Natural

I’ve always found it particularly interesting that some may find it rational to justify the overly high standards of modern dating culture—the preemptive raising of “red flags,” absurd and arbitrary perfectionist demands in physical attractiveness, characterological traits, and for the entire dating process from start to finish to be free of discomfort or strife. Many still seem to justify it as inherently natural, framing it as a cold calculation innately wired into our biology as a means of carrying out natural selection—to find the best possible partner for reproductive and generational success.

But all too often we forget that within our modern world—characterized by endlessly complex social constructs, caste systems, convoluted norms, and nonsensical rules that arbitrarily determine reward and punishment—very few things we do are truly natural. Since society probably hasn’t existed long enough for us to fully adapt our psychology to it, there are a myriad of tendencies that have persisted in our biology that are ultimately counterproductive to our success within a system that is inherently artificial. Natural selection simply doesn’t work the same way it used to; if one of the main purposes of society is to ensure the safety and prosperity of all its constituents, the implication of this is that the majority of those with seemingly undesirable and counterproductive traits can and will pass on such traits. How do we determine the efficacy of certain traits within this context? Do selfishness, hate, deceit, pessimism, haughtiness, pride, obstinance, temperament, irrationality, and irascibility—all arguably very natural and instinctive traits possessed by human beings—serve to augment or diminish the prosperity within this world that we’ve meticulously designed?

We’ve already decided within the construct of society that basic human decency requires that we are patient with one another, that we help those that can be helped, that we build one another up even despite our deficiencies. We’ve already decided that survival of the fittest—perhaps the most natural process there is in the order of life as we know it—isn’t anything that remotely resembles an ethical strategy; we‘ve already decided that it isn’t acceptable to just leave homeless people to perish and rot on the streets; we’ve already decided that eugenics is wrong—that we shouldn’t just kill off everyone that committed a crime or suffer from a mental illness to forcefully prevent them from proliferating their deficiencies. If we can agree on this, why do we persist in our hypocrisy? Why are we shocked or aghast when we discover that someone has some degree of undesirable traits? Why do we suddenly turn a blind eye to our responsibility as human beings when it comes to choosing a romantic partner? Why do we spurn our coworkers and our colleagues, our classmates and our teachers, our friends and our acquaintances, or mere strangers when they end up acting in dishonorable or detestable ways because of flaws in their character?

May we refrain from using our flawed and unstable notion of what is deemed natural to justify our wrongdoing merely when it is convenient to do so. Human civilization at this point is too far gone at this point—our worldview, our conception far too dissociated from the evolutionary underpinnings of our psychology. The rules of the game have changed—our conceptions of right and wrong, our awareness of humanity's collective consciousness and mutual prosperity, our understanding of role, responsibility, and reward in the intricate world that we’ve crafted for ourselves. We must constantly put to trial our instincts, our intuitions, our feelings; to think that they always act in our favor, to think that our lizard brain truly understands the artificial world that we live in, would be perhaps one of our greatest blunders.