Alan Levinovitz: The Seductive Myth of Nature’s Goodness
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Without our realising it, a single, slippery concept has become a secular deity throughout the modern industrial world. We make terrible sacrifices in its name: of our money, our health, and our planet. That deity is nature itself. Alan Levinovitz, the assistant professor at James Madison University, Virginia, beams in for a virtual Berwins Salon North to explain why arguments based on what is ‘natural’, in food, medicine, and society at large, are appeals to a false idol – our oldest, most persistent superstition.
Alan will be in conversation with Helen Bagnall.
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Without our realising it, a single, slippery concept has become a secular deity throughout the modern industrial world. We make terrible sacrifices in its name: of our money, our health, and our planet. That deity is nature itself. From supermarket shoppers to evolutionary biologists, from atheists to pastors, from Alex Jones to Gwyneth Paltrow, we are all prone to the intuitive faith that life should be lived ‘naturally’. But nature can’t teach us how to live. If we try to stick to its imagined commands, eschewing human artifice in pursuit of Edenic purity, we jeopardise the environment, our health, and our society
It is time to accept our profound responsibility to shape the world of which our technology and our selves are wholly a part.