As I am already spoiled by having the fortunate occasion to follow Maarten for many years, this article I may consider as a pearl of wisdom and insight into an amplified trend I notice being propagated all over ( the nature is good hype). Thank you Maarten for this gift of intellectual wisdom. Do I look forward for more ? That's only natural, is it not. 😃
As you note, it's only well-off people who are very isolated from nature who have the luxury of idolizing nature. In my observations, I also note that this conflation of healthful=pure=natural (and also = local) food is more of an aesthetic than a coherent set of standards. Because it's an aesthetic, violations result in feelings of disgust in a way not possible if it were a a set of reasoned-out premises.
For instance, I live on a small Caribbean island best known for its eco-tourism--hiking through the rainforest, diving on the coral reefs, and that sort of thing. The sort of folks who like to do eco-tourist holidays are also the sort of folks who have feelings about naturalness and purity of food. Also, as previously ranted about, my island is subject to prissy Dutch cultural imperialism, which also has a lot of incoherent eco-puritan ideals.
So for instance, we get tourists who want local* organic foods--but not whelks or breadfruit, which are abundant here but are unfamiliar and (with whelks) honestly pretty weird looking and super chewy--so these things ought to meet the standard, but they're "gross." (*And "local" is time-bound. Breadfruit was imported to the Caribbean from Asia during the golden age of colonialism; it's definitely not native and would probably be considered an "invasive species" by eco-puritans if it were imported to the Caribbean today.) And we get Dutch government consultants who want us to grow more of our own food on the island--but not goat (an "invasive species" per the Dutch but that's also been a food animal here for centuries) and not cassava (also a Caribbean staple, but one that takes significant prep to make non-toxic, which we can't be trusted to do). These things are out-of-place on the Dutch food spectrum, so I think they violate the aesthetic of "pure" food. There's government health advice, too. We are advised to eat organic fruits high in antioxidants, like strawberries and blueberries (which do not grow in the tropics). We are advised to not consume things with a high glycemic index like yams or potatoes (which grow great here).
It's like the ideas about "naturalness" of foods held by our nature-loving tourists and Dutch officials have no awareness that different climates allow different things to grow. There's no awareness of how nature actually works, and how that constrains what foods are locally available. Instead there's an aesthetic of nature, with strict categories that may not be violated, and that are anything but natural.
Fascinating, and great ammunition for my fellow Dutch ecomodernists. ;-) Did you ever write anything about your experiences over there? I think you should!
Dear Maarten, in the second part of this splendid article you wrote about the famous chocolate experiment where people could choose between a chocolate hart ( lovely) or a double dosed amount of chocolate but in the form of a ( disgusting) cockroach. While many of the cockroach consumers did not really enjoyed their selection they did not wanted to be seen as irrational. So choosing the heart would after all be rational after all ? Not so from an economic point of view as the cockroach format contained a double amount of chocolate but surely rational from the neurofysiological mechanism of taste and hedonics as those sensations are always a mix of bottom up sensorial stimuli in conjunction with top down anticipatory affective and limbic amygdalae predictions ( our predicting brain).
I once did an experiment where I served one of my top Burgundy Pinot noir wines in a Starbucks coffee jar ( PS until this day I still regret this bloody experiment - where were my thoughts) and a Young cheap tanine rich wine in a crystal glass. While I got about the same distribution on the selection process ( my buddies could easily guess that choosing the coffee mug wine) would make them feel more " professional" a later casual survey revealed that all in all they found that wine not bad but at most worth 15 euro ( I feel ashamed to declare it's real value but this explains my rational regret for having ever thought about this experiment)
Life is both rational and delightfully irrational !
Some additional (obvious but little mentioned) points to make:
1. While some inorganic compounds like water and salt are essential to life, the obsession with "organic" foods belies the fact that the human body cannot use most organic compounds for nutrition until it breaks them down using stomach acid and bile. For example, the element iron in proteins must be stripped out of the proteins to be used by the body to create hemoglobin molecules.
2. The general fear of eating fat and cholesterol containing foods ignores that these compounds are created by the human body from first breaking down carbohydrates and sugars. A chicken eats no dietary cholesterol yet produces eggs which contain it. A cow eats no fat yet there is fat in your steak.
3. Many natural compounds are deadly including cobra venom, some toadstools, viruses, etc etc.
Very well said and echoes my own opinions developed over many years.
A similar and more consequential "evolved intuition" leads to a general preference for forcible collectivism over voluntary individualism. My conviction is that humans have become successful mainly because individual humans (unlike other species) are enormously diverse in the choices and specializations they select after birth. INDIVIDUAL human diversity is our strength, not GROUP "diversity" where groups are defined by accidents of birth. Yet most people insist on following "leaders" and "gods" who want to heavily regulate individual freedom of choice.
I was lucky enough to be present at your enthralling presentation in Finland, and this text is very interesting in the way it enlarges it.
One thing about which I would not agree is singling out Rousseau as the originator of the "naturalistic fallacy". As you know, Rousseau was among the philosophical founders of humanism, the first proponent of enlightened education, so it is very unfair to appear to place him in the same category as present-day back-to-nature green freaks, who are essentially anti-humanists. Kant himself said "Newton taught me the order of the world ; Rousseau taught me the dignity of Man", and the only decoration in his austere study was a portrait of Jean-Jacques...
Thanks a lot for your feedback! It's true that Rousseau was an ambivalent figure, but he was definitely not the founder of humanism, which long predated him. And his doctrine of "general wilI" was anti-humanist (Petrarch, Erasmus, Montaigne, More...). But you're right that Rousseau cannot be equated with present back-to-nature environmentalists. I only wanted to argue that this famous first sentence is the most pity encapsulation of the same intuition that undergirds back-to-nature environmentalism and deep ecology. But he didn't invent it and was not their intellectual progenitor. As I write, it would be wrong and ahistorical to blame everything on Rousseau (in general, philosophers overestimate their influence on history). But I do think Kant though too highly of Rousseau. ;-) See also here a more extensive critique of Rousseau: https://maartenboudry.substack.com/p/the-enlightenments-gravediggers
Thank you for putting this together, what a great resource.
The Natural = good; Unnatural = bad framework is rather shortsighted once one starts thinking about what “natural” really means. For everything the laws of nature allow has to be “natural”.
So, the differentiation becomes Man-made = bad; Non-man-made = good.
But even that makes little sense, as you show with the examples from agriculture. Is a banana man-made or not?
What are we left with, then? Here’s a proposal: makes people’s life better = good; makes people’s life worse = bad.
That, too, might be overly simplistic, but I find it a useful rule of thumb. GMOs give us more food for less, so they are good. So are fertilizers. And nuclear power. And so is solar and wind. The only bad inventions are those that limit our progress.
Also, thank you for citing the selection of Brassica oleracea as an example of how we've been genetically manipulating food for forever. I think that it's underappreciated how recent some of these new cultivars were evolved.
As I am already spoiled by having the fortunate occasion to follow Maarten for many years, this article I may consider as a pearl of wisdom and insight into an amplified trend I notice being propagated all over ( the nature is good hype). Thank you Maarten for this gift of intellectual wisdom. Do I look forward for more ? That's only natural, is it not. 😃
You're an intellectual glutton, Georges. ;-)
I love this, and am looking forward to part 2.
As you note, it's only well-off people who are very isolated from nature who have the luxury of idolizing nature. In my observations, I also note that this conflation of healthful=pure=natural (and also = local) food is more of an aesthetic than a coherent set of standards. Because it's an aesthetic, violations result in feelings of disgust in a way not possible if it were a a set of reasoned-out premises.
For instance, I live on a small Caribbean island best known for its eco-tourism--hiking through the rainforest, diving on the coral reefs, and that sort of thing. The sort of folks who like to do eco-tourist holidays are also the sort of folks who have feelings about naturalness and purity of food. Also, as previously ranted about, my island is subject to prissy Dutch cultural imperialism, which also has a lot of incoherent eco-puritan ideals.
So for instance, we get tourists who want local* organic foods--but not whelks or breadfruit, which are abundant here but are unfamiliar and (with whelks) honestly pretty weird looking and super chewy--so these things ought to meet the standard, but they're "gross." (*And "local" is time-bound. Breadfruit was imported to the Caribbean from Asia during the golden age of colonialism; it's definitely not native and would probably be considered an "invasive species" by eco-puritans if it were imported to the Caribbean today.) And we get Dutch government consultants who want us to grow more of our own food on the island--but not goat (an "invasive species" per the Dutch but that's also been a food animal here for centuries) and not cassava (also a Caribbean staple, but one that takes significant prep to make non-toxic, which we can't be trusted to do). These things are out-of-place on the Dutch food spectrum, so I think they violate the aesthetic of "pure" food. There's government health advice, too. We are advised to eat organic fruits high in antioxidants, like strawberries and blueberries (which do not grow in the tropics). We are advised to not consume things with a high glycemic index like yams or potatoes (which grow great here).
It's like the ideas about "naturalness" of foods held by our nature-loving tourists and Dutch officials have no awareness that different climates allow different things to grow. There's no awareness of how nature actually works, and how that constrains what foods are locally available. Instead there's an aesthetic of nature, with strict categories that may not be violated, and that are anything but natural.
Fascinating, and great ammunition for my fellow Dutch ecomodernists. ;-) Did you ever write anything about your experiences over there? I think you should!
Dear Maarten, in the second part of this splendid article you wrote about the famous chocolate experiment where people could choose between a chocolate hart ( lovely) or a double dosed amount of chocolate but in the form of a ( disgusting) cockroach. While many of the cockroach consumers did not really enjoyed their selection they did not wanted to be seen as irrational. So choosing the heart would after all be rational after all ? Not so from an economic point of view as the cockroach format contained a double amount of chocolate but surely rational from the neurofysiological mechanism of taste and hedonics as those sensations are always a mix of bottom up sensorial stimuli in conjunction with top down anticipatory affective and limbic amygdalae predictions ( our predicting brain).
I once did an experiment where I served one of my top Burgundy Pinot noir wines in a Starbucks coffee jar ( PS until this day I still regret this bloody experiment - where were my thoughts) and a Young cheap tanine rich wine in a crystal glass. While I got about the same distribution on the selection process ( my buddies could easily guess that choosing the coffee mug wine) would make them feel more " professional" a later casual survey revealed that all in all they found that wine not bad but at most worth 15 euro ( I feel ashamed to declare it's real value but this explains my rational regret for having ever thought about this experiment)
Life is both rational and delightfully irrational !
Cheers
Georges
Some additional (obvious but little mentioned) points to make:
1. While some inorganic compounds like water and salt are essential to life, the obsession with "organic" foods belies the fact that the human body cannot use most organic compounds for nutrition until it breaks them down using stomach acid and bile. For example, the element iron in proteins must be stripped out of the proteins to be used by the body to create hemoglobin molecules.
2. The general fear of eating fat and cholesterol containing foods ignores that these compounds are created by the human body from first breaking down carbohydrates and sugars. A chicken eats no dietary cholesterol yet produces eggs which contain it. A cow eats no fat yet there is fat in your steak.
3. Many natural compounds are deadly including cobra venom, some toadstools, viruses, etc etc.
Thanks for the useful ammunition, the first factoid was new to me!
Very well said and echoes my own opinions developed over many years.
A similar and more consequential "evolved intuition" leads to a general preference for forcible collectivism over voluntary individualism. My conviction is that humans have become successful mainly because individual humans (unlike other species) are enormously diverse in the choices and specializations they select after birth. INDIVIDUAL human diversity is our strength, not GROUP "diversity" where groups are defined by accidents of birth. Yet most people insist on following "leaders" and "gods" who want to heavily regulate individual freedom of choice.
I was lucky enough to be present at your enthralling presentation in Finland, and this text is very interesting in the way it enlarges it.
One thing about which I would not agree is singling out Rousseau as the originator of the "naturalistic fallacy". As you know, Rousseau was among the philosophical founders of humanism, the first proponent of enlightened education, so it is very unfair to appear to place him in the same category as present-day back-to-nature green freaks, who are essentially anti-humanists. Kant himself said "Newton taught me the order of the world ; Rousseau taught me the dignity of Man", and the only decoration in his austere study was a portrait of Jean-Jacques...
Thanks a lot for your feedback! It's true that Rousseau was an ambivalent figure, but he was definitely not the founder of humanism, which long predated him. And his doctrine of "general wilI" was anti-humanist (Petrarch, Erasmus, Montaigne, More...). But you're right that Rousseau cannot be equated with present back-to-nature environmentalists. I only wanted to argue that this famous first sentence is the most pity encapsulation of the same intuition that undergirds back-to-nature environmentalism and deep ecology. But he didn't invent it and was not their intellectual progenitor. As I write, it would be wrong and ahistorical to blame everything on Rousseau (in general, philosophers overestimate their influence on history). But I do think Kant though too highly of Rousseau. ;-) See also here a more extensive critique of Rousseau: https://maartenboudry.substack.com/p/the-enlightenments-gravediggers
Thank you for putting this together, what a great resource.
The Natural = good; Unnatural = bad framework is rather shortsighted once one starts thinking about what “natural” really means. For everything the laws of nature allow has to be “natural”.
So, the differentiation becomes Man-made = bad; Non-man-made = good.
But even that makes little sense, as you show with the examples from agriculture. Is a banana man-made or not?
What are we left with, then? Here’s a proposal: makes people’s life better = good; makes people’s life worse = bad.
That, too, might be overly simplistic, but I find it a useful rule of thumb. GMOs give us more food for less, so they are good. So are fertilizers. And nuclear power. And so is solar and wind. The only bad inventions are those that limit our progress.
Also, thank you for citing the selection of Brassica oleracea as an example of how we've been genetically manipulating food for forever. I think that it's underappreciated how recent some of these new cultivars were evolved.
I wrote more about this here: https://doctrixperiwinkle.substack.com/p/the-parable-of-the-mustard-seed
(I know Christianity isn't really your jam; you can ignore the parts about the history of the church if you want.)