Ergotism

One of the more fantastic and popular subversions of science is to attempt to make nature prescriptive.

You hear it all the time today and throughout history. Homosexuality is bad because it’s unnatural. It violates some hidden cosmic law that the truly initiated somehow has access to. In this way, it’s a classically Gnostic position. Talk about your new-age Hippie shit. A claim is made to hidden cosmic knowledge which is at once universal, and yet somehow evades the deviant.

Women forgoing childbearing and instead pursuing a public life is unnatural. So it was said during our period of feminist upheaval. Isn’t it strange that the last argument of the conservative, when all others fail, is that the progressive is unnatural? It’s strange because nature is descriptive, not prescriptive.

Kipling famously declared that the white man’s burden is to rule over the savages. It is the natural order of things, and therefore is as it should be, and as it always will be.

If anyone does anything, whatever that person is doing is natural. Nature is the study of the universe as it exists. Nature makes no claim about what is best, or what should be, or that the current state of nature is permanent or unalterable. This posture is the position of the conservative.

It seems that the best way to characterize the difference between conservative and progressive is that a conservative sees the world as it is and declares that this is the way that it must be, and that it is good for things to be this way. The progressive sees the world and says, “I bet we can do better.” When the conservative argues against the progressive by appealing to facts and reason, then the conservative can win. But when the conservative is forced to argue against the progressive on the basis that the progressive violates some hidden cosmic law, the conservative loses. In fact, it seems that the argument from prescriptive nature is the position that conservatives through history take when their position is on its last legs.

Don’t ever let anybody ever tell you that anything you do is unnatural. Whatever you do is natural by virtue of the fact that you’re doing it. Nature is not prescriptive. It is descriptive.