Lorraine Daston, Discussions about human nature are always politically and morally fraught

The eminent historian of science speaks with Ondřej Šebestík on the construction and limits of 'nature' throughout history. They explore the conditions of humanity, monstrosity and humanity’s dubious mandate on the planet.

People have always tended to find patterns of values – like the Good, the True, and the Beautiful – specifically in nature. But they are not implicitly there. In what way do we project those values onto nature?

We seem to do it in a fashion that is very much related to our use of symbols more generally. We appear to be a species that likes to represent its mental creations in external, often very concrete and physical form. In science, for example, people create models of very abstract theories to visualize their properties. For instance in the early history of atomic theory, atoms were conceptualized in terms of a billiard game, bouncing off each other. We also use allegory as a literary form to imagine and visualize abstract concepts like fortitude, courage, or justice. The visual and poetic records of many traditions are full of such representations. Therefore, we can consider the projection of our moral aesthetic values onto nature as just one more aspect of our tendency to represent our internal creations, in this case moral orders, in concrete, externalized form. This raises the question of why we choose nature as the resource for doing that, rather than, say, our own artificial creations, such as computers, clocks, skyscrapers, or many other things that we create. That was the puzzle with which I began the book.

'Nature' is a broad term containing plenty of meanings. How would you explain your categories of nature that work as a basis for human orders? I particularly mean your three terms of specific nature, local nature, and universal nature and their laws.

You're absolutely right. The concept of nature as it's been transmitted in what might be called, loosely speaking, the Greco-Roman tradition, is like a layer cake of meanings. The three I singled out are among the most persistent and pervasive. One can find them in almost every branch of this tree-like tradition, which has branched out into all the major European vernaculars. Also, all three endure despite many attempts to get rid of them.

Specific nature is perhaps the most fundamental of all three meanings of nature. It is that which makes something what it is – what makes a squirrel a squirrel, water water, and silver silver. It goes along with certain predictable properties; for example, we say that fire burns everywhere because we think that fire has an intrinsic nature. We also talk about human nature, as we would of any other species or natural kind (including minerals).

The second – local nature – is about the distinctive combination of flora, fauna, topography, climate that distinguishes a certain place, which is why I call it local nature. If you had grown up, for example, in a desert, you would have a very different idea of local nature than if you had grown up, let's say, on the shores of the sea or in the mountains or in the forest. These local natures spread themselves over the globe like a patchwork quilt, each patch distinctive.  Local natures are very diverse, much as the specific natures are very diverse – think of the diversity of biological species. But within any one patch of that patchwork quilt of local natures, you can predict with a fair degree of reliability what is going to happen. For example, what summer will be like, what winter will be like, how the seasons will progress, whether there will be seasons, and how best to go about feeding, clothing, and sheltering yourself in that local nature.

The third of the three strands of the many meanings of nature among those that I pick out in the book is universal nature. Those are regularities that hold not only for the entire Earth but, at least hypothetically, for the most remote galaxies. Whether we are talking about the air molecules in the corner of the room where you're now sitting, or we're talking about the star Alpha Centauri, we assume that these regularities, called natural laws since the 17th century, hold. This is a very strong form of universality – even stronger than specific natures. Squirrels may be squirrels wherever you look on Earth, but we don't expect to find squirrels on other planets, stars, or galaxies. The universality of universal nature is everywhere, always.

Let's stick with specific nature because it is somehow related to classification – to categories that are somehow bounded, and if there is some transgressed entity, it turns into a monster and generates horror – we can see it on the example of transgender people that scare some ultra-conservative Catholics. My question is, why is this so persistent? Science, art, and philosophy have attacked these beliefs many times. Why do we still have this strong, almost naturalized, notion of specific natures?

Each of the three meanings of nature that I've just described can be violated in a distinctive way. As you've just said, the way in which specific natures are violated is through monsters. The most obvious are those that cross species boundaries. You may remember a few years ago there was a fraud, a very successful fraud in terms of the number of people taken in by it, perpetrated on the internet, which showed a mouse but with a human ear emerging from it. This was a fake, but it stirred feelings of horror and fears that scientific research was deliberately creating such species hybrids, such monsters. In the case of the responses to transgender persons, here it's not a question of species; everyone agrees that they're all members of the same species. But again, it is a violation of categories which are taken to have the same kind of firmness as specific nature. Gender has some kind of specificity and integrity that means that when it is violated, what is violated is not just a social convention, but a natural kind. Now, whether or not gender identities are a natural kind is very controversial, but that, I think, is the impulse, the analogy which fuels those emotions of horror excited by the very prospect.

It's very typical, I think, of specific natures and violations of specific natures that they center on issues of reproduction and sexuality, and in particular anything that threatens what might be considered to be the normal course of reproduction. Crimes contra naturum in Roman law, and especially in the Christian west, such as homosexuality and bestiality, were aimed at any form of sex that was considered to be nonreproductive. That’s because the model for specific natures is organic species, and the idea is that an organic species reproduces itself faithfully. Like reproducing like. So any violation of that procedure comes to be seen as unnatural.

But even in modern history we can see some very dangerous outcomes of this approach. For example, you can justify racism, segregation, slavery, all kinds of atrocities you like. Do you think that in our time we are at the point where we can critically deconstruct it and try to move beyond it?

I certainly hope so, and I do think that there has been enormous progress made on that front. Often that progress consists of denaturalizing the category. We were just speaking about gender. There has been an enormous amount of critical thought in the past three or four decades that has gone into denaturalizing gender roles. It is no longer considered, for example, to be the specific nature of all women that they should stay home, have children, and take care of children. There are far more opportunities. So that's an example of a successful denaturalization of what was once seen to be the natural destiny of all women. I would remark as well that there is a certain plasticity in all three of these ideas of nature. You are absolutely right to say that specific natures have been used to justify racism, to justify sexism, to justify all manner of horrendous crimes. However, they have also been used to justify human rights on the grounds that all human beings share a nature and therefore are entitled to the same rights. One should not assume that there's any particular political direction, any particular political valence to any one of these three understandings of nature. All of them can be used for either revolutionary or reactionary purposes. And they have been.

Let's stay for a while with local nature because I guess it's a term that refers to ecology or practices of nature preservation. I'm wondering if ecologists derive norms from nature and then create a management plan to conserve or restore some specific biotope. Then there is the rewilding movement. People are inspired by Paleolithic landscapes and back breed once-extinct species of ancient herbivores like aurochs. The question is, is it possible to conserve these ever-dynamic natural processes? And who should decide what to preserve and how?

Those are very good questions. All three of these ideas of nature assume a foreshortened, human perspective. But in the longue durée, over centuries and millennia, all of these local natures are dynamic. They are changing. In the very longue durée, if we take an evolutionary or geological timescale, of course, whole species come into being and pass away. From this long-term perspective, it makes very little sense to talk about the local natures as being frozen in time or unchanging. They are not. However, because the human timescale is at most a few generations, there is a tendency to assume that the local nature one experiences at this moment is the most natural state, and that somehow it should be preserved like a fly in amber.

What distinguishes local natures is not just these interactions of flora and fauna and terrain and climate. What distinguishes them is the fact that all these forces at any given moment are experienced by human beings as being in a kind of equilibrium with one another. There is a fear that when something is changed, by human agency in particular, it will throw everything out of whack. So, for example, when a natural disaster happens nowadays, you often see a headline: “Revenge of nature.” When the Swiss began to cut down trees on their mountains to make room for more ski paths, they also increased the number of avalanches. This was interpreted in such headlines as the revenge of nature. If monsters are the violation of specific natures, the violation of local natures is to capsize that equilibrium, with results that are often dramatic and, in the short term, very harmful, especially harmful to human life and property.

The question that you raise apropos of the rewilding movement is whether there was some time in the past, a privileged moment which would represent, as it were, the most natural of all local natures for a particular locale. That seems to me a highly contentious claim. There are so many past such moments, and we really have no criteria to determine which of them is, the most natural and what it would mean to say that. They're all natural. They all existed. Which is the most desirable? Desirable from whose point of view? That strikes me as more nostalgic romanticism than a plausible ecological argument.

Right, so maybe the question about who, when, and which kind of environment to protect is more about ethics than something that can be derived from your philosophical categories.

It's also about aesthetics. I think that there is a very strong dimension of an idealized natural landscape. What that idealized natural landscape is, is very much a cultural product. Before the Romantic Movement in Europe, the Alps were considered to be hideous. They were described by Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century as pimples on the face of the Earth. It's only in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century that they come to be seen as sublime. We often tend to think of the countryside as it exists in cultivated form – rolling hills, flourishing farms – as nature, whereas, in fact, it represents a human transformation of the original primordial landscape. So the aesthetics as well as the ethics of the choice of which local nature is the real local nature are both diverse and extremely fraught.

But if we are facing damaging climate change, like we are, a reassembled Paleolithic environment is maybe one of those that can capture the biggest amount of carbon dioxide in the soil – maybe it's simply the reaction to fear from nature's revenge. We want to somehow act on it.

I agree. Here one has an interesting situation because we were talking about the fact that there are multiple criteria for deciding what you preserve, what you do not preserve in a local nature. In the case of climate change, because the threat is so urgent and so potentially devastating, you could argue that that criterion is the course of action that would absorb more carbon and minimize carbon transmission, which ought to have priority over many others. So that would be a clear argument for a combination of urgency and likely impact to give us a clear criterion, a clear hierarchy of criteria upon which to act.

What is the link between norm and order? Humans do use natural orders to represent moral orders and norms. The example is often the beehive or anthill.

It's very difficult for us to put our arms around an abstract noun like "society." The former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once notoriously asked, "Where is society?" as if she were asking for someone to point it out to her. For that reason, there is a long history of trying to find concrete models to represent society. Not all of them are natural. Clockwork, for example, has been used as one possible model. But many of them are natural, like the beehive, as you mentioned.

The question arises why? We have plenty of artifacts, things that we have made that we could use as models, which you might think would be better suited for our own intellectual creations. But we tend to prefer the natural objects, and they have several advantages. One of them is that they are ubiquitous; they are available to everyone to see. But the second is that they are also enduring. One of the most important desiderata for an order of any kind, natural or moral, is that it be durable – that it not be the creature of a month, a day, a year, or even a decade or a century. So nature's order, which is amongst the most durable that we know, especially as compared to our merely human time scale, is a very appealing resource for models of the moral and social abstractions that we create.

Traditionally, western cultures distinguish humans and nature quite strictly. But we know different concepts from different cultures. Can you please describe why this is so? And is this changing somehow?

Human nature is just one of many specific natures. Squirrels have their nature, bears have their nature, and humans have their nature. We are one organic species amongst many. In some ways, this just puts us on the same level as all other organic species. But, of course, it plays a much more important role for us because it happens to be the nature of our species. However much we may attempt to evade anthropocentrism, we remain members of our own species. Discussions about human nature are always politically and morally fraught. It's particularly interesting to observe the way in which human nature is used because it is a sterling example of how our discussion about natures straddles the boundary between the descriptive and the normative.

You might think of social science and biological explorations of human nature to be just like the explorations of the nature of amoebas, or the nature of gorillas, or the nature of any other species. But when there is an act committed by a human being, which we consider to be in some way atrocious, our first reaction is to ask, what kind of a person could do something like that? – with the implication that the person is not a person at all; that the person does not belong to the species for having violated some aspect of human nature. The paradigm case is when parents kill their children. This is considered to be not just a horrendous crime – it certainly is that – but it has a very special horror attached to it because it is considered to be against human nature. So you see how very difficult it is to disentangle the descriptive from the normative aspect. Human parents love their children – the descriptive – and human parents should love their children – the prescriptive.

Do you think we need to represent nonhumans in politics? What might it look like? Because the needs of many species are different from human needs…

I think that we should be very cautious about speaking for other species.  We should be very sure that we know what the best interests of other species are. We're not very good even at judging the best interests of our own species. It strikes me as presumptuous, to say the least, that we should take it upon ourselves to decide the conditions under which other species flourish. That being said, one can understand movements that seek to prevent the attrition of biodiversity in the world for all kinds of reasons. Reasons which are to some extent ethical, aesthetic, but also prudential. Our species will not flourish in the absence of many other species. But that is a different matter than giving other species political representation. Given the fact that the political representation would be ipso facto through the mouthpiece of human beings – it would mean that human beings would have to empower themselves to speak for other species. I don't think that we thus far have shown ourselves to be very good advocates for other species.