Skeletons of Mardi Gras: How the Walking Dead Are Keeping Traditions Alive in New Orleans

When I pulled onto Esplanade Avenue on Mardi Gras morning, the clouds over New Orleans were just losing their sunrise glow. I found a parking spot in the shadow of I-10, which sits right on top of Claiborne Avenue in the Fauborg Tremé neighborhood; one of the oldest predominantly black neighborhoods in the country. The famous Zulu parade would be be coming down Claiborne later, but that's not what I was here to see. On this most festive of days, I was in search of the walking dead.

Not long after leaving my car, I heard a faint crrrraww! sound to my left. Several blocks away, a handful of black-clad figures with huge white heads emerged into the street, and then vanished, followed by a small parade of brightly dressed onlookers. I pulled out my camera and ran after them.

The North Side Skull and Bones Gang were on the move.  Several African American men and boys were making their way down the street.  They wore black sweats with skeletons painted on them, and paper-mache skulls the size of beach balls. On their white butcher's aprons was a leering skull design. All of them carried big bones in their hands, which they used to bang on doors on either side of the street. One particularly scary looking Skull walked on stilts, making him at least nine feet tall. The leader, a big guy with antelope horns protruding from his skull mask, boomed in a deep voice “Skull and bones gang! Mardi Gras morning! Wake up!” Some of them shook tambourines and rattles, and one—I think the one on stilts, though it was hard to say with the masks--kept making the eerie crrrrawwwww!! call.

Doors cracked, and people peered out at the apparitions on the street. Most of the grown-ups smiled and said “Good morning”, or “Happy Mardi Gras!” Kids peeked around their parents, looking thunderstruck. “Get up outta that bed! It's Mardi Gras morning!” the bone men yelled, “You gotta get your life straight!”

The North Side Skull and Bones Gang are the best known of several “skeleton gangs” that roam the streets of New Orleans on Mardi Gras morning. They claim to be the oldest skeletons, tracing their history to 1819. If so, they've been waking people up on Mardi Gras morning for nearly 200 years. But they aren't just trying to get the party started. They have a serious message, too. As they walked down the street, they greeted people emerging from doorways, shaking hands, patting backs, and bending down to talk to kids. I couldn't hear most of what they were saying, but based on what I've read, they tell them to be good, stay away from drugs, and do their homework. If they don't, they say, the bone men will come back for them.

By appearing as the walking dead, the bone men remind people--young and old—to live well while they're alive. As the words on their aprons say, “You next!” Sometimes they dance in a circle and chant “You better get your...life together, next time you see us...it's too late to try!”

Not everybody welcomed the Skulls that morning, though. When they banged on one door, an irate white woman with a Midwestern accent appeared and said, “Why are you doing cop-knocking first thing in the morning? I had to stuff all my s**t under the couch, what the f**K!?”. The leader of the Skulls, somehow looking disgusted through a giant paper-mache skull mask, said “Then move outta the city.” All the onlookers nodded in agreement. Another woman, whose husband opened the door and shook hands with some of the Skulls, pointed at the leader and said, “Don't touch me.” I couldn't hear what she said next, but she seemed to think the Skulls represented black magic or devil worship. I heard the big Skull in the antelope horns saying, “No, no, that's not what we're about.”

It's hard to pinpoint the cultural origins of the skeleton gangs. Some sources vaguely suggest that the North Side Skull and Bones Gang was started by a merchant marine from New Orleans, who witnessed the Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico, and decided it would be perfect for Mardi Gras. If that's true, the tradition was borrowed from a combination of old Aztec celebrations (the Aztecs being big on skulls) and European traditions like the Danse Macabre motif in art, and the idea of the dead becoming restless during the three day period of Halloween, All Saint's Day, and All Souls Day (October 31-November 2). One of the Skulls I talked to later that day, however, said the tradition was related to Lent, and that skeletons are a reminder that the pleasures of the flesh—the carnal things celebrated at Carnival—are fleeting.

But I suspect there's more to the story. New Orleans is often called the most unique city in the United States, and most people assume that's because of its French heritage. They're partly right, but New Orleans preserved more than French culture. It also preserved African culture; more so than nearly any other place in North America.  Under French (and Spanish) law, slaves had more extensive rights than in the Anglo-American south. One result was that they were allowed to gather on Sundays for dancing and drumming at the place now known as Congo Square. This would never have been allowed in Anglo-America. The Congo Square gatherings helped preserve rhythms that mostly disappeared in other parts of the United States; rhythms which reemerged in Mardi Gras Indian chants, jazz, and rock and roll. If New Orleans preserved this musical aspect of African culture, there's every reason to think it preserved other aspects, including African religion. After all, African music and African religion aren't easily separated. One of the functions of the drums was to call forth the spirits. Those drums certainly fill me with the spirit.  I don't happen to believe in the kinds of spirits the Congo Square drummers believed in, but I can see how they came to believe the drums allowed transcendent spirits to enter their bodies.  I mean, it's a pretty accurate description of what it feels like.

One of most important African religious traditions to be preserved in New Orleans was Voodoo. Just to be clear, I'm not falling for the Hollywood version of New Orleans Voodoo here. Most of the “Voodoo” you see in the city today is strictly tourist kitsch.  However, Voodoo (or Vodou, or Vodun) is a real religion, and it did play a role in New Orleans' history.  Voodoo originated in West Africa, and is still an important religion in some countries there, especially Benin.  It was blended with Catholicism and Native American religions to produce produce Santeria in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil, and Voodoo in Haiti.  Voodoo came to New Orleans with slaves, soon after the city was founded. After the Haitian revolution, many white refugees fled to New Orleans, bringing slaves with them. The Voodoo tradition was even stronger in Haiti, of course, and remains the predominant religion there to this day. The 1800's were the heyday of influential Voodoo practitioners in New Orleans. The most famous was Marie Laveau, whose tomb is in St. Louis Cemetery Number 1, right next to Congo Square.

In Voodoo, there is a supreme god, who stays remote from human affairs. Lesser spirits known as Loa are the ones who deal with people. One group of Loa are the Ghede, who are simultaneously spirits of death and fertility. The Ghede are a sort of family, often pictured as skeletal figures wearing black and purple. They're a wild bunch; drinking spiced rum, dancing the suggestive Banda dance, and swearing profusely. They are the spirits of fertility, but they are dead, so nobody can punish them for their lewdness. They can do what they want. Interestingly, many of the Ghede, especially Papa Ghede, their patriarch, are very fond of children. The Ghede are closely associated with the more powerful Loa, Baron Samedi (Baron Saturday) and his wife, Maman Brigitte. These two resemble the Ghede (and are sometimes considered a part of them) with skeletal faces and black clothing.

When the Skulls finished their rounds on Mardi Gras morning, they returned to the Backstreet Cultural Museum in the Tremé, just across Armstrong park from the cemeteries and Congo Square. Their leader, Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes, traded his giant skull and antelope horns for a skull mask and top hat with a cross in front. Now he clearly resembled Baron Samedi or Papa Ghede. Barnes seems to see the Northside Skull and Bones Gang in terms of the Ghede tradition. In interviews, he explicitly links the skeleton gangs to the Ghede tradition in Haitian Voodoo.

I don't know if the skeleton gangs really originated with the Ghede and Voodoo.  It's intriguing that both the Ghede and the skeleton gangs (or at least the North Side Skull and Bones) seem concerned with the welfare of children. But maybe the tradition originated from multiple sources: African, Catholic, and perhaps even Aztec (if the Day of the Dead connection is true). All these traditions were influencing each other well before New Orleans was founded. Besides, people tend to come up with similar ideas independently. If you believe the spirits of the dead remain after the body dies, you could easily conclude that the dead had lessons to teach us. One piece of advice they might offer is to live life fully, and not join them sooner than necessary. This sort of idea has surely occurred to people around the world.

Whatever its origins, the North Side Skull and Bones Gang today seems mostly concerned with maintaining the traditions and culture of black New Orleans, by encouraging young people to participate in that culture, and by warning them away from the drugs, guns, and violence that are all too common there. The people involved seem quite capable of making a difference. When I started reading about the Skulls after Mardi Gras, I realized how talented some of their members are. An older gentleman I spoke with turned out to be Ronald Lewis, the creator of the House of Dance and Feathers, a museum of black New Orleans culture in the 9^th ward. Another member is Royce Osborne, creator of an excellent documentary about Black Carnival traditions in New Orleans, called All On A Mardi Gras Day. Their leader, Bruce Barnes, is a park ranger at the New Orleans Jazz National Historic Park, a multi-instrumentalist who leads a Zydeco band called Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots, a former professional football player, and an important community leader.

Underneath their masks, the North Side Skull and Bones Gang are talented, influential people They're fighting for a worthy cause, and helping preserve a truly unique heritage. I hope they go on banging on doors and waking people up for years to come.

____________________________________________________________________

Links

Backstreet Cultural Museum
 
All on a Mardi Gras Day 

House of Dance and Feathers

Sacred Ground (a good article about the North Side Skull and Bones Gang, and the Tremé neighborhood)

Signs of Life (a photo exhibit featuring the North Side Skull and Bones) 

Darwinian Family Values: From Selfish Genes to Altruism

It's a Saturday night in south Louisiana; the weekend before Mardi Gras.  There's going to be parading and debauchery from now through Fat Tuesday, and I intend to see some of it.  But tonight, the rain is pounding against my windows, and I just can't get that excited about going out in it.  So, I'll risk the wrath of Bacchus by staying in and continuing my recent ramblings about ethics.

In my last two posts, I've been considering whether ethical laws are an intrinsic part of nature.  I've concluded there are good reasons to be skeptical about the idea of natural law--the idea that there are clear ethical rules implicit in nature, and that we can use our reason to discover them.  If the natural world evolved through a combination of  basic physical processes and natural selection, then there's good reason to question the natural law idea that everything in nature has a purpose, and that learning our purpose can tell us what is good.  If humans are chance products of natural selection, then we may have no purpose at all.  It seems quite likely to me that we weren't put on earth for any reason.  We are here because we happened to evolve.  I don't mean to wring my hands and say life is meaningless.  I think human life can be incredibly meaningful.  We are smart, curious, social, and talkative creatures living in a world full of wonders.  There are plenty of ways to find rewards and meaning in life.  I just don't think we can assume that we are here to serve some cosmic purpose.

Another reason to be skeptical about natural law is the problem of the appeal to nature fallacy (or naturalistic fallacy), which reminds us that we can't automatically jump from descriptions about how things are to how things should be.  Evolution, for example, has made human males stronger and more aggressive (on average) than human females. In the past, and in some places and subcultures even today, being big and bad enough to outfight or intimidate other males was a successful strategy for having more offspring.  Does that mean men should fight more, since we are, in the mindless evolutionary sense, designed for it?  Certainly not.  The fact that belligerence was a successful strategy in the past doesn't mean it's the right way to act.  Is does not equal ought.

Nature only seems care about what works, not what's right.  However, this doesn't mean nature is irrelevant to morality.  We can't simply ignore the laws of nature, or the realities of human nature, when we decide how we should act.  We can't for example, decide that it's wrong to ever eat any part of another living thing.  We would starve to death. 

On a less drastic level, it's important to know as much as we can about human nature, to gain insight into why we have ethical preferences all.  Is our sense of morality a universal part of human nature, with deep roots in our evolutionary history?  Or are humans born a blank slate, learning the socially constructed rules of our particular culture?  In some circles, it's heresy to claim that human behavior has any intrinsic basis.  It smacks too much of old theories justifying racism, sexism, and the supposed superiority of western ways.  In the last few decades, though, it's been increasingly hard to deny that human nature has been influenced by evolution.  But it's a universal human nature, common to all people, regardless of race.  While our moral sense is obviously modified by the culture we grow up in, it was not created by that culture, at least not entirely.

If evolution is amoral and blind, how did it give us a sense of morality, a sense that some things are good or bad, right or wrong?  Let's focus one aspect of morality for now: altruism.  Altruism occurs when one animal (human or otherwise) does something to help another, at a cost to itself.  Most people feel an urge to help others, at least to some extent, especially if those others are their friends or family.  But we aren't the only animals capable of altruism. Vervet monkeys, for example, will give a loud call if they see a predator.  This warns the other members of the group to be careful, but it also increases the chance that the predator will zero in on it, and have that selfless monkey for dinner.  Wolves that have had a successful hunt will eat their fill, return to the pack, and regurgitate food for others who weren't part of the hunt.  This may be gross, but it's undeniably altruistic.

Now, we don't know if vervet monkeys and wolves feel some sense of obligation or empathy which spurs them to such selfless acts.  Both are fairly-large brained creatures, so it seems likely to me that they do.  In humans, a sense of obligation or empathy is considered a moral sense.  While I don't know if I would say wolves and vervet monkeys are moral creatures, I would say their urges toward selfless behavior could be a precursor of our more sophisticated moral sense.

But the question remains--how did this kind of behavior evolve?  Lots of people figure that animals are altruistic because it helps the group or species survive. After all, evolution is about the survival of the fittest species, right?  Well, not really.  Evolution doesn't seem to happen at the group level, except possibly in very special cases.  Here's why:  let's say you have a group of extremely altruistic monkeys, whose members always share food and help care for each others' offspring.  They always help each other, and because of that, they are a very successful group.  But there is always some variation within any group of organisms.  Occasionally, one will arise within the group that doesn't have "helpful genes".  They never help, and they take advantage of the altruism of the others.  This they will survive better, at the expense of the others.  It also means they have more offspring, who inherit their tendency to take advantage of others.  Very quickly, these non-altruistic monkeys will get more and more common in the population, until the group is no longer composed mostly of altruists.  To the extent that acting for the good of the group is not conducive to survival and reproduction of the individual, it is not--to use the evolutionary biologist's term--an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Actually, what matters most in evolution is not the even success of the individual, but of particular genes.  Individual living things are ephemeral--most only live a few years at best. An individual's particular combination of genes are also ephemeral.  In sexually reproducing organisms, each one has a unique genome, a mix of the genomes of their parents.  If they reproduce, they will pass 50 % of their genes on to each of their offspring, and each of them will have their own unique combination of genes.  What lasts across generations are individual genes.  For the last few billion years, genes that happen to be good at getting themselves replicated have increased at the expense of genes that weren't as good at replicating.  Over time, the world has come to be populated by organisms whose genes are good at replicating themselves.  As Richard Dawkins explains in The Selfish Gene, whole organisms are vehicles designed by genes for the purpose of replicating those genes.  Of course, neither the organism or the gene is conscious of this.  A gene has no consciousness at all, and an organism that acts in a way that spreads its genes isn't conscious of why it's doing so.  A mother alligator cares for her babies because her brain and hormones tell her to, not because she's thinking about how best to spread her genes.  This is true for people, too.  We care for our children because we feel an intense love for them, rarely considering that this love has anything to do with our genes.

Caring for children is so automatic for most people that it doesn't even seem like altruism.  It's just what you do.  But it is altruism in the sense that the parent is making sacrifices for the child.  Often big sacrifices.  Once I had a dog that had puppies.  She was a wonderful mother, and nursed them all the time.  Before long, her hair started falling out, because her puppies were getting nutrients she needed for herself.  She was sacrificing her health (albeit unconsciously) for the sake of other creatures--her puppies.  The immediate reason she did this is because she felt (and I'm convinced she had feelings) an overwhelming urge to do so.  But the ultimate, evolutionary reason she felt that way is that each one of those eight puppies held copies of her genes.  I say copies because genes can't pass themselves on.  They can only pass copies of themselves on.  This means it doesn't matter, in terms of the gene's success, that those copies are in another organism.  In fact, it works out well, because one organism can have many offspring, producing multiple copies of many of its genes (multiple copies of all of them, if it reproduces asexually, but that's a different topic). 

Today, this "gene's eye" view of evolution is often known as the "selfish gene" theory, because it was explained in the brilliant book of the same name by Richard Dawkins.  Other scientists, especially W.D. Hamilton, George Williams, John Maynard Smith, and Robert Trivers, came up with the basic idea of looking at evolution at the level of the genes.  As Richard Dawkins would readily admit, he was just explaining it.  As he would also admit, the title of the book has caused a lot of misunderstanding.  He called the book The Selfish Gene because genes tend to do whatever it takes to get themselves replicated, whether or not this is good for the individual organism.  A male preying mantis has an intense urge to mate with a female preying mantis, even though she is quite likely to bite his head off in the midst of their passion.  It's a risk worth taking, as far as his genes are concerned, because he is getting them reproduced.  As long as more genes are replicated in the long run, the misfortunes of Mr. Mantis are irrelevant to evolution.   This is the sense in which genes are selfish.  The mistake is to conclude that selfish genes always create selfish organisms.  Genes do whatever it takes to get themselves replicated.  Sometimes selfish organisms do this most effectively, but oftentimes, altruism works just as well.

We've already seen one way this is true: with parental care of offspring.  But altruism in nature goes beyond that.  If all genes become widespread by making copies of themselves, those copies don't have to be in direct offspring.  An organism's offspring, as I mentioned, have copies of 50% of its genes.  But so do its parents and siblings.  This means that if it doesn't have offspring, but helps two of its siblings survive and reproduce, the effect is the same in terms of gene replication.  This means natural selection will tend to produce organisms that act altruistically toward their relatives.  The closer the relation, on average, the more altruism.  While siblings share 50% of their genes, cousins only share 25% of them (on average, as always).  If we look at how the world works, that's exactly what tends to happen.  Some animals do take care of their siblings' offspring, but they don't spend as much time with them as their own offspring.  My aunts and uncles were all very kind and generous to me, but they didn't raise me.  They raised their own children.  That's how evolution made us.

Selection for altruism toward relatives is known as kin selection, and it accounts for most of the altruism in nature.  But it only goes so far.  It doesn't lead to absolute altruism, even toward ones children or siblings.  If there are two siblings, and only enough food for one of them to survive, kin selection theory predicts each will try take the food for itself.  Yes, if one of them lets it's sibling have the food, and then dies, 50% of its genes would have survived.  But if it takes the food itself, 100% of its genes have survived.  So, even close relatives don't share the exact same interests, genetically speaking, unless they are identical twins.  This means there's a lot of conflict in nature, even among members of immediate families.  In some cases, when an individual can spread its genes more effectively by surviving at the expense of its family members, kin altruism is selected against.  This is apparently the case in the Sand Tiger shark.  This shark gives birth to live young, but only two of them.  The shark has a double uterus, and in each branch, the shark embryos eat each other, until only one remains.  Evolution doesn't always encourage niceness, even among brothers and sisters.
 
This unsettling image brings up an extremely important point.  I want be perfectly clear that, while I do think evolution created most of our moral impulses, such as our urge to treat relatives well, I don't think these impulses are the best we can do morally.  As I discussed in the last post, nature is amoral.  Evolution encourages altruism when altruism is useful for spreading the most genes.  When it isn't useful, it isn't encouraged.  Our genes, in their mindless quest to replicate themselves, gave us large brains, capable of reflecting on our impulses, and (with a good bit of willpower) choosing which ones to follow, and which ones to resist.  And some of our natural impulses should definitely be resisted.

In any case, it seems likely to me that altruism between related individuals gave rise to some of our basic, morally-laden emotions, including love, the urge to nurture and protect, and our sense of loyalty to family.  In human societies, we are constantly using family metaphors to encourage bonding, cooperation, and loyalty among unrelated people.  Students in fraternities and sororities call each other brothers and sisters.  Catholic priests are called "Father".  Americans talk about our Founding Fathers, while Russian's talk about Mother Russia.  Confucius saw society as a large family, and believed that the kind of loyalty and hierarchy that made a good family (as he saw it) would also make a good society.  This extension of the family metaphor into larger groups has been a mixed blessing, of course.  On the one hand, it's built cooperative groups capable of accomplishing far more than they would have if they hadn't cooperated.  On the other hand, it can be used by tyrants to justify their power (Big Brother is watching you), and it can lead to a nasty kind of tribalism, where people abuse those that aren't part of their societal "families".

I don't want to get caught up in how the family metaphor is extended to unrelated people, at least not now.  My main point in this post is that the moral impulses humans feel have an evolutionary history that began long before humans did.  But it isn't common to all animals.  Many animals feel no impulse at all to treat other members of their species well.  If parental care isn't adaptive, they don't even feel the need to treat their own babies well. Many frogs simply leave their eggs in a pond, and then go about their business.  It's probably safe to say that this frog doesn't have any particular sense of good will or fair play toward other frogs.  However, animals that practice parental care--even solitary ones such as bears--do seem to feel an obligation to protect and care for other bears--if those bears are their own offspring.  In social animals, individuals may feel an urge to care for the rest of their family, not just their own offspring.  In many small groups of animals, most individuals are related, so they may feel a general altruism toward all their fellows (though they are likely to feel more of it towards immediate kin).

Of course, there's a lot more to human morality than altruism between relatives. We also have a sense of the sacred, of fairness, of loyalty, and of moral outrage when we think these things are being violated.  If I'm going to consider the origins of these impulses, then I have a lot more work to do.  However, I think it makes sense to start by looking at how some animals began to have the sense that they should be benevolent or cooperative to certain other animals (instead of ignoring them, chasing them away, or killing them).  One way this happened is though kin altruism.  But it's not the only way.  Unrelated animals do cooperate in nature, and some may even form friendships, develop a rudimentary sense of fairness and empathy, and trade favors.  This kind of cooperation isn't as strong as kin altruism, though, and it's prone to shifting alliances and exploitation by cheaters.  This is where social life among animals turns into a real soap opera.  But this post is long enough, so I'll talk about that in the next episode.

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins

The Expanding Circle:  Ethics and Sociobiology - Peter Singer

Meerkat image © goldencolt - Fotolia.com

All-Natural Goodness, Part II: Does Natural = Good?

For people just tuning in to this series of blog posts (and if you are, many thanks), I've been on a kick of thinking about where morality comes from.  Is it an innate part of reality, or have we humans created it ourselves?  So far, I've examined the idea that good and bad are whatever God says they are, and found it wanting.  I've also considered the history of natural law ethics--the idea that there is a higher law in nature, discoverable by human reason, that can tell us how our laws and morals should be.  In that post, I talked about natural law as it has been seen by thinkers from Socrates, to Aquinas, to Jefferson, and concluded that that we can't conclude that morality is written into nature or reality in any simple way.  Maybe moral laws exist in the sense that they inevitably arise when thinking, feeling beings start to haggle over rules for treating each other decently.  That's plausible, but what isn't plausible to me is that detailed moral laws existed before conscious beings with preferences came along.

In this post, I want to return to the idea of intrinsic morality in nature, but from a slightly different angle.  Most people have an intuitive sense of natural law, even if they've never read a speck of philosophy.  This sense underlies the common belief that what is natural is good, and what is unnatural is bad.  Of course, most people today aren't thinking in the terms Aristotle or Aquinus did.  Some people take a religious view, thinking something like "God created nature, and nature is good.  Therefore, what is natural is good, and what is contrary to nature is bad."  These people may accept the idea that people should tame nature, but not directly contradict it.  Others focus on nature in itself, and separate it from the idea of God.  In fact, many of those convinced of the goodness and rightness of nature are not traditionally religious.  Lots of folks who gravitate toward nature and the outdoors have an reverence for the nature world that seems a lot like religion to me, even when they don't consider themselves religious.  

I understand this feeling, because reverence for nature comes, well, naturally to me.  I was one of those kids who spent my summers and weekends tromping around the woods, marveling at the wonder of it all.  Like many such people, I think nature has beauty and harmony, an implicit wisdom we should respect. It's not hard to see where this view comes from. Almost anyone thinks a mountain stream, for example, is more beautiful than a sewage drain or salvage yard. A meadow is a nicer thing to look at than a parking deck. But these are just surface appearances.  The apparent harmony and goodness of nature goes deeper than that. Examples abound of the amazing balance and stability of the natural world. For hundreds of millions of years, animals have inhaled oxygen and exhaled carbon dioxide, while plants have done the reverse; and around it's gone in an efficient, stable cycle. Examples also abound of the unintended folly of human actions. DDT seemed great until we realized it was wiping out birds. Australia is now knee deep in rabbits, toads, and camels because someone thought it would be a good idea to introduce them.  Artificial trans fats seemed just as good as naturally occurring fats, until we realized...they weren't.

 

It's no wonder, then, that people make the generalization that natural is good, unnatural is bad. But the idea is usually based on gut feelings more than facts, so it tends to be both strongly held and vaguely formulated. The result is that people draw conflicting, often mutually exclusive conclusions from their intuitions about the "rightness" of nature. People have appealed to nature to justify or attack just about every idea imaginable. Some assume that herbal remedies are always safer and more effective than synthetic drugs, simply because they are natural, even though there's no scientific reason to think plants evolved to provide us with medicines. Sometimes it's true that natural remedies are better, but it isn't necessarily (or even usually) true. Arsenic, mercury, and hemlock, which are all quite natural, will kill you quite dead, while synthetics like sulfa drugs have saved millions of lives. Social conservatives often justify discrimination against gays on the grounds that homosexuality is "against nature". Various forms of social Darwinism, the idea that we should let the "fittest" in society rise to the top, leaving the unfit to their fate (because that's the way nature works) are still rather common. So, while there's no doubt we can learn a lot from the natural world, it's crucial that we take this intuition and clarify exactly what it means, and what it doesn't.

I learned this lesson once at a party.  I was talking to a good friend, who has degrees in philosophy and biology, about whether it was wrong to eat animals.  As an ethical vegetarian, she thought it was. I disagreed, telling her I thought there is nothing wrong with eating other animals, because that's the way nature works. I said, "Animals eat each other throughout the natural world, so why should we be an exception?" "Well," she shot back, "infanticide, robbery, and deceit happen all the time in nature too. Does that mean it's fine for us to do those things? Whether or not something happens in nature doesn't determine whether it's ethically right"
 
I opened my mouth to reply...and then shut it again.  I had no retort to her argument. I had always been the type to look to nature for guidance about how the world should work, and I had never thought about things this way. But I realized she was right. The fact that lions kill other lions' cubs doesn't make it ethically right for us to kill infants. If I find it indefensible to justify infanticide by saying it happens in nature, I have to admit that justifying meat-eating on the same basis is just as groundless. The logic is the same in both cases. This realization wasn't enough to convince me it was wrong to eat meat, but I did have to abandon my favorite justification for it. 

 
I found out later that I had been caught red-handed committing a well known philosophical fallacy, called the naturalistic fallacy, or the appeal to nature fallacy (there's a difference, but it's too subtle to concern us here). The first to point out the problems with this way of thinking was the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hume said that just because things are a certain way doesn't mean that things should be that way. The way he put it is that there are no logical grounds for inferring what ought to be from what is. A similar idea was put forth by G.E. Moore at the beginning of the 20^th century, using a more sophisticated logical argument. Today most ethicists accept that the naturalistic fallacy is a logical error.  Of course, this doesn't mean that nature as it is has no bearing on what is right.  We obviously ignore nature at our peril. But it does means that just because something exists in nature, that does not mean it's right or good. 


With most natural processes, from colliding molecules to evolving species, it doesn't make much sense to talk about morality, because those processes happen mindlessly.  You may regret that a rock fell on you, or that a virus made you sick, but it doesn't make sense to blame them for their actions, because they have no minds.  They don't know they're doing it.  For an entity to have a moral capacity, it has to have things like awareness, preferences, and the ability to make choices.  Moral beings didn't exist on Earth until animals evolved brains sophisticated enough to have such abilities.  It seems to me that, once an animal develops sensations and preferences, it deserves some degree of moral consideration.  Moving up the scale of moral sophistication, once an animal--a human for example--realizes that other animals are capable of pleasure, pain, and preferences, and becomes able to consider and choose its actions, then we can talk about whether it is behaving morally, based on how its behaviors affect other sentient animals. 

I don't know when in the history of our world the capacity for awareness began, but at some point (long before people came along, I suspect) living things began to feel what was happening to them.  This was a revolution in nature, because it added a subjective--and eventually intellectual and moral--dimension to what had previously been the blind shuffling of matter and energy.  But this revolution has been a mixed blessing for us sentient beings. The simple capacity to feel is a double-edged sword. It introduces pleasure and satisfaction, but also hunger and pain. Because nature is blind, there is no guarantee that the pleasures will outweigh the torments. I have seen pairs of beavers (which often mate for life) carefully groom each other at dusk. Young deer romp and chase each other, and even snakes and lizards seem content when they bask in the sun. I'm convinced that pleasure and appreciation have been around far longer than we humans have. But I've also seen seagulls rob their neighbors' nests and eat the babies. Tragedy and pain are also much older than we are.

I think the romantic vision that nature is unfailingly harmonious and beneficial, and that it offers a sure guide to morality, is deeply flawed.  We need a new, more nuanced way of thinking about about nature, one that recognizes its horrors as well as its glories. I think the Hindus can teach us westerners a lesson here.  The well-known image to the right is the Hindu god Shiva. Typical of Hindu deities, Shiva assumes many contrasting forms. He is simultaneously the god of asceticism, destruction, and sensuality. In the picture, he assumes a form called Nataraja, Sanskrit for "lord of the dance". In this form, Shiva brings the world into being through an awesome cosmic dance of creation. Standing on a dwarf who represents human ignorance-our limited view of reality--he holds a drum symbolizing creation in one of his four hands, and a flame signifying destruction in the other. In Hinduism, the world emerges in the swirling play of these two forces. I think this is a perfect symbol for the way the natural world works. Like a dance, nature is an ongoing process of creation, full of rhythm, balance, and harmony. It's truly a thing of beauty, like many well-orchestrated acts of creation. But, like Shiva, nature frequently creates by destroying. In the cycle of national selection that has built the gorgeous diversity of living things, there is no safety net for those that aren't able to survive and reproduce. Survival of the fittest often means the death of the imperfect. I don't mean that's how things should be.  I'm just saying that's how they are.
 
Nature may be beautiful, but for the most part it's merciless. For every example of cooperation or nurturing you can find another example of predation, competition, or parasitism. This only makes sense if nature has evolved unconsciously, through a blind process that requires no planning, foresight, or feeling. Nature judges new behaviors and forms on one basis-whether or not they work. With the exception of a few animals with nervous systems, there is little evidence of any awareness in nature. It's senseless to talk about the morality of the natural world, just as it's senseless to blame a tree for falling on your house. Morality presupposes awareness and preference. Unless these abilities are involved, nature is amoral. It is neither good nor evil. It simply is.
 
We humans probably didn't invent pleasure and pain, or appreciation and tragedy, but we have refined them. Our species has invented sensory and aesthetic wonders, from chocolate ice cream to the Sistine Chapel. But we have also invented iron maidens and concentration camps. We've taken feelings, good and bad, to heights never seen in nature. But our world also differs from the natural world, in ways beyond intensification and refinement. In contrast to the rest of nature, we have a great deal of control over the quality of human life. 
 
That's one of the bonuses of our ability to imagine things that aren't immediately present. We can imagine alternatives and try to choose the better ones. I think this is the challenge of the human condition--unlike much of nature, we are at least partially responsible for what we do. We can decide how we want to live, how we should treat others, and what kind of society we want to have. Because we have foresight and choice, we have the capacity (some might say duty) to act purposefully and morally. This means it's possible for human society to progress--to improve the world, or at least our own societies. While nature makes decisions based solely on what is stable or viable, we can go beyond these criteria, and chose based on what improves the quality of the lives around us; on what is right and just. The question is whether we have the wisdom and will to do so.