think there is a sense that we are playing God when we intervene at this very basic level of construction, it’s both epistemically opaque for a lot of people, it’s really hard to understand what it would even mean to get energy out of an atom, or to modify DNA, in a way that breeding animals is pretty obvious or burning a log seems pretty obvious. And so, solar energy also feels epistemically transparent, even though it’s actually very technological, the batteries that are used are extremely…

0:40:38.0 Alan Levinovitz: We’re not even there yet, we’re still trying to develop these technologies. But you look at the panels, you hear the word “solar,” you look at the wind farm and you think, “Oh, wind in my hair, sun on my skin, I get how that works, nuclear seems like playing God, I associate it with bombs.” I think there’s a lot of good debate to be had about the place of nuclear energy in an environmentally-​friendly energy package, but for a long time, that place was denied, simply because it was perceived as incredibly unnatural, the glowing green slime. And I’m no expert, I’m not an expert on nuclear energy, what I’m an expert on is how forms of rhetoric, in quasi-​religious rhetoric in this case, can distort our understanding of science, and this happens with natural immunity and vaccines, it happens with natural energy… Natural gas, solar and wind, versus nuclear. And so again, this is just yet another context in which I think if we got over our attachment, metaphysical attachment to the idea that natural is good, we would just be able to think more clearly, which is what we want as we approach these very complicated problems that affect all of us.

[music]

0:42:07.0 Aaron Powell: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.

[music]