A new fallacy, or at least one I’ve not heard anyone point out, is the appeal to natural order. It is exceedingly common in certain polarized discourse as an argument by itself. Here are some examples that you could hear today..
- Transgender people are attempting to change their body, created in the perfect image of God, therefore their actions are wrong.
- Masturbation is good for you. It is a natural impulse in any healthy person, so should not be admonished.
- Masturbation is bad for you. It is an unnatural abuse of ones own body, and must be avoided.
By my examples, I wanted to demonstrate a few things. (1) shows that there’s often a religious motivation behind it, though I won’t discuss this much more because it’s straightforward to disprove. By examples (2) and (3), I wanted to expose the problem with this argument. It is that what is considered natural, especially for a human being, is not well-defined. This may be a consequence of living in artificial urban worlds, where we have no practical awareness of the unaltered natural world, only having ideas about it. Apples come from apple trees, because we have been told this is the truth, when city-dwellers may have never seen a real apple tree in their lives. Thus, naturalness devolves into speculation. It can transform into a term defined personally, socially, or relatively, and rarely defined objectively.
This bad grip of naturalness we all have does not alone give rise to this fallacy. It becomes toxic when combined with the assumption that naturalness is inherently good, and should be sustained for it’s own sake. Any sense of goodness in natural order is just a human idea and not really true. Following McLuhanism, it always happens that new media creates nostalgia for the old, and so we must have a perpetual nostalgia for nature. This is perpetual because it shall never be stopped by the truth of nature so long as we dwell in the city. In reality, a good natural order would prefer it’s beasts be swift and polite in their killing, rather than slowly pick and tear at guts and groins. A good natural order would not allow the parasite to form, a creature whose form is almost a joke about natural selection. They are a totally selfish creature, whose abysmal and short life serves only the production of more short-lived parasites, in a pointless cycle that exists for itself that has the effect of damaging ecosystems and causing suffering. The hyena and parasite are of the same natural order as a cute bird and pretty flower; and are certainly no less natural. What does this imply for the idea of inherent goodness of nature? That naturalness does not itself confer goodness.
When it comes to naturalness as applied to humans, it becomes even more slippery. Everything that makes us human can be framed as how we violate what is natural for us and around us. The rise of agriculture states this overtly; all civilization rests on the first farmers deciding to reject our position as another animal, and to begin life outside the natural order, in a manmade order. Everywhere, the most celebrated humans are the ones who violate their nature the best. The Buddhist monk is revered as wise, but their practice consists of resisting and rejecting what they would otherwise tend to naturally — though I must note that ’naturally’ is loose, because again, that tendency is strictly unnatural as they originate from urban society.
To bring it all back together: natural order is a superfluous term, but we believe the natural order is the best. Why is the natural order the best? The typical answer is tainted by spiritualism, Christianity, sentimentality, and other such things that blind ones mind. There is, as far as I know, no rational basis to exalt nature, and certainly no reason to use divergence from nature as an argument against anything or anyone.