Mother Nature Returns

It's not just a metaphor.

Apple CEO Tim Cook doesn’t really believe in Mother Nature. It’s just an allegory. A dramatization. The tech company’s latest video features Octavia Spencer as the vengeful deity of thunderstorms, queen of the seasons, clothed in the appearance of human flesh to pass judgment upon the works of man.

As a metaphor, of course.

You see, what Tim Cook and his PR team actually believe, or think their audience believes, is this: the physical world exhibits certain unchanging tendencies of cause and effect. Human actions, like putting carbon in the air or drilling for oil, damage the planet and make it harder for living things—including humans—to survive. This is bad, because taking life is wrong. All perfectly rational.

I just have one question: if Octavia Spencer as Mother Earth is a metaphor, what would be the “literal” way of representing the statement, “taking life is wrong?” What could you say or show besides a scowling human form to convey the impression that what modern industry does is evil?

One answer might be, you could show actual men and women suffering—real ones. If Mother Nature is a fiction, how could her imagined displeasure compare with the very genuine pain of living mothers, whose flesh is not a figure of speech and whose sorrow is no illusion? But that would suggest that words like “harm” and “evil” are words applied by human beings to human experiences—which would mean that something about humanity is unique and valuable, worthy in itself of cultivation. If we are the ones who give the world its moral flavor, then it would be pointless to dismantle human civilization in service to an unfeeling ecosystem that can take no joy in the offering.

Still, we aren’t the only ones who feel. Maybe an emaciated polar bear or a ravaged forest would get the point across: surely it’s arrogance to imagine that other kinds of souls only have significance because we confer it on them. You’d have to prove that we humans are somehow to blame for arctic predators dying as they always have of starvation—but the thinness of that case hasn’t stopped climate activists before. The problem is that if a merely mortal human being isn’t pitiable enough to make Tim Cook’s point, why should a jaguar or a lemur be? However noble they are, the beasts of the field aren’t quite exalted enough to communicate the gravity of what’s being said here.

The real sin of which we all stand accused is not against our fellow man, or even our fellow creatures, but against the logic of nature itself. It’s those very laws of cause and effect that are bearing down on us: because we have done the wrong things to the environment, the environment now threatens to starve or even annihilate us.

At this point it becomes useless to take refuge in abstractions. We might plead that we never meant to say there was a real person behind all those scientific laws and general tendencies: only that we entered the wrong input and now we are getting the wrong output. But her figure looms in the approaching mists all the same. If it is the equation itself we have defiled, and the whole spirit of the system that we have violated, then the allegedly impersonal results of our interactions with nature are not simply consequences but punishments. We have hurt her; soon she will hurt us.

What clearer or more accurate way is there to say all this than to say that nature has passions and a personality, that she is coming in a dark cloud to demand sacrifice? Whether Tim Cook knows it or not, Mother Nature in this creed is not in fact a mere narrative contrivance: she is the real truth of things made manifest, the simplest and most direct way to express the faith of those who pray to her.

Her worshippers seem to think the fairytales they tell are just amusing representations of an underlying truth about raw data and cold facts. But really the fairytales are the truth of it; the rest is just a confused metaphysics that travels under the banner of data and mathematics. It is there to shroud the figure of the goddess in a haze of mystery, to overawe her more credulous acolytes and conceal her true figure from them—no different from clouds of smoke and incense hovering around a statue of Demeter or Inanna to make her seem alive.

Well, but the team at Apple doesn’t really think that Mother Nature walks the earth as a woman of flesh and blood. They’re hardly so simplistic as the ancient pagans. The trouble is: neither were the ancient pagans. It is a modern conceit, born of self-congratulating ignorance, that the worshippers of the old gods couldn’t give a “rational” account of their beliefs. Many of them very much could. We may flatter ourselves that the new myths we tell aren’t “really” true, and we know it. But so did many tellers of the old myths. And if we go on telling ours, maybe they are more faithful depictions of what we believe than we care to admit.

Here is an inescapable and terrifying thought, one that no amount of enlightenment argumentation has succeeded in chasing from the mind of man: the world is teeming with more than material life, pervaded by forces greater than our strength and infused with ethical meaning that we cannot wish away. The powers that rule nature really are stronger than us—and if there is nothing stronger than them, they must inevitably become our masters.

But they are cruel sovereigns and makers of false promises; in the end they bleed the life out of their servants. Our ancestors learned this through painful experience, until a power greater even than nature brought the old gods to heel. Without him, it’s no surprise we find ourselves cowering again under the chastising gaze of a severe mother, poised to devour her children. Apple Watches will not placate her for long.