'Natural'

What does it mean to say something is natural? Does it mean hills and valleys, wildflowers and singing birds? Are GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) natural? If not, what about seedless fruits? Is contraception unnatural? If yes, what about 'natural' preventative measures?

I see more and more people across a wide range of fields advocating 'natural' products, processes and attitudes as being better than 'artificial' ones, ranging from the peddlers of alternative medicines to anti-industrialists, and from the anti-GMO movement to the controversy over how long to breast-feed for. At base, though we're talking about a lot of different movements, some more rational than others, these views all have in common the idea that 'natural' means 'good' or 'better'. Let's call this view 'naturalism'.

I find naturalism utterly abhorrent, a preposterous distortion of language, culture, and in most cases also science and truth. I'm only going to focus on the part of the problem - language - that I'm qualified to talk about, though necessarily I'll touch on the others as I go.

So what does 'natural' mean? Presumably, it means 'like nature' or 'nature-like'. But what is nature like, besides immensely varied? It's true that from a distance, nature generally seems tranquil, harmonious and beautiful, but I doubt a vole in the claws of a hawk feels that way - and I doubt you'd feel that way with your skin covered in smallpox blisters.

Of course, the problem isn't really what we call 'natural'; it's what we call, either directly or by implication, 'unnatural'. Personally, I think there's no good way of making this distinction (or rather, no useful way of doing so), but even if there is, I don't think 'natural' comes out of it meaning 'better'.

What we really mean when we say something is 'unnatural', of course, is that it goes against (its) nature. Now, the only way to go against nature is by choice - by free will (I'm taking this as a matter of definition - the only other ways a thing can behave are randomly or causally determined, and both of these are fundamentally natural). So if a thing is to be considered unnatural, it must be a product of choice rather than causal law or randomness.

I don't think this is out of touch with how we normally use the term. The things we regard as most 'artificial' - meaning 'unnatural, but not necessarily in a way we hate' - are those which require the most complicated decision-making; the development of modern technologies that take a huge number of detailed individual choices to invent and assemble.

But all the best features of human society are the products of choice. The poetry of Keats, the music of Bach, the philosophy of Leibniz, the physics of Einstein, the biology of Watson and Crick, and so on. Our greatest achievements and inventions are, in this sense, unnatural - flying to the moon, eradicating smallpox, training to the point of running the 100m in nine and a half seconds.

And it's worse than that, too, if we look at what elements of humanity we consider natural. What is human nature? We invoke human nature when bemoaning the selfish, the greedy, the cruel, the small-minded, the hateful, the tribal. When we speak of human nature, we speak of the caveman, the atavistic savage. Or we speak of some of the worst people in our society as 'unable to restrain their base natures', from paedophiles and psychopaths to 'testosterone-addled' bankers.

So if 'natural' is good, human beings are trapped coming and going. Either we behave unnaturally (and thus, according to naturalism, badly) or we give in to our base and horrible natures. We are doomed to evil either way.

This is why I find naturalism so abhorrent. It repudiates or denies all human goodness. Look at the great moral values of human society - justice, mercy, democracy, art and so on. I can think of only two which appear in nature: innovation and compassion, and the innovation of nature is in its arms race; its compassion is purely tribal.

I'm not, by the way, claiming that we shouldn't be more environmentally conscious and conscientious in our actions, particularly at the level of national and international policy. I just don't think that branding 'unnatural' or 'artificial' as 'evil' is a good idea - if nothing else, saving nature from our own worst excesses is going to require huge artificial processes.

And there's a clue here. It's in our interests to treat the environment well because 'nature' is simply the combination of us and our environment. We are part of nature. After all, it's perfectly plausible to argue that free (or at least rational) choice is part of our nature, and if we do this, then our choices are part of nature too.

Nature, like us, can be staggeringly cruel and merciless. It can be destructive and murderous. It knows no fairness, only the rule of might - the strong and the lucky survive, the rest live in fear until they die. Very few human deeds equal the horror of those species of parasite wasp that lay their eggs inside still-living beetles so their young can eat their way out. Few if any human deeds equal the scale of death from smallpox.

Our civilisation, with all its triumphs and terrors, is natural, or at least a mirror to nature. My point is not that we should not worry about morals, or that we should not be ecologically responsible. My point is only that the natural-unnatural distinction is arbitrary, at best unnecessary and at worst pernicious and nihilistic about human culture.

Speccy

This seems to be typical of the growing hubbub around Google Glass. Pretty much every article I've read about it has been positive on the functionality - I've certainly seen no complaints from anyone who's actually used the thing - but everyone seems to start and finish by saying something along the lines of 'but would you really be willing to be seen out in public wearing one?'

Before I get into the meat of my problem with this response, there are a few remarks it's worth making. Firstly, there is a legitimate worry over privacy with Glass when it goes live - I can foresee incidents (and there are anecdotes of things like this already) where people object to talking to someone wearing Glass because there's no way to tell if they're filming or not. It's tempting to dismiss these people as the 21st-century equivalent of that old chestnut about 'savages' fearing the cameras of the white man because they seemed to take a piece of their soul, but there is a legitimate concern here (though personally, I feel modern culture is more than a little too obsessed with its privacy). That's not what I want to talk about today, though, since I haven't yet worked out exactly where I stand on the issue.

The other two things I want to point out have more to do with why I think this worrying over image is just hot air to fill column inches. First off, I know a fair number of musicians, and an increasing number of them have forsworn discreet, unobtrusive in-ear earphones for their iPods and what have you, because the sound quality and comfort are much better on a full headset (I'd probably do the same, to be honest, except that I basically never use an mp3 player for anything). The versions of Glass that currently exist all seem far less visible than a massive Sennheiser headset.

Secondly, there's been some speculation over whether Glass can do anything really useful, or whether it will just be a luxury toy. I don't think we'd be seeing any doubts about aesthetics without this more basic doubt, but the basic doubt seems to me a hopelessly out-of-touch, backward-thinking phenomenon. It sounds altogether too much like the scepticism over smartphones five years ago, or personal computers twenty-five.

We have no idea what Glass is capable of once unleashed. We won't really know until it's been out for a few months. But I guarantee you this; within a year of its release, there will be people - probably a huge number - as absolutely reliant on Glass as they are now on their smartphones. Within five years, Glass (and whatever competitors for it Sony and Apple dream up) will be as common as smartphones. As far as I'm concerned, the success of Glass, and the disappearance of complaints about its appearance, are inevitable.

So why, even in top-line tech commentary, is there so much fuss over the way Glass looks? I can't remember ever hearing so much negativity about the look of a product in its prerelease hype. In some quarters, the aesthetic seems to be the sole negative anyone mentions.

I'll grant that most Apple products have a heavy (and, frankly, ludicrous) hype over their elegant aesthetics as a selling point (because they've got to find some way to shift their control-freakery and overpricing), but mostly our technology is utilitarian at best in the aesthetic department, and the subject doesn't come up.

Again, headphones are relevant; it's the only other time I can remember any doubts about aesthetics coming up, and that case is rather different - headphone technology started for the purposes of things like studio recording, then made the jump to streetwear (and yes, only after some significant work was done on aesthetics - my dad has an old pair of headphones, probably from the late 70s or early 80s, that I definitely wouldn't be willing to wear in public, but then they weren't designed for public use).

I probably wouldn't be bothered by this question nearly so much if I wasn't a lifelong myopic. I was first prescribed glasses for distance reading at age 7 after complaining of finding the blackboard hard to read in class. Less than a year later, I was in glasses full-time, putting them on when I woke up and taking them off only to shower or go back to bed. I'd have worn them in the shower too, except that glasses covered in water and/or steam are worse than even my near-useless natural lenses.

Of course, that meant being on the receiving end of all the familiar name-calling at school (seen this, by the way?) - 'foureyes', 'speccy', 'nerd' etc. It feels to me like all these doubts about Glass come from the same sentiment, the idea that there's something wrong with wearing glasses (that's not to say I won't get my eyes lasered as and when I can afford it - I stick to my guns).

And I kind of hoped we were past this as a culture. Up to a third of the population of the world are myopic, depending on the estimate used. That makes it possibly the most widespread disability in the species (and, though normally mild and easily re-enabled, it is an impairment). And for most of the last fifteen years, the world's richest man has been a bespectacled nerd, while the products he created and the revolution they led have transformed our lives in ways that beggar thought.

Why are we still worrying about this? I have real trouble understanding why anyone, looking at Glass, doesn't immediately think 'Oh, wow, COOL. I wonder what they'll think of to do with that?' (Okay, I get that some people will see it and respond with fear - 'what will people do to me with that?' - but that's got nothing to do with aesthetics either).

I take small comfort, though, in the knowledge that as a speccy, I have nothing to lose by getting Glass. I'll be getting Glassed as soon as I can afford glasses with the technology built-in or clipped-on. Of course, since Google seem intent on making a deal with some designer label to provide high-end prescription Glass glasses, it'll probably be a while before I can afford the tech (I wish Google would instead sell a clip-on model, even if it's a clip-on that requires complicated calibration in a shop somewhere, since designer spectacle frames are one of the most pointless and extravagant wastes of money on the high street).

My New Favourite Word: Extropianism

I've mentioned before that I work in disability support for students. In one particular case these past three months (and I have to be quite careful how I talk about it, because the assignment's ongoing and there's client confidentiality to protect), I've been working in disability support for a student studying special educational needs and disabilities. This has been rather mind-bending from my point of view, and I'm going to talk a bit about one of the ways in which it's bent my mind today.

As part of this assignment, I've attended a series of lectures about media representation of disabilities, during which it's been explained in some detail that 'the media', in general, handles disability very badly. Representations of disabled people as weak, pitiful, burdensome and so on are bad enough, but there's also something quite damaging about the 'disabled person triumphs over adversity to live a 'normal' life' kind of stories that we see quite often in local and some national news outlets.

The fundamental, underlying point of these lectures, as I've understood it, is that treating physiological and psychological impairments as illnesses to be cured or overcome is in itself discriminatory and prejudiced. It sets up an arbitrary standard of 'normality' according to which some people are 'deficient'.

And this is an entirely valid point. These kind of frameworks and attitudes, which are referred to as the 'medical model' of disability, are damaging and hurtful. We should be doing everything we can to overturn them in ourselves and in society generally. But there's another side to it which I'm much less comfortable with, and it's taken me a while to figure out why.

The idea has been floated in several of these lectures that impairments ('disabilities' is actually the wrong term, for reasons I'll get to in a minute) should be celebrated as a form of human diversity. The most extreme form of this was the suggestion that a disabled parent legitimately could or even should wish for a child who shared their disability. There's a complex debate in there, and there are rational arguments on both sides, but I have to admit that the first time the idea was mooted, I felt an immediate and visceral revulsion for it - not a rational argument, but that was my response. For that reason, I'll wait to get into that issue until I'm a bit more detached from it.

Let's stay with the broader theme for now instead. The key idea here is what's called the 'social model' of disability (proposed in the 1970s as a rebuke to the medical model), which says that, though physiological and psychological impairments are matters of undeniable fact, to regard them as disabilities is wrong. A disability occurs only when some action is socially established as normal despite the fact that some people are impaired in their ability to perform that action. So to be disabled is for society to declare you inadequate to some task, not anything inherent in you.

I have some minor semantic quibbles with the social model, but I think it's fundamentally sound, and a vast improvement on previous approaches. It puts the obligation for providing support to the impaired exactly where it belongs - on the society that otherwise pushes these people to the margins.

The social model lets us look at impairments from a much more appropriate perspective in the here and now. It tells us that we shouldn't let doctors and experts decide what disabled people want from life - instead, the experts should be treating disabled people as adults capable of making their own decisions. If this sounds absurd, it's no more than exactly what those of us without significant impairments expect when we go to the doctor.

If I go to a doctor to complain of the disruptive effect of my near-chronic rhinitis (yes, I've been to the doctor's several times for a runny nose. You don't get to object to this until you've listened to me rant for at least ten minutes about how unpleasant it can get), or to an optician to get glasses so that I can still see despite severe myopia, I don't expect them to start trying to organise my life for me. I want the quickest and simplest solutions that will allow me to live the life I want.

And, generally, I get it. Historically, this is absolutely not how disabilities have been treated by  the medical establishment and society in general. Score more points for the social model.

The problem comes when we look ahead, to the technological advances we can expect over the coming century (not to mention some which are pretty much already here). I've touched on this issue before, but it's time to go at it more head-on, thanks to my new favourite word: Extropianism.

An extropian is someone who believes that an essential part of future human progress is taking control of our own evolution; rejecting the genetic lottery and modifying our bodies as we see fit. For purposes of this post, the aspect of extropianism I am interested in is the idea that we should never be happy with the way our bodies are. Bit of a contrast to the way we normally think about body modification, no?

I'm not saying we should all immediately go and get plastic surgery. This isn't about what our bodies look like; it's about what they can do. The idea of modifying your body for aesthetic purposes isn't completely without merit, but modifying it just to fit some arbitrary idea of how a person 'should' look is not justifiable.

The reason I like the word so much (apart from the fact that it's just a cool word) is that, quite without knowing it, I've been an extropian most of my philosophical life. I'm very much against the idea that we should bow to the dictates of nature when they get in our way.

I could be trite and argue at this point that to an extropian proponent of the social model of disability, we're all disabled and thus shouldn't be discriminating in any way against anyone else, but the actual thrust of my argument is a bit more individual and internal. Speaking to each of you as individuals, whatever the quirks of your body and its capabilities, I say that if your body stops you doing something you want to do, change it, or at least look forward to the day you can change it. Don't resign yourself to any limit on your abilities, and certainly don't celebrate it as a form of diversity.

I don't have anything that society would class as a disability, but I'm short-sighted, I have mild tinnitus, and I have chronic rhinitis which is a bigger disruption than the other two put together. Given the option, I'd be shot of all three in a second (though I admit I'd be very self-conscious without glasses). But also, given the choice, I'd like flight-capable wings and the ability to plug my brain directly into the internet. I fit all those choices into the same category.

My basic point is this: if you take it as a principle that you should celebrate and therefore maintain the physiological limits that birth puts on you, whatever those limits are, then you have to reject the whole possibility of extropian progress. The debate between the social and medical models of disability is a small but important sub-debate in the debate between extropianism and its opposite, which is sometimes called 'bioconservatism', but for our purposes we can simply call 'naturalism'. We have to be careful what principles the disability debate leads us towards.