In the cleavage of nature / culture

The Times' "Week in Review" section had some duelling banjos going on. On one page, it cited an essay on sustainability from spiked-online stating that "Environmentalism can be seen as a counterattack against a key premise of the Enlightenment: that a central part of progress consists of increasing human control over nature." It's a good old argument: man is set off from nature by consciousness, and therefore should seek to surmount nature wherever possible. Culture over nature.

On the Times' next page, in an article about whether kids should be encouraged to achieve or whether they should all be tracked together, some woman from the American Enterprise Institute weighed in that schools should let boys play at Lord of the Flies because "boys are hard-wired to compete." Now, her techno-metaphor notwithstanding, this is nature over culture. Culture can't hold the natural alpha dog-testosterone forces of these little boys back.

They're both on the Right, but they're arguing at cross purposes.

It would be easy enough to end there, and say that the Right needs to get its act straight on the nature / culture question. But the fact is that rare is the person who takes a consistent stand. Everyone is always negotiating some sort of compromise between nature and culture. Say you drive a Prius. You're still despoiling the environment. Is it defensible to drive it to the grocery store but not the convenience store because of unit environmental impact? People actually think about this stuff, but they're always arriving at compromises. The Unabomber was probably as good an example of a naturalist purist as your going to find, and look at him. At the other end of the spectrum, science fiction has thematized, from Blade Runner to Spock to C3P0 and R2D2 and onward, the persistence of an irrational human element in the machine and machine-like. And it is always the irrational that provides a hope of salvation and transcendence.

So nature / culture is a continuous sliding scale. The problem is when you start trying to build policy off of it.