The Value of Nature and Old Books

In modern times, some people have started to see nature more as an enemy to be conquered than as a god to be worshiped.

I've seen people argue the opposite. In ancient times, nature meant wolves and snow and parasites and drought, and you had to kill it before it killed you. Only recently have we developed the idea that nature is something to be conserved. (Because until recently, we weren't powerful enough that it mattered.)

"Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth.

None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them."

(From C S Lewis's preface to a translation of Athanasius. There's a lot to dislike about C S Lewis, but he was a clever chap.)

I like the thinking behind this post and I think it gives a good reason for reading old books. Upvoted.

But I don't know if you're quite right about nature. This study shows that being in nature provides various hard cognitive benefits. It makes evolutionary sense that we feel more at home in nature and more connected to ourselves there. Why should we be looking for more explanations of why people like nature than that?

I also don't think our views of nature are all that uncontaminated. Yes, there's the animal core of us that thinks "Oh, nature, I understand this." But that's overlaid by a lot of very culturally-determined feelings. In Western culture, the a certain idea of loving wild nature for its own sake really started with the Romantics, and then went through people like Muir to come down to us as various ideas like romanticism, environmentalism, hippie-ism, wilderness sports, and the like. Those counterbalance a whole bunch of other ideas including a medieval Christian/Protestant distrust of wilderness, a Randist "bulldoze it to construct something profitable" ethic, and a whole bunch of other things. I doubt a hippie and an Objectivist would see a waterfall the same way any more than they'd see a strip mall the same way.

I do think everyone including the Objectivist would have a certain biological core set of preprogrammed responses to nature, but I don't know if that's what you're saying.

A few notes and responses...

People have always had a religious or quasi-religious reverence for nature. In modern times, some people have started to see nature more as an enemy to be conquered than as a god to be worshiped.

Evidence please? I had thought this was merely part of the myth of the Noble Savage. Some people have had nature-oriented religions, but plenty of others haven't.

More importantly, people started to see nature as something to be conquered at precisely the point that people gained the numbers, technology, and profit motive to do so. That people didn't try to conquer nature before that, when they 1) couldn't and 2) had no reason to do so, proves nothing. Going forward, the ability and desire won't disappear, so any comparison is misleading.

I think the objection would be without merit if one were to broaden the scope of concern to something like all creatures, present and future, capable of having experiences (who else is there to care about?)

You seem to assume that such broadening would be somehow right or justified (morally? expirentially?) but without a good argument, many people don't accept that - and legitimately so, I feel.

A third response is that getting into a "conquer nature" frame of mind puts people into a "conquer everything" frame of mind and leads to aggression against other people. This might have merit historically

I think that the causal relationship, such as it is, is the other way around - especially historically. Because people were in a "conquering" frame of mind about all other people and things - notably the people living "in nature" - they also naturally proceeded to conquer nature.

So what, if anything, is left to the idea that there is something special about nature worthy of particular regard? And by special I mean something beyond the fact that many people just plain enjoy it

Why do you need something more special than that? I think all meaning and value should ultimately derive from people just plain enjoying things :-)

when you are in nature or contemplating nature, you can be confident that the resulting thoughts and feelings are uncontaminated...

That would require some massive weight of evidence to prove it. A priori, all of your thoughts and feelings about everything you encounter are pretty much determined by all those things whose "contamination" you fear - up to individual variation, of course.

When you look at a waterfall and you like it...

But what about when I look at a waterfall and I don't like it? What if I think that, in fact, it would be nice if some park employees came along and cleared a proper trail from the parking lot and put down some benches? Are you going to claim that I'm "contaminated" and need to be cleansed... er, deprogrammed? Or is preservation of wild nature more important than such opinions which are held by some people?

I realize you don't say this, but it's the logical outcome of your ideas...

You could say similar things about mathematical truths, which are also uncontaminated by your own biases and assumptions.

Here's another reason for liking old books. A society that respects the accomplishments of the deceased sends a strong signal to living achievers: work hard, and you, too, will be remembered and respected, even when your work becomes obsolete.

It seems to me that one good reason to do so is that for all the ways that these works have been analyzed and surpassed in the intervening years, the reader can be sure that what is written there is not the product of manipulation by the forces that are at work in the reader's own time and place. So it represents another way to gain valuable freedom and distance.

Outside of learning about the context/history of some field of thought, I think that's the general reason people give for recommending "classic" works of nonfiction.

Older works can also differ in their presentation, which can make them more interesting. You bring up Euclid, so I feel I'm free to mention I really, really wish I'd learnt Calculus from a high-level text like Courant, instead of Stewart and Sallas+Hille+Etgen. I would've have become more enthusiastic about math much earlier. (Maybe. Ah, counterfactuals.)

I would say that the main thing that makes nature special in this sense is that when you are in nature or contemplating nature, you can be confident that the resulting thoughts and feelings are uncontaminated by all of the (visible and invisible) ideas and biases and assumptions that are present in your particular time and place.

Uncontaminated by the wishes of my fellow humans, yes. Uncontaminated by eons of biases built in to my brain, no. I'm not sure why one is preferable to the other.

I like your post, but I often think that 'Nature' doesn't exist. There's lots of 'pleasant approximations' without large carnivores and - in many parts of the world - any poisonous animals, and there's still lots of 'unpleasant approximations', but even if we talk about the latter, we can't lump them together when deciding on policies.

1) Ozone holes are pretty localized, as are sources of many kinds of pollution. You can specifically and consistently decide to non-impact 'Nature' yourself, but indirectly everybody impacts it with much larger effects than what we can allow ourselves to not do. Personal non-impact is a warm-fuzzies resolution; I would even say it is the most significant use of 'Nature' for many townspeople nowadays. They see 'Nature' as the last luxury to be had, a thing impersonal and within their absolute power, which they might never execute either way.

2) Is a 'radioactively rich' forest, in which elks and bears breed, 'unnatural'? I think it isn't, but I know people who would say yes. Why? Because the value they assign to 'Nature' decreases when they can't potentially use it. They might even agree that bears should live on Earth, too... just not that they be polluted bears...

I think the primary reason people feel some special attachment to nature is that nature contains optimizing processes other than us. In a universe without sentient aliens, nature is the next best thing.

As far as reasons people read them go, philosophy/religion/biography books are all fiction. I cannot think of any old and truly non-fiction books people that read.

See and I would say the exact opposite. Modern terms, at least since the 1960s hippie revolution, people care more about nature, and particular with modern green revolution spurred on by global warming scares.

At least, we're doing a better job than we were pre1959.

That's not to say that only hippies can connect to nature, but they were indeed important in this shift.

How about this: While nature may be "ours" to do with as we please, "we" are a gigantic bunch of people (including future people who will have interests in what we do now), and without a unanimous vote, messing with nature is going to be stealing it from somebody who was entitled to its being left alone.

I like all of the responses to the value-of-nature arguments you give in your second paragraph. However, as a hedonistic utilitarian, I would disagree with your claim that nature has value apart from its value to organisms with experiences. And I think we have a obligation to change nature in order to avert the massive amounts of wild-animal suffering that it contains, even if doing so would render it "unnatural" in some ways.