Nature's Evil

‘The old colonial system’, as it was known in the British tradition, did not move too far from Herodotus. The empire consisted of a metropolitan centre, or ‘mother country’, and colonies. Different races lived in them, and different laws applied. The daughter colonies extracted raw materials and delivered them to the mother country; the mother country processed them into manufactured goods which she sold back to her colonies or traded with other empires. The Republic of Venice and the Spanish Empire also used this dual model, but it fully developed later in England as mercantilism – the political-economic doctrine that was the ideological foundation of the British Empire.

Some countries are rich in resources, others in labour. Raw materials and goods are constantly being exchanged. Robert Malthus said that the greatest sector of world trade was the exchange between town and country. Extending this formulation, we could say that the greatest sector of world trade has been the exchange between labour-dependent and resource-dependent partners. In earlier times these partners were the metropoles and the colonies. Today they are ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries: the first world and the third world, the post-imperial centre and the post-colonial periphery – and the second, post-socialist world, still shaky and uncertain. All these definitions share the prefix ‘post’. 3 Post-colonial, post-socialist and, on the top of that, post-modern – but have we actually parted with the old mercantile system? Do we live in a post-mercantilist world?

Natura vastata

The silkworm has a complicated life cycle, but humankind uses only one stage of it – the cocoon. Unravelling the thread from the cocoon, man throws away everything else that makes the silkworm grow, move and reproduce. The cotton bush has roots, stems and flowers, but man uses only the single-celled fibre that grows from the husk of the seed. Nature created this fibre to allow the seed to float on the wind, dispersing the plant across the land. Using these little filaments, humans refused to follow the path that evolution had mapped out for them; they learnt to cover their bodies with the fibres of the silkworm cocoon or the cotton plant, which protect them from heat and cold. The poppy is also intricate; but only a small and incidental part of it, the sap of the unripe seed head, is of interest to man. For humans, all these resources are both the condition of their freedom and the road to new dependencies. By multiplying the ways they extract some elements and ignore others, humans increase consumption and proliferate waste. In mastering the nature of other beings, they change their own.

As long as nature seemed infinite and good, it was possible to think of her as God made manifest in another form; that is what Spinoza thought, distinguishing between Natura naturans and Natura naturata (Nature the Creator and Nature Created). Today it would be more accurate to contrast Nature Created with Nature Used and also with Nature Wasted, Natura vastata . The first has always been greater than the second; but it is the third that defines our survival. As Kant wrote: when man realised that he was ‘the true end of nature’, he said to the sheep, ‘The fleece which you wear was given to you by nature not for your own use but for mine.’ 4 The power of man over nature consists not so much in modifying Nature Created – the possibilities for that are limited – as in selecting his Nature Used and ceaselessly reproducing the chosen thing: out of many insects man chose the silkworm, from plants he selected cotton, from animals he chose sheep, and so silkworms, cotton and sheep are bred in quantities that far exceed their natural limits. This is also a natural selection, but Spinoza’s terms make it more basic than Darwin’s. The power of humans is also realised in the deep processing of selected materials: a great deal of knowledge and labour is required to make cotton into cloth and cloth into clothes. Natural selection leads to the development of new kinds of technology and standards of taste – or, conversely, these technologies and fashions make the use of new materials possible and desirable. If Nature the Creator has a plan, it nowhere coincides with human plans, which is precisely why it is so difficult for us to understand her plan.

The light, the rare and the dry