The Myth of “Harmony”
This is not an original observation, but it’s one that needs to be made frequently and with fervor: there is no such thing as “living in harmony with nature.” Nature is not harmonious. Nature is made up of clashes and conflicts which only appear harmonious when viewed in the aggregate or at a distance—like the useless God in Bette Midler’s song Who views us “from a distance” and thinks that we are “instruments / marching in a common band.” And natural clashes will sometimes lead to a stable or seemingly position—every year the shepherd loses X amount of sheep to the wolf, and can rely on that number, for example; and the clashing physical forces of gravity and inertia make the orbits of the planets quite regular. This creates an illusion of harmonious regularity. But living up close to reality—in the lives of actual individuals—there is no such thing as “harmony” in nature; there is only struggle and conflict.
The life of an American Indian in the days before westward expansion was not one of harmony but of a constant fight for survival and subsistence. Their survival patterns, of course, came to mimic certain natural processes—following the buffalo, for example—just as farmers still must follow the seasons’ regular progress. And of course their religions developed along such lines, holding for example that the gods had created this or that species or plant for the benefit of man. But their religious traditions—like the traditions of the Greeks, which held similar views—are still often stories of struggle, and stories about how the gods taught man to do this or that task so as to survive. They are not stories of an Eden where all is provided for.
The notion of a harmony with nature is a modern luxury—a myth; even a new religion—created for a society with enough food and technology that it can afford to indulge in romantic fancies. And we’ve done a remarkable job of making it real. Our modern neighborhoods are much more “harmonious” with nature than anything humans have ever lived in—irrigation and other technologies have made possible the cool green lawns and pleasant gardens with which we decorate our homes. But even this is not really “harmony with nature”—it’s the conquest of nature, and the use of it to serve our purposes.
Update: I'm not sure I understand the criticism leveled in this post by Greyson Ruback at Partisan Free Politics. My point was that there is no such thing as living in an idyllic "harmony" with a nature that is actually made up of competing forces. The idea of "harmony" espoused by environmentalists, enthusiasts for "Native American religion" (I put this in quotes because these enthusiasts generally overlook the diversity of American Indian religions), and so forth, claims that there is a way to live in the world that somehow “balances” in a “sustainable” way with the needs of animals and plants and that once we find this harmonious way of living, we will work in sync with “the earth.” At such a point we will no longer be in competition with “the earth” or its other species—or we won’t be in conflict with them—and all will be well. This is all nonsense, because in reality the world is made up of competing forces which sometimes create the illusion of harmony only because the arms races balance each other out.
There’s no need to go into Greek linguistics to see that the idea of living in “concord” with nature is simply a fantasy. There has never been and can never be such a thing, because there is no such thing as “nature,” except in the aggregate, and no such thing has “concord” or “agreement” with it. One might just as well speak of living in “harmony with the economy” or living in “concord with the Cold War.” There are equilibrium points in economies and in arms races, but there is no such thing as harmony. There is no “graphing” something that does not exist. This seems at some points to agree with what Ruback says. But then he cites Rousseau (who is indeed the father of the myth of “harmony with nature”) but he seems to agree with Rousseau, and to cite Rousseau for the outlandish claim that pre-Columbian Indians lived in harmony with nature. Needless to say, Rousseau was not an anthropologist and had neither first-hand experience nor any serious understanding of life among pre-Columbian American Indians. Rousseau's claims can be rescued only by regarding them as normative rather than descriptive, and even then they’re pretty worthless.
As to a "modern notion of harmony," well, this notion of harmony is a modern invention, by Rousseau. Previous generations may have had different definitions of "harmony with nature," but that was just my point--that when we speak of harmony we're speaking nonsense and that Indians and others who lived closer to nature knew better than we do. They knew that life is a struggle with equilibrium points, and never a paradise.
There’s no point in disputing the benefits of harmony versus the benefits of disharmony or whatnot—there is simply no such thing has “harmony with nature.” Nature is not something it is possible to be in harmony, or concord (or βιώ συμμετριει or what have you)--with. Even our modern lives, that Donald Boudreaux says are more in harmony with nature than ever before, aren't really. What has happened is that we have tamed nature to some extent. We no more live in "harmony" with nature than we do with a pet dog or with a pack of ravenous wolves. We are either the masters or the playthings of nature to this day, and we always will be.
