Note: This opinion is part of a point-counterpoint responding to: “Every summer, hundreds of boating enthusiasts in the US drown as a direct result of drunken negligence. Is this Darwinism taking its course, or should we work harder to protect people from their own poor judgement?” See Ashton Cermak’s response.
Nature no longer has a place in dictating the affairs of humans. Human life is growing up in a world outside of the natural one.
The human world is increasingly focused on the informational technologies that fuel economy. As nature has no place in this informational epoch of humanity, humanity has no place in the affairs of nature.
Natural selection simply doesn’t work for a species that lives artificially. Humans must pose rules so that nature can’t destroy our most precious qualities, curiosity and wonderment.
Quite the reverse, for humans are much better at imposing purpose and design on nature than nature ever was. One look around at any city, those pinnacles of humanity, will tell you that.
In a city, wholly-built and designed by those nature revisionists, humans, the roads and buildings are erected from materials found in nature, but bettered by human.
For in a city, nature serves a purpose! Human affairs and businesses are conducted best in cities, where nature can’t interfere with the natural course of human life. Perhaps as an item of novelty, nature is posited in parks and gardens of a city.
Nature is such a seductive force in the lives of human kind. It was mystery posited by nature for which human kind was so compulsively curious that we had to develop our standard model of physics, and calculus, and geology and other sciences so as we could cope with confusion over the purpose of our existence, to which we’re so poignantly aware of.
These naive compulsions and curiosities are the forces that drive humanity to scientific inquiry and hypothesis; things that will drive our information-based society and boost our economy. However, the naïve compulsions and curiosities of humanity are also what the destructive forces of nature prey on.
What if a child was looking over the edge of a bridge at the turbulent waters rushing by in the river below, and had no parental protection to keep him from diving into those intoxicatingly mysterious depths?
The child is naturally curious about such powerful phenomenon, and how is his curiosity any different than a physicist’s, whose curiosity is on the nature of black holes? The only obvious difference is that the river poses an immediate danger, while a black hole is too far to be a real danger to the physicist.
With the increasingly informational technology-based existence of humankind, the jeopardy imposed by nature on us is reinstated.
For this new epoch will develop and enrich an individual to follow any curiosities he’s compelled by, and as he’ll be spending most of his time on the internet or other artificial worlds, his understanding of the natural world, and all the dangers it posits, will fade from lack of use.
Humans need to increase their role in the security of their survival. Danger lurks not only in the unknown elements of future, and the economical stake we may or may not have in the exploding information age.
We forget to remember old faces of the unknown, in that of nature, which has always been human’s first and foremost mystery. It was in solving that mystery, that humanity opened up so man y more.