With a mother like Nature…

The other day I sat at home and listened to the White Album (well, most of it anyway. As always I skipped the track called 'Revolution #9'. Perhaps I never did quite enough Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds to appreciate the unique genius of its composition... and besides: if I really did want to hear wild, incoherent ramblings about nothing in particular, interspersed by what sounds like a car radio left on full blast after a traffic accident... I'd call up Franco Debono for a little chat.).

Oh, and I skipped 'Obla Di-Obla-Da', too. No offence to Desmond and Molly Jones or anything, but: seriously, why on earth would anyone give a toss which one worked at the market, and which one sang in a band? Especially if that's how they actually sang...

But still, as somebody once said: life goes on. And so does the White Album.

***

And what an album it was, too! Probably the single most uniquely satisfying thing The Beatles ever produced - with the possible exception of Abbey Road... and maybe the Magical Mystery Tour. Oh, and let's not forget Revolver... and Rubber Soul... and Sergeant Pepper... and...

Oh, OK, I'm a Beatles fan, I confess. But there was a good (if somewhat contrived) reason I happened to bring up the White Album today. For among the many tracks I was surprised to rediscover this week - and incidentally that's one of the many attractions to this particular double album: there are so many songs on it, it's easy to forget a few here and there - is a curiously haunting melody called 'Mother Nature's Son'.

Like many a Beatles number it is eminently simple in scope: just Paul McCartney singing on his own, with an acoustic guitar and some sound effects for company. And while the resulting melody is universally acclaimed by music critics as a masterpiece - and indeed it is, if I say so myself - something about the song nonetheless got on my nerves this time round.

It took me a while to work about exactly what, but I got there in the end. It's the lyrics. They're so... very... silly. Not so much in the same way as Desmond and Molly; more like in the naïve, flower power, 'hippie-go-lucky' sense of the word, that also gave us such inane 1960s anthems as 'Peace Train' and 'Kumbaya'. 

There are no more than six lines to the whole song, so I can quote it here in full:

"Born a poor young country boy - Mother Nature's son
All day long I'm sitting singing songs for everyone...
Sit beside a mountain stream - see her waters rise
Listen to the pretty sound of music as she flies.
Find me in my field of grass - Mother Nature's son
Swaying daisies sing a lazy song beneath the sun."

Listening to Paul warbling those words the other day, I stopped briefly to think. Not just about what sort of 'grass' Paul had in mind (literally) when he wrote the song ... I also thought about how very, very differently two otherwise comparable human beings (such as, ahem, McCartney and I) could perceive such a vastly complex thing as 'Mother Nature' in all its infinite, and occasionally nightmarish, variety.

Having been brought up on wildlife/science documentaries made by people like Sir David Attenborough, Piero D'Angela, Carl Sagan and so on, my own view of 'Mother Nature' tends to be somewhat less idealistic than those of Paul McCartney, Cat Stevens, Joan Baez, and the rest of the Peace'N'Love brigade. Their concept was all cuddly and cute... birds singing, bees buzzing, groupies banging (immortalized in another classic Beatles lyric, by the way: the one about the 'pornographic priestess' who let her 'knickers down')... for all the world as if 'Mother Nature' were populated only by super furry animals which have nothing better to do but roll around in fields of marijuana all day long... sleeping, waking, procreating, maybe pausing to nibble at a dripping honeycomb every now and again.... then sleeping again, waking, etc.

***

And yet the 'Mother Nature' of my acquaintance is... rather different. More than a loving, caring and nurturing mother, she actually comes across as a brutal, insensitive and psychopathic multiple murderer, whose often shocking crimes are underscored by a sadistic streak of savage humour that makes them truly chilling to behold. In fact, the more I think about her, the less attractive she becomes. One example alone should suffice: it comes from Attenborough, who responded to criticism of his 1970s TV series Life on Earth (he was criticized, incidentally, for 'not giving due credit to God') with the following example:

"When Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind... Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy..."

About the only saving grace I can find to say in Mother Nature's defence (I'll leave the defence of God to others, by the way - I can assure you there are enough people willing to take up the challenge) is that, rather than actively seeking to crush, inconvenience or destroy all life forms in the most excruciating and devastating way possible, she tends to achieve that exact same goal rather by accident. Nature is not so much cruel, as indifferent ... even though to you and me - and to a much greater extent to the hummingbirds, the swallowtail butterflies, the orchids, the flamingoes and all other creatures still helplessly trapped in her clutches - she is little short of TERRIFYING.

'Sing a lazy song', indeed. Honestly, how can I not feel a degree of impatience, when a man of intelligence like Paul McCartney... whose distant ancestor once managed, against all odds, to escape from precisely the same prison his descendants would one day write soppy little songs about... describes the most truly frightening phenomenon we can possibly conceive in such fuddy-duddy, happy-clappy and quite frankly idiotic terms? I'm sorry but it pisses me off. Yes, even if it's on what might well be one of the greatest albums of all time...

Just imagine, then, how much more irksome and maddening the same misconception about Mother Nature suddenly appears... when cited as part of an argument to deprive others of life-changing opportunities because the science that made them available is 'unnatural'?

OK, like I said it was a contrived way to bring up a topic. (Also a good excuse to listen to some brilliant music, I'm sure you'll agree). But soon after my misgivings about 'Mother Nature's Son' I found myself confronted by yet another, far more infuriating example. It came about as a result of the present government's declared intention to 'regulate IVF'... only to come up with a proposal for a law entitled 'The Protection of Embryos' bill, which (as the name suggests) does not so much 'regulate IVF' as place unworkable restrictions on it: for instance, by limiting implantation of embryos to only two, while simultaneously outlawing embryo freezing altogether.

I won't go into the specifics of why this is fundamentally the wrong approach to the issue at hand - suffice it to say that the only medical professional who actually offers the service locally (and therefore, unlike nearly every MP who will eventually vote on it, knows what he's talking about) predicted that with the law in its current form, Maltese patients will be forced to seek treatment abroad at considerably greater expense.

Nor will I go into that remarkable, superhuman achievement, whereby a law which purports to regulate a medical practice doesn't seem to even acknowledge the existence of such things as 'patients' (being altogether too besotted by visions of darling little human embryos, all dancing in imaginary Petri dishes in their dreamy little heads). Instead I will limit myself only to the most depressing aspect of this law: the unbridled contempt and hatred it displays by blatantly discriminating against homosexuals... to the point where they are even setting up an authority to determine whether people are gay or not, so that they can deny them access to medical technology on unabashedly ideological grounds.

I don't know whether our wonderfully pragmatic legislators have thought through the implications yet, but... how, exactly, do they propose to establish the sexual preference of people seeking IVF therapy at private clinics? A pink triangle sewn onto their sleeves, perhaps? Or maybe they'll tattoo the word 'PUFTA' in pink letters on their foreheads. In any case it doesn't really matter. Like Mother Nature, I'm sure they'll come up with something spectacularly sadistic in the end (though unlike Mother Nature, it will be done deliberately).

What intrigues me more is the justification for what can only be described as blatant discrimination. The following is an excerpt from one of the more ignorant comments that have appeared on the online comment boards in response to the same proviso: "Gays cannot have babies not because the state or any religious institution is against them having babies but rather BECAUSE NATURE INTENDED IT THAT WAY!"

Ah yes, of course, suddenly, "what Mother Nature intends"  becomes a major consideration... at least for as long as Nature's 'intent' happens to also reflect the undisguised biases of Malta's naturally homophobic population. Do I really need to point out that Nature, being actually a simulacrum of forces all answering to the same universal laws, does not have the capacity to think, still less to make future plans and to have aspirations, ideals and... 'intentions'? Such is the ignorance all around us, that I'm afraid the answer to that one is: YES.

What I want to know, however, is... why must we submit ourselves to Mother Nature's 'intentions' only when it comes to IVF? Why not in all other medical issues... like, for instance, when an adolescent suddenly develops appendicitis. Out of curiosity: what is Mother Nature's 'intention' in cases like these... which incidentally account for around 10% of the world's population? Well, judging by what used to happen before human beings developed the means to treat that particular condition - namely, to cut the patient open with a knife, and remove the inflamed appendix before it bursts - he or she would almost certainly die of peritonitis: probably in considerable agony, too.

This was in fact the routine fate of all such unfortunate people until recent practical improvements to modern surgery - which are far, far more 'unnatural' than IVF, by the way - dating back less than a century. And the same, of course, applies to practically all conditions that require surgical intervention... or for that matter other types of treatment which human beings discovered or invented on their own... like antibiotics for bacterial infections, or chemotherapy for cancer, etc.

And yet, the newfound 'Nature worshippers' - you know, the ones who insist that everyone else bow their heads to Nature's 'intentions, while they themselves see nothing wrong in taking unnatural medication, or driving an unnatural car, or typing comments on an unnatural keyboard... these people do not object to any of a million 'unnatural' technologies, so long as they may benefit from them in person. Oh no. They only object when other people whom they despise try to benefit from exactly the same technologies in ways that they disapprove. Then suddenly, 'going against Mother Nature' becomes a big no-no... even if they have 'gone against Mother Nature' practically every day of their entire lives.

What cheek, what nerve, what flaming hypocrisy, that they can cite 'Mother Nature' as a pretext to deprive other people of opportunities... especially considering that these same opportunities are delivered to us, not by that same ghastly 'Mother Nature' that forces worms to eat children's eyeballs... but by human beings who have spent the better part of 20,000 years cheating the same Mother Nature, slipping through her traps and thwarting her 'intentions' at every step of the way?

Well, having spent around 20 millennia outside the weal of Mother Nature, I for one have absolutely no intention of going back. I happen to be proud that I am a member of a species as ingenious as the Human Race... precisely because human beings - unlike any other animal in the world - actually managed to break free of Mother Nature's brutal and tyrannical grasp, and have benefited enormously as a result. And it both scares and sickens me to discover that there are still people out there who would willingly resubmit, not themselves, but other people to her pitiless dominion.