As he gets older he begins to take control of his world. The road to dominion starts with his own body. He learns that his hands are attached and that, to his delight, that he can move them at will. At first these movements are clumsy and often futile. Later on he learns that certain actions affect even those things that are not attached to his person. The bottle can be grasped; the rattle can be shaken and so on.
This goes further when he begins to pull the rug to bring the toy on it within reach. He can make mommy come when he cries or make daddy pick up the toy he has intentionally thrown on the ground. His actions make the world change. Soon language is added to his palette. By manipulating his body in his larynx, he can make his desires known and call attention to interesting things around him.
Throughout childhood this set of actions becomes less instinctual and more intentional. His shuffling steps become running and skipping and dancing. Grunts and cries turn to sentences and to songs. He trains his body to do what he wants even when his desires serve no bodily function.
Life becomes less and less natural. He eats things not as fuel in an indiscriminant fashion, but chooses which foods he wants to satisfy an internal desire. He learns that sometimes the most effective way to accomplish his desire is the indirect route. At first he stamps his foot and screams. Later he quietly pleads and puts his head on mommy’s shoulder. He learns how to seek the two in the bush in spite of having one in the hand by working for what can be rather than being satisfied with what is.
At first he plays with blocks without rhyme or reason. Soon he is building complex castles that he has never seen. First he plays with the dirt and the grass. Then his yard becomes a faraway land with battles and adventures. The more he distances himself mentally from being a cog in nature’s machine, then the more he is able to take from nature what he wants and to cause it to be what desires. Nature slowly becomes his.
As an adult this dominance grows. If he wants to feel alert and sharp, he drinks coffee. If he wants to feel relaxed and mellow, he drinks wine. Even his own state of mind becomes subject to his desires.
This is not his subservience to his own bio-chemical impulses, but an expression of nature and his own body as his possession. He must always obey nature in that he cannot drink a gallon of coffee or wine and still function. Yet it is this very submission to nature’s laws that allows him to make nature submit to him. He must sleep, but he sleeps when he chooses. It isn’t healthy to stand in the rain, but he does so if he chooses.
We all recognize that this self-conquest as maturity, but it is often indistinguishable from stupidity. If a man stands in the cold rain to catch a glimpse of a girl we call him a romantic, a fool, or maybe a pervert. This is exactly where humanity’s supernatural-ness comes to the fore. For people the choice of particular actions has a moral quality corresponding to their context.
If a male animal senses a female in heat then he must obey his instinct. No one thinks a dog is a fool or a pervert when he breaks into a yard to get at a bitch. No one thinks an ape is a fool if he passes on a gourmet meal later so he can have a banana now.
To be human means to cause your instincts to submit to your will and to manipulate nature in the same way. Yet it is for this aspect of our daily lives that the atheist has no answer. For him all is natural. We are not distinct in our desire for music from the animal’s desire for food.
By his reckoning we have no reason to judge a child’s actions as truly less mature. A child obeys his instinct and defiles himself where his sits without thought or care. This is natural. It is unnatural to discipline one’s body. Adults are the ones who are delusional to think there is a value to withholding a desired action.
To kill one’s rival as an animal is not sniffed at by their fellows or by us. To kill one’s rival as a child is prevented only by being weak and small. As an adult human, I am called upon to restrain my passions and instincts. I would be rightly condemned as outside the moral map if I obeyed every physical impulse.
Some might say that the natural attitude is exactly what is needed. They say we ought to get in touch with our inner child and to drop our taboos about sex. To them it is our separation from nature that has caused our misery and nature’s desolation.
But how many of really want to live in a world if we all acted “naturally?” Does the lion care if “no means no,” or if the lioness is not in the mood? Does he treat her as an equal and unique partner in spite of his physical superiority? Does he value the intrinsic value of his rivals’ cubs? No is the answer to all of these. He mates at his convenience. He lies on the grass while the lioness hunts for his food. He kills his rivals’ cubs without care as soon as their father is banished. Is this what we want?
Only humanity can have a humane society. It will not be by getting back to nature that we will achieve a good life. Nature’s society is brutal, selfish, and often cruel. Nature may have no place for hate, but it also has no place for love. It is only by the suspension of our own natural desires and, at times, the violation of natural laws that the concepts of goodness, beauty and love will ever have any meaning. Only by rising above ordinary nature can humanity be what we are naturally intended to be.
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