A quick stroll through nature and culture

Yesterday, a friend of mine said, ‘if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I will miss the natural world, but I won’t miss the human world.’ Writers and thinkers such as Bruno Latour make little distinction between nature and culture, and Heidegger described nature as always already constructed.

The human world is surely ‘natural’ in that the struggle to survive is strongly impressed on language and culture, one only has to think a little about the surfaces of David Cameron’s speeches and sense the slaughtered antelope under their sheen, surrounded by hyenas, with vultures lurking in the trees, the flies already feeding. The media landscape is saturated with this struggle, the dog eat dog life. When reviewing Hayek’s Road To Serfdom, George Orwell criticised his laissez faire advocacy by saying ‘the trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them.’ In television entertainment such as Dragon’s Den and Deal Or No Deal, the great thing about competitions, is that somebody wins them. It is Milton Freidman television.

And this is before we have even left the house, to work in offices, call centres, industrial units and prisons. This comes to us before we close the front door to go and undertake an ethnography of the local magistrates court. This is the landscape of culture, rather than nature, that my friend wills the number nine to skid on black ice to deliver him from. This said, having thought a little about post-retirement life expectancy recently, I also suspect that ‘the struggle’ keeps us alive, and there is a further dialectic to be had there. None of this was ever going to be simple.

Despite mulling over some of the issues it raises, I take my friend’s point, and despite not having reached forty, I strongly agree with it. What Heidegger said about never experiencing our own death is relevant to mention here too, how can you miss anything when you are not ‘there’ to experience the absence? In which case it is time to do some walking in nature, constructed or otherwise.

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