by Steven Poole
British MP Robin Cook explained the recklessness of the ‘resource’ view in the following way:
The market is incapable of respecting a common resource such as the environment, which provides no price signal to express the cost of its erosion nor to warn of the long-term dangers of its destruction. Yet every participant in the market will experience a loss in their quality of life if the cumulative effect of their activities is to degrade their common environment.84
Of course, environmental degradation will affect all human beings and all animals, not just ‘every participant in the market’; and thinking of the environment as a ‘resource’, as Cook termed it, is a symptom of the problem that he was decrying. Probably Cook realised this, however: he was addressing his argument to the blithe consumers of ‘natural resources’, and casting it in their own vocabulary.
To call what will not necessarily spring up again a ‘resource’, then, calms any shadowy anxieties about degradation, and also implies our right to do as we wish with it. Adding the term ‘natural’ reinforces this latter point, suggesting not just a right of use but the healthy duty to use. What is ‘natural’, after all, must be good for us and the planet as a whole. ‘Natural resources’ are part of Nature’s gracious bounty; and to use them is only natural.
Consider a further Unspeak use of the concept of ‘nature’ in the term ‘natural gas’. Since ‘gas’ already meant gasoline in the US, the burnable gas trapped under the earth’s surface was christened ‘natural gas’: the addition of the term ‘natural’ had the further helpful effect of making gas seem somehow purer and cleaner than other fossil fuels, even though oil and coal were just as natural. Fossil-fuel companies deliberately played on this deceptive language in advertising new drilling for gas as a virtuous development. A 2005 ChevronTexaco advertisement described natural gas as being ‘one of the most environmentally friendly fuels in the world. It produces almost no emissions of sulfur dioxide or particulates and leaves no solid waste behind, which means less impact on air and water quality.’85
A sceptical reader might have observed that the advertisement, for what it also called a ‘cleaner fuel’, made no mention of carbon dioxide, the main contributor to human-caused global warming. And for good reason: this ‘cleaner’, ‘environmentally friendly’ fuel emits only 29 per cent less carbon dioxide than oil for the same heat output, and actually gives off 20 per cent more carbon monoxide.86 Furthermore, when ‘natural gas’ leaks into the air, its main ingredient, methane, is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. According to a 1999 US government report, methane amounted to only 0.5 per cent of US emissions but was responsible for fully 10 per cent of the total emissions’ greenhouse effect.87 ‘Natural gas’ was, after all, no friend to nature.
The template of ‘natural resources’ must, further, be to blame for the modern barbarism of the corporate term ‘human resources’. To call human beings ‘resources’, firstly, is to deny their existence as individuals, since any one person will not spring up again once worn out; instead, people are ‘resources’ only insofar as they are thought of as a breeding population, like rabbits or chickens. ‘Human resources’, first recorded in 1961, eventually succeeded the term ‘manpower’ in business parlance:88 the effect was merely to replace a crude sexism with a more generalised rhetorical violence. People considered as ‘human resources’ are mere instruments of a higher will. Compare the Nazi vocabulary of ‘human material’ (Menschenmaterial) and ‘liquidation’ (liquidieren, recasting murder as the realisation of profit):89 if ‘natural resources’ evinces merely a blithe disregard for the environment, ‘human resources’ contains an echo of totalitarian Unspeak.
The grain of Nature
Still, we all loved ‘nature’. Of all words, wrote the urbane philosopher David Hume, ‘there is none more ambiguous and equivocal’.90 In the twenty-first century it remained one of those terms wrestled over by everyone, regardless of their attitude to what it denoted, because it automatically evoked pleasant feelings. It worked in the same way as the splendidly Unspeak name of environmental group Friends of the Earth, or even Greenpeace – for who did not like green stuff, or peace?
‘Nature’ was a hotly contested term, too, in debates over biotechnology. Was the genetic engineering of crops or embryos an example of man playing God, interfering with ‘nature’, indulging in ‘unnatural’ perversity? Or was it, on the contrary, simply the latest stage in ‘nature’s’ understanding of itself? Even if you thought the term ‘nature’ was unhelpful, it was hard to get away from it completely. In a report on genetically modified crops, a British think tank, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, stated:
The ‘natural/unnatural’ distinction is one of which few practising scientists can make much sense. Whatever occurs, whether in a field or a test tube, occurs as the result of natural processes, and can, in principle, be explained in terms of natural science.91
The authors, having decided that the natural-versus-unnatural distinction is senseless, nonetheless found themselves appealing to a concept of the ‘natural’ in order to defend science. But their claim that everything done by science is perforce ‘natural’ allowed the conclusion that, say, grafting a human ear on to a mouse’s back is perfectly natural. This may strike some people as a stretch. Yet it is merely a version of the old idea that, since humans are part of nature, anything they do must be natural: it is in principle impossible for their actions to be unnatural.
But if ‘natural’ describes everything that occurs in the universe, including the behaviour of people, it follows that it is impossible for anything to be unnatural. As Hume pointed out, even if a supernatural miracle occurs, then it has emerged in the realm of empirical reality, and so could be considered ‘natural’ too. ‘Natural science’ does not imply any notion of ‘unnatural’ science but only distinguishes itself from social science or political science. Meanwhile, there can be no other kinds of ‘processes’ apart from what the Nuffield authors call ‘natural processes’, since they happen in fields and test tubes alike. Used like this, the term ‘natural’ loses its primary antonym and so ceases to contain any real meaning at all, apart from a residual intimation of virtue.
Once ‘natural’ is thus emptied of discriminatory meaning, it may happily be used in biotech PR. Another Unspeak smoking gun, for example, comes from the Asian Food Information Centre, a company funded by the biotech food and agriculture industry whose mission is to ‘provide sound science-based information on nutrition, health and food safety across the Asia Pacific region’.92 (Clearly, ‘sound science’ gets around these days.) In a 2001 report entitled ‘Food Biotechnology: A Communications Guide to Improving Understanding’, it advised companies on the right sort of PR language to use when describing genetically modified food. Sure enough, ‘natural’ was among their recommended ‘Words to Use’, along with ‘better’, ‘field’, ‘heritage’, ‘tradition’, ‘wholesome’, and even ‘organic’.93 (All food is ‘organic’ in the sense that it is made up of organic chemicals, but that might not be what shoppers read into the term.) ‘Words to Lose’ include ‘alter’, ‘chemical’, ‘DNA’, ‘genes’, ‘laboratory’, ‘patent’, and ‘technology’. Spot the pattern: all terms that smack of science are to be discarded. ‘Sound science’ demands that the workings of science be swept under the carpet. Instead, producers of genetically modified food should speak only in terms of wholesome, traditional nature.
Even the term ‘genetically modified’ itself was soon for the chop. It had originally been the Unspeak replacement for ‘genetically engineered’: the teleological concept of engineering implied ground-up creation and so perhaps ‘playing God’ by scientists, as well as an unpalatable association with machinery or weapons. Modification, on the other hand, connotes mere tinkering, on a smaller scale, and, implicitly, for the better. In an excellent book on the language of biotech debates, linguist Guy Cook interviewed many scientists and representatives of the biotech industry and found that, for these reasons, they ‘were qui
te unanimous and explicit in their preference’ for the term ‘genetically modified’ instead of ‘genetically engineered’.94 Moreover, ‘genetically modified’ is usually shortened in PR and the media to GM, so that any potentially worrying implications of science in the term are compressed out of existence. After all, GM can also denote General Motors, or a grandmaster in chess.
But the Asian Food Information Centre was already speeding ahead on the road of Unspeak, and they recommended changing the language once again. A new report in 2004, on the reaction of people in the Philippines, China, and India to different terms (in English, Mandarin, and Hindi respectively), found that even the ‘modified’ part of ‘genetically modified’ struck people as meaning ‘unnatural’ and ‘strange’.95 An improvement was ‘genetically enhanced’: because the focus-group participants said that ‘enhanced’ sounded ‘positive’, and even as though the food were ‘more nutritious’. Best of all, though, was the shiny new term ‘biotechnology foods’. The mention of technology was softened and rendered virtuous with the reassuring prefix ‘bio-’; while genes (a Word to Lose) could be forgotten. ‘Biotechnology foods’ sounded ‘life-affirming’ to the survey’s respondents. It even sounded ‘natural’.
Opponents, on the other hand, continued to appeal to the concept of the natural, while meaning something quite different. Outlining his pre-millennial ‘10 Fears for GM Food’, Prince Charles wrote:
Are we going to allow the industrialisation of Life itself, redesigning the natural world for the sake of convenience and embarking on an Orwellian future? And, if we do, will there eventually be a price to pay?
Or should we be adopting a gentler, more considered approach, seeking always to work with the grain of Nature in making better, more sustainable use of what we have, for the long-term benefit of mankind as a whole?96
It must be admitted that Charles, while adopting a threadbare disguise of merely asking questions, was weighting those questions rather heavily. Few people, however excited by the possibilities of biotechnology, would put their hand up and cry: ‘Yes! I want to industrialise Life itself and embark on an Orwellian future!’ Notice also Charles’s loading of the second question with the holistic use of ‘sustainability’. His distaste for ‘redesigning the natural world’, moreover, implied that the world had already been designed in a certain way, in a way that was perforce good, for we had no right to change it. And the person who designed it, as we know from the dishonest neocreationists touting ‘intelligent design’ in the US, can be none other than God – for whom, indeed, ‘Nature’ is often just an alternative name, used to avoid scaring the horses.
Charles’s further implicit recommendation is that we should always ‘work with the grain of Nature’. The metaphor of carpentry (working with the grain of the wood) evokes a rustic, harmonious idyll. Taken seriously, the call to work with the grain of Nature becomes a radical Luddite manifesto. After all, by ‘Nature’, Charles does not mean the whole universe and all the actions of the humans within it, as the Nuffield Council on Bioethics used the term. If humans should work with ‘Nature’, then they are by definition not part of it. On this understanding of ‘Nature’, it is violently opposed by much of modern science. A doctor who saws through a patient’s sternum in order to try to revive a failing heart is, we might say, working rather obviously against the grain of Nature. A dentist who scrapes out the nerves at the root of a molar and implants a titanium post is fighting against Nature’s plan for teeth. Lasers, like the one in your CD player, exist nowhere in Nature. A space probe is launched atop an enormous rocket in order to overcome the reluctance of terrestrial objects to leave the planet’s gravity well: a reluctance wisely ordained by Nature.
‘Can […] that offend great Nature’s god / Which Nature’s self inspires?’ asked Alexander Pope, a couplet which James Boswell derided for its ‘flimsy superficial reasoning’.97 Prince Charles clearly agreed: one could indeed cause offence, as long as one believed in Nature’s ‘god’; or, like the ancient Greeks, in nature as a vast organism with an intelligence of its own.98 (We borrowed the late-classical Greek word for nature, phusis, to name our science of ‘physics’, but the word no longer carries the same metaphysical assumptions.) But if one sincerely believes that one should always ‘work with the grain of Nature’, then one is committed to turning the clock back by at least several centuries, if not to the time when we were all swinging from trees and eating berries. That, perhaps, was the last time that ‘Nature’ was in perfect harmony with human beings.
Human nature
Ideological appeals to ‘nature’ also abounded in the phrase ‘human nature’. In this expression, the war between man and the environment was internalised: there was assumed to be a core of innate, ‘natural’ humanness, and a person could choose to work with its grain, in Prince Charles’s language, or against it. Sometimes it was thought that this nature was virtuous, so that various forms of vicious behaviour could be condemned on account of the belief that they ran counter to ‘human nature’. At other times this ‘nature’ was specifically God-given, and in a Christian context referred to man’s fallen state, the ineradicable stain of original sin. Thus Thomas Aquinas used it (in Latin: natura humana), and thus Tony Blair, in his statement on the death of Pope John Paul II, referred to the latter’s experience of ‘what was wrong in human nature’.99 George W. Bush declared explicitly that ‘the Author of Life wrote […] our common human nature’.100
Theologists have the advantage of a metaphysics, according to which this ‘nature’ is implanted by God, and so they can claim to be sure about aspects of it. Absent any such foundational certainty, the problem with invoking ‘human nature’ is that, given the enormous variety of humans, any such assertion as to their ‘nature’ is bound to be a generalisation that omits or implicitly denounces certain individuals. David Hume wrote A Treatise on Human Nature, supposing that such a ‘nature’ was open to empirical investigation, like the ‘nature’ of plants and animals. When he wrote ‘An affection betwixt the sexes is a passion evidently implanted in human nature’,101 he accurately pointed out that most people express heterosexual preferences, but did not account for homosexuality. One might decide to infer from Hume’s sentence, after a little thought, that homosexuality must be contrary to ‘human nature’; and then, if it is so contrary, that it must be morally wrong. Thus, according to Republican Senator Rick Santorum, ‘homosexual acts’ are ‘deviant’, they ‘undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family’, and should be considered in the same category as ‘man on child, man on dog’.102 From the idea that certain behaviour is ‘deviant’ – statistically in the minority, not ‘normal’, against ‘nature’ – Santorum elicits a whole line of apocalyptic moral reasoning, accompanied by a vivid dumb-show of pornographic marionettes.103
Moral arguments from claimed observations about a ‘human nature’ have hardly been thin on the ground ever since Aristotle defended the practice of slavery by asserting that some human beings were slaves by nature.104 Conservatives in particular have often claimed there to be an inescapable and unimprovable ‘human nature’, so as to argue that any newfangled thinking which runs counter to that ‘nature’ must needs risk catastrophe. In a 2004 book, historian John Lukacs bemoaned the ‘myopia of liberals […] about human nature’, using the phrase repeatedly thereafter, but without ever explicitly giving an account of it.105 There were clues, however, in his generalisations: for instance that, apparently, ‘people are moved by (and at times even worship) evidences of power, rather than by propositions of social contracts’.106 As is the fate of most claims about ‘human nature’, this one was at least as false as it was true. It is not obviously the case, for example, that ‘people’ in general really were more ‘moved’ by the 2003 American invasion of Iraq (an evidence of power), than by the American Bill of Rights (a proposition of a social contract). Indeed, if you tied Lukacs’s statement down to any set of empirical facts, it began to look very shaky. But it was given rhetorical force b
y the implicit appeal to ‘human nature’.
In order to counter such pessimism about the practicability of new forms of society, in contrast, Marxists and some existentialists had regularly argued there to be no such thing as ‘human nature’ at all. Taken to mean that there was nothing innate about human behaviour, this was just as untrue as the reifying claims about ‘human nature’ on the other side of the argument.107 But modern ideologues on both sides were not really concerned about the facts: they were more likely to invoke ‘common sense’.
As it continued to be used at the end of the twentieth century, the idea of ‘human nature’ was dressed up verbally as a quasiscientific understanding, but really used just as code for a generalised pessimism about human affairs. ‘Human nature’ was an ancient inheritance of selfishness, greed, and violence. It was a counsel of despair. In this sense the term was available to all political viewpoints. The siege of Sarajevo, for example, was taken to symbolise ‘the depravity of human nature’.108 When unleashed, ‘human nature’ would inevitably become the engine for a historical tragedy.
4
Tragedy
A tragic mistake
On 22 July 2005, Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian electrician living in London, was chased on to an Underground train by police, who then shot him seven times in the head and once in the shoulder. They had suspected him of complicity in the previous day’s attempted bombings, because he lived in a block where another apartment was under surveillance, and he was allegedly wearing an unseasonably warm jacket, perhaps hiding a belt of explosives. (His cousin later said he had been wearing a denim jacket.1) In fact Menezes was innocent of any involvement and had not been about to blow himself up. As the Metropolitan Police Service put it the next day: ‘We are now satisfied that he was not connected with the incidents of Thursday, 21 July 2005. For somebody to lose their life in such circumstances is a tragedy and one that the Metropolitan Police Service regrets.’2