A lively discussion in the philosophy group I attend touched on the distinction between nature and culture, which several of us regard as impenetrably ambiguous. Someone, appealing I guess to common sense, observed: “Well your body is almost 100% natural.”
I was for a moment charmed by the thought, that beneath our clothes each of us conceals a secret wilderness unblemished by the millennia of human history. And the comment promised the added benefit of conflating the culture/nature question with that old chestnut, the mind/body problem. Unfortunately it’s nonsense. I’m no scientist, but even with a layman’s grasp of human physiology, we’ll quickly realize our physical bodies are infested with cultural traces, right down to the cellular level.
Actually, there’s one field that science has mostly ignored, but which has held my interest for more than four decades: the adaptations of the human musculature to the stresses of everyday life. I’ve been a student, sometimes casual, sometimes intense, of a host of inter-related disciplines: bioenergetics, qi gong, Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, chiropractic… you name it. It doesn’t matter which door you enter by, once you take a close look you’ll see that the average Western body is a morass of dysfunctional muscular tensions.
I say “dysfunctional” advisedly. The way we characteristically tighten our jaws, suppress our breathing, lock our hips, splay our feet and clench our hands provides no operational benefit. These are typical reactions to the pressures and anxieties of civilized life. You’d probably have to visit the rainforests to find a human adult today who doesn’t walk funny, sit funny and lie in a knotted mess. Wilhelm Reich developed a theory of how these contractions harden into postural fixtures that correlate to particular character types: an unproven notion, of course, but a compelling testament to the intrusion of culture on our skeletal-muscular organization.
And then there’s the brain. A thought is a physical event: we may not know all the details yet, but we do know that when you think of stuff, neurons fire inside your skull. More than that, if you keep thinking of the same stuff, permanent clusters get laid down, so called neural pathways. A recent study revealed that the world’s most famous brands — Nike, Apple, Starbucks, etc. — each have their own little neural nest permanently installed inside our heads. We’re hardwired to shop.
Finally, chemistry. We eat processed foods, we breathe poisoned air, we drink contaminated water and all that goop goes somewhere. And has effects. It’s a paradox that as “civilized” human beings we apparently live longer, on average, than our savannah-dwelling forebears. But what kills us is our own constructed environment. Most of us (in the US anyway) will die of cancer, heat disease or diabetes, the so-called “lifestyle” diseases brought on by an over-industrialized environment combined with physically inert behaviors. The lawyers may attribute our demise to “natural causes” but they’ll almost certainly be lying. Most of us couldn’t die a natural death if we tried to.
Nature is real. There is a vast and cohesive biological, chemical and physical reality way beyond the influence of human culture, even under our clothes. But where is the true frontier? Where does culture end and “pure nature” actually begin? Search me.