It’s easy to think of nature as a constant battle, a “struggle of all against all” as Hobbes put it. Limited resources, competition, the rule of tooth and claw, violence threatened at every turn. For how long was this the sole view espoused by science? It fit in well with the ruling ontology after all—no matter how bad “civilized” life was, it was better than the alternative.
Nature had to be battled, fought back from where its dark edges encroached on the shining cities of civilization, lest all fall into violence and chaos. Every behavior passed through this lens of struggle and violence, from wolf pack dynamics to the reproductive habits of insects. This is often called a “discipline” society, law and order enforced by direct violence of one kind or another.
Of course, another explanation arose—symbiosis, mutualism. Kropotkin’s work on the subject, Mutual Aid as a Factor of Evolution, is perhaps the most well known. He argues quite successfully that mutual aid, organisms helping one another, is at least as important as this competitive struggle, if not moreso. This view gained traction, again because it could be contained within the explanation of the world that justified the newest system of control. Democracy.
It was no longer a matter of outright threat, of ordering peasants to be thankful for what they had, lest you let the wolves at the gate gnaw at their bones. It is a subtler coercion now. We’re working together, to everyone’s benefit, or so they claim. Remora pick parasites off sharks, crows lead wolves to deer, and when you elect politicians, they work in your best interests! Really, you benefit the most. They’re civil servants, after all. Needless to say, this is a stunningly effective bit of propaganda.
Science is political—the science that gets accepted, that gets funded and taught and becomes mainstream, is the science that justifies the status quo. It is a powerful tool for justifying the political, precisely because it claims to be nothing short of The Truth, objective and non-political.
The science that showed women had frail hearts and wandering uteruses justified patriarchy. The science that showed black and indigenous peoples were naturally subservient justified slavery, genocide, and cultural erasure. The science that normalized one particular type of body above others justified horrific violence against those who were disabled, intersex, or neurodivergent. The science that placed humanity on top of a pedestal above all other life justified the wholesale destruction and colonization of nearly every part of the world. Science has acted to justify whatever profit-making story those in power tell throughout all of history, or it has been ignored—and now is no different.
There is a way of looking at nature, of understanding the world, that science will refuse to accept, that productive society will reject entirely. Such a view is antithesis to them, because it contains within it the possibility of a world different from the one we now exist within. A world without prisons, without work, without control. It is a world of play, of joy.
A bear who wanders through the woods, eating berries and roots, wading into a stream to snatch fish from the water, is not hard at work. She does not wake to the blaring sound of an alarm, dreading the thought of the day before her. She simply exists, joining the great game being played every moment of every day by each living thing.
A seagull, wheeling to and fro on circling currents of air, acts as he pleases. It is a dance to skim low over the water, to dart below and pluck sardines from anothers’ mouth and have them stolen back in turn. If he is tired, he lands, and bobs upon the waves or sits upon the sand. If he is hungry, there is food to be found—he must only walk over to find it.
These carefree examples are easy to understand as play, as joy—any one of us might find pleasure in the daily life of a gull or bear. But what of the rabbit as it huddles in its burrow, away from the sharp teeth and hungry belly of a coyote? What of the insects devoured by swooping bats and sparrows, the elk hounded by wolves? Surely, these things cannot be part of any game?
But they are. Western society has atomized our view of the world, chopped it into distinct pieces that cannot be made whole again. It is linear and boxed-in. An elk is chased, is caught, is eaten. The elk is dead, and that is the end of it. The elk is gone, forever.
But she is not. The elk is not apart from the wolf, not some piece kept easily in an ivory box and removed from time to time for the pleasure of seeing it. A certain type of knowledge would divide an elk into a thousand different pieces, each separate and unrelated. She is so many pounds of meat, stretched over bone of a certain composition, likely to be found in specific regions at specific times of year. Her being is presented as though unrelated to the grass and the lichens she eats, the icemelt she drinks, the wolves and insects and humans who eat and drink her in turn. This idea of an elk is tied only to the most trivial facts of her existence, her physical body and nothing more. She is known objectively —as an object.
In truth, there is more of the elk in the joy of her bounding run, in the steam of her breath in the short cold days of winter. The elk and the wolf are inseparable from one another, inseparable from the chase, from their dance. The wolf chases the elk, the elk runs, escapes, is caught, is eaten, survives. The cycle continues, escape and capture and hunger and satiety, as long as there are wolves to chase and elk to run. It is a waltz, circling around and around even as the dancers fly across the ballroom floor. No matter who dances the steps, it is still the same waltz, the same cycle.
Of late, white settlers and colonial expansion have interrupted the dance. One partner is rudely yanked away from the other, a knife stuck in her back. The survivor is forced into a corner, expected to repeat her steps for the amusement of those who now march around the ballroom in tight formation, complaining of the pain in their feet. Wolves are destroyed, habitat for elk and deer razed and plowed down, and we take it upon ourselves to “control” the populations whenever the slivers of land left allocated to them prove insufficient.
Colonial thought has turned gently tended gardens of pines and chestnuts into barren fields of bone-white dust. The need for “production” has vomited poison into rivers and oceans, and griped when fishing became unprofitable. A great dance between the stones and the grass and every thing that was has been reduced to spreadsheets and value judgments, to mineral rights and profit margins.
I have been the benefactor of much of this violence. The pain and loss of others kept my belly fuller, my water cleaner, my life easier. I have been ignorant, but not innocent. The more I understand this, the more I try to abandon what I’ve been taught, the more I try to shake off the jackboots I was born into. Perhaps all of us who have received the cruel profits of the world’s subjugation can do this. We are shoved along, kept in line by those marching behind and before us even as we try to break loose, but there may be empty corners we can fill with dance, with joy and play.
The ballroom is scuffed and worn now, it’s true. But there are those who remember the dance, and we may find a new set of steps, a twisting turning expression of joy, that lets us dance lightly over broken boards and trampled curtains. Learning that dance, learning to turn our lives into games of joy and delight, may be our only chance to become free.
(I don’t think she’s on tumblr any more, but huge credit to Araña for suggesting some edits when I showed this to her a long while back. If anybody knows her current url lmk so I can @ her!)
