What's this?

*knocking skull*

Why--I think it's a brain. I think there's a brain in there. Huh. Dammit, I guess vacation really is over.

I have this ambivalent relationship with diabetes treatment in the 21st century.

On the one hand, I am likely to lose fifteen years of actual life and more of quality life due to disability and complications, and in the meantime need to manage a very complicated daily regimen of carbohydrate grams and dosages and blood sugar test results, and it all involves a lot of math. (So there you go, Dear Readers; if a young person in your life struggling with arithmetic ever asks you what earthly good all of this will ever do them, you can honestly reply that if they are ever diagnosed with diabetes, every bit of math they ever took will be immensely useful.)

On the other hand, I should be dead.

Type 1 diabetes is (or was) a fatal illness that inevitably resulted in death by starvation until partway through the twentieth century, and for decades after that it was literally a shot in the dark, best guess scenario, where quality of life (and quantity of life) were seriously compromised. I should be dead. I should have died at seventeen. Everything I've had since then has been a gift.

It has been--I should add--an unnatural gift. Tools and technology have enabled me to stay alive. Better tools and technology allow me to sleep in on weekends, go out for lunch without planning the day beforehand, eat the occasional slice of chocolate cake, have a baby without serious medical consequences, and keep my eyesight for fifteen years post diagnosis (not so common not very long ago).

It is something of an ideological conundrum for an eco-freak organic-type Nature Girl who goes gaga for trilliums every May. Or you might think it should be, but it's not.

(I should say upfront for honesty's sake that even if it were an ideological conundrum, screw it, I'm taking the tools and technology for all they're worth, because I like living. I am no martyr. Even on the days when diabetes is kicking my ass and life, in general, sucks, I have taken my shots and tested my blood sugar and made some rudimentary stab at guessing carbohydrate grams.)

See, natural. What the hell does that mean? Generally it's posited as part of a dualism: natural vs. artificial (or unnatural), each at opposite ends of a spectrum, and whatever is under consideration is either one or the other or perhaps somewhere in between but certainly not both, and everything can be categorized. Bollocks, I say. There is no such thing as artificial.

That was an intentionally provocative statement. Let me refine it: "Artificial" is wholly a subset of "natural." Everything artificial is also natural. Everything came from nature and to nature it will eventually return. Conceptualizing the artificial as something distinct form and outside of 'nature' is just plain silly. Furthermore, "natural" in most contexts is used as shorthand for "what I like and think is the way things ought to be." So you have conservatives decrying homosexuality because it's not "natural" and others decrying group marriages because they're not "natural" and health-food folks decrying cheesies because they're not "natural" and misogynist idiots with brians the size of shrivelled peas decrying working women and single-mother families because they're not "natural."

Nature is everything. You cannot get away from it. There is no "away" to go to. Yes, we have cities, but they exist in nature too. The air and the water and even the concrete and glass and steel and plastic are all part of nature; the wind moves through cities as well as plains, water erodes plastic as well as stone, the suburbs are affected by weather as much as the forests are. Where you are sitting, right now, this very second, is nature. If you don't see it that way, that's a division in your brain. It's not reality. YOU are nature. You, in your manufactured clothes, wearing glasses or contacts, and a watch, and high-tech shoes, with the iPod in your pocket, you are nature. All of those gizmos and gadgets appended to you are nature, too.

You do not exist outside of or apart from nature, not at any point of your life. You are inextricably connected to it every moment of every day from conception through disintegration. You are part of it, in it, always. So are the tools.

Generally speaking "natural" in this context is used to mean "unmodified," or what would exist if humans had not applied tools to the situation. But how far back in human evolution would you have to go to find humans who did not use tools to modify their situation? Before chimpanzees; they would be primates, but not in any way human. Artifice is, for human beings, wholly natural. Tools are natural. Technology is natural.

(I'm not saying it isn't often destructive, but that's a separate point. Nature is often destructive. Sometimes destruction is necessary and good, and sometimes it isn't.)

Humans are animals who use tools (that's not everything that makes us human, but it's part of it). Tools and technology (which are really just more complicated tools) are an expression of our nature. Our skyscrapers, our paved roads, our electric toaster ovens, our pretty printed tulip skirts, our cherry-red lipsticks, our laptops, our lawnmowers, our oil-based economy, our ivy-league universities, our paper and plastic money, all of it, is nature. Artifice is a natural expression of human nature. It always has been.

The whole idea that artifice exists apart from nature presupposes that there is anywhere or anything apart from nature and, apart from its logical fallacy, the attitude that anything exists outside of nature is a huge part of the ecological mess we're in. You cannot ever, you have not ever, gotten away from nature.

So there you are: no ideological conundrum after all. My external plastic-and-metal cyborg pancreas and all the sterilized manufactured crap that makes it run, batteries included, is just as natural as the flesh-and-blood pancreas you have nestled in against your stomach. And I'll use it to extend and improve my life without a moment's conflict.

~~~~~

*While this post was triggered by a recent post at Mad's that touched on nature and medicine, it should not be construed as a response, since we are talking about different things.

Posted by Andrea at September 17, 2007 6:32 AM under The World

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