Reflection on  Human Nature and World

Welt and Umwelt (world and environment). But it is much more complex. Imagine a young wolf, born a thousand years ago in what is now Yellowstone National Park. The young wolf would have an ideal environment to which it would become within its wolf pack perfectly adapted, perfectly healthy – always with a little luck.

     I think we human beings are also created (and evolved) into something like this – our environment (Umwelt) though is a world (Welt). Our natural world: a loving, caring family, a genuine community where everyone has a useful and valued role to play; a community that has preserved its cultural treasures and has a worldview that makes sense of its past and present, and relates its members to the world as a whole, perhaps what transcends our possible experience of the world; a community to which young people become habituated by acquiring the skills and above all the spiritual dispositions necessary to live in community with other members (common sense wisdom, justice, courage, self-restraint, mercy, etc.); a community that thoroughly knows its place in nature (including awareness of its ignorance) and can live from that place without diminishing or destroying it – I could go on. Something like this, I believe, is to us what Yellowstone is to the wolf.

       Now the human “Yellowstone” – the world most natural to human beings –  has been almost everywhere destroyed. Whenever it begins to recover for a group of people, it gets destroyed again. It has been destroyed partly because human societies almost everywhere come to be dominated by a power elite that arises when the production of needed goods surpasses what we need. It then controls the means of production, dominates the political decision-making process, and determines the forms of work and leisure. (Yes, I learned this from Marx, but it’s true. Jesus also preached as much.) This is partly a result of competition between groups within a society and between societies for the control of resources. We are correspondingly not only cast out, but become to some degree insane – as a young wolf would be if ripped out of Yellowstone and thrown into downtown Detroit. What is natural to us comes to seem like a mythical Eden. What is unnatural changes our nature over time. We live east of Eden.

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Capitalism and bodies. Summer fashions for girls and young women - lots of skin, showcasing legs, waistlines, tummies, shoulders, backs, and bottoms: as if displaying their wares in a shopping window. Those with nothing to sell, like me, pull the curtains over our bodies as best we can.