Nature
Note: “Nature, Order, and Progress” is one essay, but after seeing the sheer size of the document, I thought the responsible thing to do was to divide it into three parts. The next installment will be out soon. Enjoy!
At the beginning of the fall semester, which began at the tail end of August, I took the train to my university. It was a four-hour ride, and I stayed on campus for a few days for orientation. Since the rest of my classes are online, I can take them from home and not make the voyage that would end up eating a third of my day.
I’ve never made that journey before. I was keenly looking outside the window as I always do on long trips, quietly envying every person on board on their laptop or head buried in a book — not plagued by the specific dizzying nausea that motion sickness evokes. My limited options of media to engage with do tend to make me more attentive to my surroundings, however.
Satisfied with having said their piece, heavy bulbous rainclouds from the night before were making their exit. There were still a few noncommittally lingering in the slightly desaturated blue sky, though not many enough to interrupt the late morning sun making everything glimmer. I’ve always appreciated how vibrant everything becomes after rainfall; I half expect the colors to run off with the droplets, like it would with a wet painting.
When the train slowed down as it was nearing the next stop, the scenery changed from quiet deep valleys, rivers, and agricultural patches to a bustling construction site. Right between the busy city and the idyllic open landscape, suburban housing was being built.
I felt my expectation of disapproval looming over me. The tall fences, cinder blocks, and dust clouds from the construction work — it should've been out of place in this beautiful nature, but I couldn’t bring myself to commit to this frustration. The construction workers, with their bright orange boiler suits, were a welcome addition to the scenery. We rolled past them during their lunch break, a few scattered on the grass underneath a tree engaging in passionate conversation. Others were sitting on a few rocks on the hill, feet dangling, quietly eating their lunches, some out of a tupperware, others enjoying their store-bought wrapped sandwiches.
This impulse to condemn was no doubt intensified by having watched Jonas Čeika’s video essay on Miyazaki and Heidegger. He draws specifically from Heidegger’s essay The Question Concerning Technology to show how Miyazaki’s romantic portrayal of nature is often accompanied by a stark critique of its reckless destruction through various technologies. I enjoyed Čeika’s analysis, not only for the impressively drawn parallel between the two, but also for how he left out the painful jargon that normally accompanies Heidegger.
Heidegger’s famous essay details the potential dangers tied to the uncritical use of technology. Mainly, he believed that it can alienate us from the world by shackling it to a single mode of being. This enframement, as he called it, makes us believe that there is only one way for reality to be, effectively obfuscating the plurality of possibilities that exist. Heidegger didn’t believe that technology was inherently good or bad, but rather that the danger is, as Rauno Huttunen and Leena Kakkori put it, that this truth of representational-calculative thinking becomes the only truth.
If we use a car as an example, which sole function is to get us from A to B quickly and efficiently, this tool might obfuscate other matters that we value — like the joy of going for a walk. For a more contemporary example, Google Maps might obfuscate other routes we would’ve enjoyed taking; a route that is perhaps longer, but more scenic. Or more importantly, opting out of using the app could strengthen our sense of direction and familiarity with where we happen to be. This is how technology can obfuscate: that it presents itself as not as the only option, but as the best one in a taken-for-granted manner.
Furthermore, such technology treats the earth’s resources as a “standing reserve”, like an infinite tap of energy that merely exists as fuel for our endeavors. It is through grasping the essence of what technology itself is that we avoid enslaving these resources, and simultaneously, not become enslaved by the singular reality this technology presents.
Heidegger spoke fondly of convivial technologies like windmills, or crafts such as woodworking. These kinds of technologies allow for more autonomy and creativity. The wind powers the mill at its whim; the distinctiveness of the wood becomes evident in our transforming it into a tool. As illustrated by Čeika, these can be found in abundance in Miyazaki’s movies.
It’s easy enough to agree with Heidegger here, especially if you're suspicious of today's rapidly growing tech industry. Most of us are struggling to wrap our minds around them as we are forced to adopt them in every area of our lives. The danger of what we might be losing in this adaptation is something many have become pondering over.
Others are tempted to take more drastic measures, like for instance rejecting modernity and embracing a traditional lifestyle; just like those depicted in Miyazaki’s movies. This much is evident by observing cultural fads such as cottage-core or tradwifery.
However, this traditional, natural state of the past has been overly simplified. Ruth Schwartz Cowan notes that the very idea of the self-sufficient rural family might only exist in the reveries of sociologists. Phenomena such as agriculture and bartering did exist, of course, but these narratives willfully leave out parts that coexisted with them — exactly because they do not fit with this overarching narrative.
The consequences of operating on such simplified narratives became evident when the US saw a surge of so-called hippie communes during the 60s. The way Jenny Odell tells it in How to Do Nothing, these people were sick of the demands of modernity, particularly its violent patriotism and capitalism. They fled the cities in droves and created their own little isolated hubs. These hubs were modeled by this prairie-like lifestyle: They bought land which they would live off of, grew their own food, made their own clothes, foraged, bartered, and whatever else.
Nevertheless, these communes still resided in 20th century America, and they had to participate in the economy to a certain degree in order to get by. Some worked regular jobs, others were using their trust fund money. The complexities of starting over quickly became evident, and it stoked disillusionment and bitterness in many. Those who financed these projects felt they were owed more than the others. Soon enough, these communes either lapsed into the very hierarchical and capitalist logic they sought to escape, or disbanded altogether when the first symptoms of this appeared.
My lack of faith in the back-to-nature approach is not rooted in its historical inaccuracy, nor in how others have failed to properly apply it. Often while looking into tech criticism that posits a traditional lifestyle as a solution, an instinctual skepticism rises in me. It's the same feeling I got while watching Midsommar1, or when encountering some strains of dad rock, or when someone unironically suggests how amazing it would be to live in the 50s.
It’s worth asking what exactly we are yearning for when we romanticize the past, as well as whose vision of the good ol’ days we are utilizing.2 For instance, it is difficult to forget how Heidegger wrote this essay after he was kicked out of the university he was working at during the post-WWII denazification process.
But the dubious nature of back-to-nature as the antidote to our technological ills became particularly evident to me while looking into the Unabomber last summer. It stoked a strong dissonance and unease in me, seeing how his bigotry was seamlessly weaved into many contemporary tech critical elements: anti-capitalism, a desire to return to simpler times, to have a symbiotic relationship with nature, and of course, a deep disdain for modernity and its tools.
Many counterarguments can be explored here.3 But to me, the more interesting problem with this argument, which was prompted by the observation I made while on the train, is whether or not it is even possible to go back to nature. Why do we assume we ever left?
I’ll explore this in the next installment. In the meantime, this quote from Frantz Fanon summarizes my feelings about the matter of nature quite succinctly:
No, it is not a question of back to nature. It is the very basic question of not dragging man in directions which mutilate him, of not imposing on his brain tempos that rapidly obliterate and unhinge it.
I like Noor Al-Sibai analysis of the movie's Nordic white supremacist overtones, as well as Kaiya Shunyata’s deep dive into the “good for her” meme. note that the issue here is not the movie, but people identifying with the horrors depicted instead of finding them...you know. horrifying.
As a child of immigrants, the idea of such an escape has admittedly never been enticing. it sits too close to the notion that my needs are too demanding, and I have to go back to where I come from to fulfill them, even though where I come from is here. Of course, I don’t mean here to mean a sort of self-hating blind patriotism, but an acknowledgment of where I happen to be situated. It is, as Dubie Toa-Kwapong said while quoting McKittrick:
[being] routinely reminded that we do not “make sense” in this geographical context, a practice that Katherine McKittrick describes in her writing about Blackness in Canada as “allowing the idea of the cold land to determine the natural place or placelessness of black diaspora communities.” We are often made to feel that we should be grateful, for we have been welcomed into a land in which Black people are “unacceptably impossible or geographically inappropriate”—among a people who purportedly have nothing to do with why we are displaced, why we have come to be here.
First, this approach is inherently neglectful. It isn’t really a solution, but a silly attempt to do a temporal U-turn. Not only shouldn’t we run away from our problems, but it is impossible to leave modernity behind in any sense. You cannot rid yourself of when you are.
Second, it is inherently reactionary. It finds it home in negation, that the solution simply must be the opposite of whatever is causing the problem: If technology is bad, then nature must be good. As if there are no more details tucked underneath this oppositional logic that bears further inspection.
Finally, it is adopting a readily available answer instead of accepting that figuring things out is a neverending process. The desire for a single, static, universal answer reveals that we have not adequately gotten rid of the very mechanical thinking we seek to escape. Adopting this cognitive shortcut will only lead us back to where we started — as perfectly demonstrated by the aforementioned hippies.