Is Nature a Brute?

Over at GreenInk, there's been an interesting discussion about cougars, wolves, nature, ranchers, human society and the planet. In arguing that the natural order isn't all it's cracked up to be, one comment suggests that nature can be brutish. My response? In strictly human terms, one could certainly look at it that way.

During the discussion, it was pointed out that people die from preventable disease and, though it may not be "natural" to try to prevent such, it was incumbent on society to attempt to do so. In this way, this particular commentator was trying to show that nature itself could well be improved upon.

From my standpoint, I think the problem with such an argument is bound up in this person's understanding of natural process. By nature, humans have been bestowed with the capacities to think sequentially and to formulate complex thoughts. We are thus able to understand, in a limited way, the workings of the human body and those behaviors, environmental stresses and organisms that might injure or conquer our bodies.

Therefore, it is not unnatural in the least for humans to try prevent disease. In fact, because all beings develop mechanisms to try to insure their very survival, it would go against nature if we did not try to prevent the destruction of our species.

Still, with all that said, it does not negate the question of whether or not nature or life itself can be brutish.

Things happen in our lives that we don't understand. A child is born with a debilitating condition (to read a marvelous book that deals with one family's struggle to understand their child's disabilities, I highly recommend you read Aidan's Way) or dies at a young age. A person happens to be in, what we call, the wrong place at the wrong time and dies tragically. A person, in the prime of their life, is struck down by a horrible disease or is waylayed by circumstances.

If such events involve people we know and/or love, the personal pain that we feel can often be brutish. There's no way to get around this and I'm not saying such feelings are trivial. They bore deep into our beings and sear us with a burning sword.

Once the immediacy of the pain has tempered, it's important to step back to realize that our personal tragedy fits somehow into the wide mosaic of reality. While it may seem senseless to us -- primarily because we have a most provincial view of the whole of reality -- it fits in to the constant ebb and flow of nature, that process that seeks to harmonize all life.

Some may say that's not very comforting. I guess it all depends on one's perspective. Personally, I've never found any solace at all in the Christian notion that the reason a person dies tragically is due to "God's" plan. Since no one seems to know what that plan entails, I don't see how that removes the brutish feelings one experiences.

In the end, there is no way fully to escape the human perspective of the brutishness of death, whether it be tragic or merely inevitable.

In the world of sentient beings, everything eventually dies. In other words, from the standpoint of nature (Tao, the Way) it's truly not brutish at all.

It just is.

[At a later time, I'll discuss if death is something we must necessarily fear.]