Thanks to a legion of secular thinkers, like Rousseau, the ideal of Natural harmony has developed quite a narrative over the centuries. Perhaps, their story goes something like this: Once upon a time, maybe a billion years ago, there was a lush garden that sprang up. It was full of evolving plants and living things of every sort in natural balance. Very recently, however, a clever animal evolved—mankind. Man lived for a while in a balanced equality with the rest of Nature. It was a time of great freedom and pleasure, with no sexual inhibitions and everyone shared everything equally. Then, one day, the first “bad” man began to think in unequal terms. He hunted for meat. He stopped sharing his food and sex partner and built a private shelter for his family—all of which he now had to defend.
Thus, we are led to believe that selfishness, greed, war, hatred, indeed, every “evil” apparently can be traced to a defective person who began seeing the world as an “unequal place”. Therefore, as the story goes, people are intrinsically good, “civilization” has led us astray and the problem of evil in the world can be physically explained away by some defect in the brain that creates the delusion of inequality and disordered appetites like religion. Hence, the frantic search in our own day for discovering the physical malady of “the Right Wing brain” or the elusive “god gene”.
Yes, a physical world requires physical explanations, explanations that replace the lofty concept of “good” vs. “evil” for the more tangible idea of healthy equalizers vs. defective manipulators. One weird illustration of all this happened when a famous comedian—“Kramer” of Seinfeld fame—recently shouted the “N-word” at some black hecklers in a Californian comedy club. As a secular nation recoiled in horror, he immediately checked himself into the Betty Ford Clinic, effectively saying that he recognized a physical health problem--not a moral issue.
Assuredly, Nature ethics is a fascinating study that generates many bizarre, secondary principles that are most often anti-human because they are premised, like all defensive ethics, on a fear of the Strong—in this case, a fear of our natural, Human domination of the planet. For example, the “pristine ethic” is a biased evaluation of environments based on the premise that humans contaminate Nature. “Come see Nature’s unspoiled beauty” the travel brochure exclaims. Such logic avoids the obvious conclusion that building a Volvo is just as natural to our human capabilities as digging a hole is to a gopher—that humans are part of nature too. However, for space requirements, we will not go into further detail on concepts of “natural balance”, “proportion”, “natural goodness” or the ultimate “attraction of pantheism” here. It is suffice to say that there are serious problems with Nature ethics, not the least of which is that it seems to contradict the entire Natural order where we can plainly see various hierarchies and a pervasive law of Utility within, for example, the animal kingdom.
In other words, if absolute physical equality is a fact of the universe, it is universally met with indifference. Therefore, humans imposing absolute, physical equality on each other—such as gay marriage-- is apparently not “natural”. It is either a highly advanced evolutionary stage or it is a nutty perversion depending on whom you may ask. Nonetheless, the take home point is that Nature ethics are, first and foremost, a denial of the existence of God, with the subsequent claim that everything should receive equal deference. Thus, “going Green” is not so much a movement based on the responsible stewardship of the planet God gave us. Rather, it is a primal fear of domination with Humanity in the crosshairs.
