"Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone os a radical scheme, the brain child of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once.... No form is to gruesome, no behavior too grotesque." p. 64 Three By Anne Dillard.
One thing about war in nature is that everything is killed for a purpose. "Waste not, want not." In nature, wives kill husbands in order bring babies into the world. Armies war to gain resources, and then use the bodies of the slain and of the captured as food and community-fuel. Flies are trapped, helpless, in webs strung with doom for one and lunch for another. Consumption is the main goal. Prosperity, the hope for tomorrow.
In the world of man, wives kill husbands because the husband ran off to the gal down the block and brought the wrong baby into the world. In the world of nature, there is no wrong baby. There is only life. In the world of man, armies fight to gain resources, bury their dead, torture the captured, and leave the economy in shambles at the end. In the world of man, economics mean food. Economics mean prosperity. Prosperity is everything. In the world of man, hobos are trapped, helpless, in webs strung with humiliation and degradation. But, in the world of men, no one is fed in their starvation. No stomach is more full because one street baby died from an empty belly. They are not pray. It isn't Darwinism that sticks their toes out of the holes in their shoes-- the weak aren't losing. The weak aren't dying. The weak also aren't fueling the strong. Something is wrong in the world of man. What is wrong?
Our natural economics are way off. If we wanted to do it right, we'd be eating the weak, using the poor to raise ourselves higher. Some would say we are already doing this. Than what's with unemployment rates? What's with starvation rates? What's with the homeless? If we were truly natural, then, would be be taking advantage of the weak, as a spider takes advantage of the weakness of a fly? Would we, then, be counted as cruel, or thrifty?
What causes mankind to be struck dumb by "devastation," that causes us to flinch when a mantis snatches a beetle and chomps into its oil-slick back? Don't we do the same? Do we do the same? At what point do we stop being thrifty, and start being heartless? Is nature heartless? To be natural, would that mean that we have to be heartless? Is there a give and take, an acceptance of demise, in the natural world, that makes it less cruel in the eyes of those who worship it? The fly struggles for freedom! It does not want to die! Is that acceptance? Is that cruelty?
Where do we, if you will, get off making such vapid generalizations without knowing what we mean? Dillard's right-- Nature is a "spend-thrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent" (67). But can we allow that ourselves? Are we too kind, too empathetic, to allow ourselves to have a spend-thrift economy? Or do we already have one, and fight it down with all of our intellectual might? What, in short, is going on here!?
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