Monday 13 June 2016

The Natural World as Survival Horror

In its current form, Springwatch may be the best and most important programme on TV anywhere in the world at the moment. Forget your boxed sets. This is serious television making.

The central conceit of Springwatch is that a big collection of BBC cameramen decamp to some location in the British Isles and set up small cameras everywhere - often in birds' nests. They then just watch what happens. In its modern iteration Chris Packham has steered it and shaped it in his own image: a completely uncompromising look at what the natural world is all about - typically, death.

What I like most about Springwatch is that it doesn't pull any punches, but nor does it dress things up in melodrama. It simply presents what happens with neutral, careful commentary which explains but never judges. There's no music or slow motion or any of the other bullshit you get in nature documentaries. (The BBC has in recent years been creating some outstanding wildlife programmes, but it has become obsessed with slow-mo to the point of self-parody. But let's not get started on that.) Just the facts, ma'am.

The effect this achieves is to magnify the uncaring brutality of the natural world. It shows exactly how hard things actually are for animals to survive, especially when young. Watch this encounter between some great tit chicks and a jay.





As soon as that jay figures out where they are, those poor little blighters are fucked. They don't stand a chance. Their entire experience from life to death can be summarised as being shut away in a box eating caterpillars for couple of weeks and then getting a brief glimpse of a vast and frightening world before being messily dispatched by an aggressive corvid. I mean, HP Lovecraft had nothing on this.

And sometimes you're not even safe in the nest. These green woodpecker chicks (four or five of them, it turned out in the end) didn't even get as far as the great tits. As soon as a female stoat figured out where they were their days were numbered.




Of course, we all know this is part of life. I don't want to turn into James Lovelock and start blathering on about Gaia...but you could interpret Springwatch as a sort of implicit text of the Gaia hypothesis: at times it seems to present - whether accidentally or by design - a cyclical view of nature that is almost too perfect. The stoat eats the woodpeckers, a tawny owl eats the stoat, the owl shits in the woods and fertilises an acorn which grows into a tree full of insects which woodpeckers eat, etc.

But viewed through a different lens it presents what is in a sense the bleakest picture imaginable - life is unremitting struggle for no purpose and it will get you sooner or later (and it's often sooner). If you're an animal you can battle to survive but the best thing that you can hope for is to perpetuate your genes (but what good does that do you really?) and that when you're killed off it will be relatively painless.

So forget the Great Old Ones, Morgoth, and the unending struggle between Law and Chaos. Nature, if you want to see it that way, is bad enough: survival horror on the biggest scale imaginable. If a jay doesn't eat you, a stoat will, and you will be absolutely none the wiser about what the point of the whole thing was. Why make a special plea for supernatural uncaring alien deities when the real world conveys that message more purely than fantasy ever could?

[I don't actually see the world this way, of course. I lean much closer towards Lovelock than Lovecraft. But you see my point anyway.]

16 comments:

  1. Replacement fertility: if a population is at equilibrium, a mated pair of animals will have two successful offspring that survive to adulthood and have grandkids of their own. Napkin math: 5 years of fertility, 4 chicks each year, 20 chicks over a lifetime, 2 of which will be successful. That's a 90% fatality rate (usually just death in childhood).

    That that's for an K-selective species, like most birds, who have just a few young and nurture them carefully. With a r-selective species like salmon, you're looking at something closer to a 99.9% fatality rate, again centered on the very young.

    If nature is murder, it is almost explicitly the murder of children.

    Have you ever looked at a death rate vs age graph? It's high as shit for babies. (And young men in the 16-24 age group, for whom it also spikes.)

    It's death on a massive scale. I almost want to call it industrial, since so many predator-prey and disease-host relationships are so fine-tuned and so large-scale.

    It gets even more fucky when you start thinking about life and death as fractals. In the natural world, the real agency lies in the genes. That's the board room where the competing strategies are developed and tested. Individual species are passengers; the genes have their hands on the steering wheel.

    All of which contributes to this vast sense (at least to me) that the wholesale murder and consumption that is the norm in the natural world--the parts we see--are just details in a larger pattern of natural cruelty. We are missing the forest for the trees, focusing on individual-vs-individual suffering instead of species-vs-species strategies, which is the real battleground.

    And since I've already written so much, I'll write one more thing.

    Predation is one reason why I struggle to condemn zoos as unethical. The argument is this: "Zoos don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better for animals than the natural world would be." which seems pretty analogous to "Driverless cars don't have to be perfectly safe, they just have to be more safe than human drivers." It's a difficult knob of ethics for me to get a hold of.

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    1. This is one of the strongest arguments against the existence of an all-powerful interventionist god, I think. The idea that the universe would be created with that amount of cruelty in-built does not seem to indicate that there exists an omnipotent and benevolent deity who has an influence over things. That's not the same thing as saying there isn't a god, of course.

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    2. On the topic of zoos I have changed my views lately. I used to agree with your point (and used to be a frequent visitor at zoos). I now tend to think that it is better for animals to have a shot at genuine agency in the natural world than to deprive them of it by keeping them captive.

      The best argument in favour of zoos, I think, is that they serve as a kind of species bank to protect against extinction and allow re-introductions. That is very important and I suppose since they need money, selling tickets to see the animals is the most rational way to do it.

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    3. I disagree with it meaning there isn't a benevolent god. I'd say it just suggests that if there is one, our view of things differs drastically, which is to be expected.

      Is ensuring that only those who can struggle best and manage to survive the onslaught of life ending circumstances on a species wide level cruel? Sure, unless you are at the top of the evolutionary ladder and are aware that only by enduring this existence will any species have a chance at reaching such heights. To use the example of Joseph Manola below, Maybe god is just giving us (and every other living thing) the chance to level up. Not to say there is a god of any kind.

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    4. Yes, it is cruel, because "species" aren't real things that have a conscious mind or can experience pain. Individual creatures are.

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  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CZCKP-H4C8

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  3. Or, if you prefer something both more metal and more uplifting (in its way):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jtpf8N5IDE

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  4. And yet nature made us, who are capable of caring for and lessening the suffering of even those that aren't of our species.

    I recently came across an article about a sick elephant who sought out a human nature reserve because it knew that the humans would care for it.

    Points of light on a very black background indeed. That's what we can aspire to be. Sometimes it's not that we're good at being kind or do it constantly, but that we do it at all.

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    1. It's not just us. By coincidence, the brood of great tits featured in the Springwatch videos above is actually being raised by a blue tit - a different species. The producers aren't sure why, but it seems as though a great tit laid eggs in with the blue tit's in the nest at some point, and the blue tit has been raising its young along with its own. The mothering instinct - the instinct to care - is very powerful where it exists. (Of course, the blue tit probably doesn't quite "know" that the great tit chicks aren't its own, but still - an interesting illustration of cross-species compassion.)

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    2. That Jay just saved the Blue Tit from being Cuckolded. >:)
      The main lessons I take from this are (a) don't get cuckolded, and (b) you need to protect your young from predators.

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    3. It's nothing to do with cuckoldry. The blue tit you see in the video is a female - the "mother". Blue tits and great tits don't interbreed with each other.

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  5. I love using the struggle of players against nature in my games, more so than using monsters or men. I'll definitely have to watch that show more. It is definitely an incredible inspiration

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  6. Now that I think about it, original D&D could function weirdly well as a Darwinian metaphor. The dungeon is the natural world. The hordes of level 1 PCs, pouring in through the entrance, are the young, the majority of whom proceed to die in random, horrible, humiliating, and often meaningless ways. The lucky few who survive long enough to 'level up' are the ones who make it into adolescence and adulthood, finally unlocking those natural capacities which any of the others *could* have acquired, if only they'd lived long enough to do so. I guess name level would be full maturity and reproduction: you claim a territory, build a stronghold (nest/lair), and a short while later a whole swarm of new level 1 characters appear around you, ready to start the whole cycle again...

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    1. Yes. I think DCC more or less makes this explicit with those whole "funnel" thing....

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  7. It all gets pretty horrific when you think about it for too long. 'Red in tooth and claw' just doesn't cover it. I think this was something that Lovecraft had some awareness of though, even if it doesn't touch on the Cthulhu side of things that much. "Life is more horrible than death" because at least death is nice and sterile and unchanging and clean.

    There was a good piece in the Atlantic by Annie Dillard (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1973/11/the-force-that-drives-the-flower/308963/?single_page=true) covering much the same sentiment, expressed in vaguely Lovecraftian - or at any rate, 'weird' - terms.

    "I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives. Every glistening egg is a memento mori."

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    1. Great stuff. I'll have to print that out and read it properly. Thanks.

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