John Green, the author and YouTube personality famous for The Fault in Our Stars, Vlogbrothers, Looking for Alaska, and lots, lots, more, was once an anxious student chaplain, working his way towards becoming a priest.
He was assigned to a children’s hospice ward, which has to be one of the most confusing and tragic places on Earth. I’ve never been to such a place, and I hope you never find yourself needing to go to one, but just imagine it with me for a minute.
I picture brightly colored murals and lots of balloons and Make-A-Wish visits from sports icons and movie stars. I also picture children wracked with disease, and parents who have to force a smile onto their mouths, but who can’t hide the grief in their eyes.
“Alas that these evil days should be mine. The young perish and the old linger…No parent should have to bury their child.” The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
It doesn’t feel natural for a parent to bury their child. The parent-child relationship is one of care and responsibility shifting from one party to the other over the years. When we are born, we are completely helpless, and reliant on our parents for everything. We rebel as teenagers, reconcile as adults, and—in time—become their caretakers as old age takes its toll. That feels like the natural way.
But John Green was given a different frame on what’s natural by his Senior Chaplain as soon as he walked into that children’s ward. He shares her perspective in his most recent book, Everything is Tuberculosis (emphasis mine).
“On my first day of training, she told me, ‘Death is natural. Children dying is natural. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world.’ Treating disease, whether through herbs or magic or drugs, is unnatural. No other animals do it, at least not with anything approaching our sophistication. Hospitals are unnatural. As are novels, and saxophones. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world.”
I once heard somewhere that the most powerful truths are the ones you encounter and immediately know, deep somewhere in your bones, are entirely correct. Indeed, you’ve known it your entire life. But up until the moment in which you encounter someone else sharing said truth, you’ve never had the words to articulate it yourself.
That’s how I felt reading the above passage.
We, the inheritors of every progress made by those who came before, find it easy to pretend that the world has always had a life expectancy of 78.4 and air conditioning and a Starbucks on every corner, when in fact it’s been a dog-eat-dog place for much of history. There’s a reason the line that Hobbes is best remembered for is that human life is “nasty, brutish, and short.”
I’m offering this frame, borrowed from Green, in the hopes that you can use it to look at the world too. Once we begin to appreciate how deeply unnatural the world we live in has become, thanks to the work of countless preceding generations, I think it becomes easier to appreciate our responsibility not just to maintain that progress, but to continue advancing it.
There are two primary but interrelated ways I think of the progress we’ve made: social progress and material progress. Disagreement without violence, equality between people, and the general notion of inalienable human rights are all examples of social progress. Vaccines, subways, and the world wide web? Those are the fruits of our material labors.
And again, they’re interconnected. For example, we’ve only had effective treatments for tuberculosis since the 1940s, and it’s hard to imagine what the world would look like if Nelson Mandela’s case, during his imprisonment in the 1980s, hasn’t been cured. The material progress made possible his social achievements.
I’ll also admit that I’ve thought increasingly about what’s natural and unnatural in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the resulting conversations around political violence.
After all, we like to say things along the lines of “this isn’t who we are” when talking about violence, but most politics in human history have been violent. Both the violence of competing states and the normal, everyday violence of tyrants whose people were kept in line under threat were the natural state of affairs for millennia. It took slow and painstaking progress to reach a place where disagreements could be aired peacefully.
Nowadays, there’s a tendency to talk about how the internet is an unnatural force which leads us to dehumanize those we disagree with. I think that’s only half right. Dehumanizing the other, whomever that might be, has been the natural way we’ve justified violence throughout history. The internet and social media might be unnatural inventions, but the tendencies they’re encouraging are inherent to our species.
But if the tendency to dehumanize is inherent, so too is our capacity to listen to our better angels. Dolphins might know how to play with each other, and chimpanzees can use basic tools, but only humanity has shown the ability to make our culture a little more noble and the world just a little bit better in the brief lifespans we enjoy. Those changes might be small generation to generation, but they compound wondrously over the centuries, to the extent that we’ve forgotten just how difficult life was even a few decades ago.
In fact, that capacity to listen to our better angels feels closely related to how we label things as natural or unnatural. Despite historical precedents showing us just how natural the death of children is, our sense that such losses are inherently wrong—or plainly unnatural—is what calls us to pursue the social or material progress that will save more children’s lives.
Progress is never linear, however, and gains made can be easily lost. A lot of human history has been a record of two steps forward and one step back, although I’d argue we are now playing with fundamentally different stakes.
Rome could salt the fields of Carthage and Genghis Khan could decimate the world’s population, and the horror their victims endured was just as real in that moment as the horror victims of violence feel today, but there was no chance such acts could threaten the long term survival of the species. Since the advent of atomic weapons, the calculus of conflict has fundamentally changed.
Annie Jacobsen effectively illustrates this is her tremendous book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, and you’ve probably heard the anecdote, often apocryphally attributed to Einstein, that claims “I don't know what weapons might be used in World War III, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Frankly, the more I study nuclear conflict, the more I think that’s an overestimation; nuclear war would wipe us away entirely.
Now I’m not saying you need to grade each and every action you might take against the possibility of its contribution to armageddon. I am, however, inviting you to weigh your potential actions against the notion that gains we’ve made over the millennia are easy to reverse and difficult to progress.
Even choices as small as leading with hate instead of empathy on social media help to normalize the vitriol that pulls us back towards our more brutal past. But once we start to look at the world we live in less as a natural eventuality and more as a tremendous and unnatural accomplishment, the responsibility to resist such backwards movement becomes clear.
I hope in your own life you can identify just how unnatural the world is and ask yourself what you’re doing to maintain that fragile progress, as well as to advance it for the next generation.1
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
Thanks for tuning in. As always, if you love every word or if you think I’m the internet’s dumbest boy, feel free to let me know directly or in the comments. See you next time.
The pull quote is a common enough phrase but I can’t find one definitive source. I grabbed the specific phrasing here from the Daily Stoic.