THE LAW OF NATURE

by Duns Scotus

I often hear Right-wingers bang on about the "Law of Nature" as if they know what they are talking about. For them it represents the "ultimate truth" and "deeper morality" underlying the "transient corruption and degeneracy" of the  present age.

Sure, the idea goes, the World is a shit show of clowns, inverted standards, and perversions, but don't worry, it's temporary, and it will all come out in the wash. The Law of Nature will see that the good finally, finally wins. Behind all this there is a sense of them outsourcing their own personal vindication to far distant times. Psychologically, it's very attractive.

Sometimes this faith in the ultimate and final good takes on a deeply eugenic hue:

Yes, the welfarism of the present age and the sexual free-for-all is resulting in the proliferation of "the underclass," but ultimately eugenics will kick in as the chaff is discarded and only the "chads" and "good mothers" come to dominate the gene pool, etc., etc.

Ultimately this Right-wing faith in the all-encompassing "Law of Nature" is an optimistic creed, almost a version of the Panglossian dictum: "All is for the best in the best possible of worlds." I suspect that, once again, we are seeing examples of hidden premises and buried ideologies rather than an honest engagement with eternal reality.

But what Right-wingers refer to as "The Law of Nature" is essentially a misnomer or mischaracterisation. Viewed on the grand scale there is little that is ordered, progressive, and optimistic about our Universe (or if there is, there is absolutely no reason for us to think so -- we never got the memo).

Sure, on petty timescales of a few million years you will occasionally see positive patterns emerge. Our own temporal bubble has seen us advance from knuckle-dragging Neanderthals covered in our own faeces to technocratic man pointing rockets at the skies and dabbing on eau de cologne.

We may even shake off the hangovers of modernity and continue this ascent to the heavens. But the true Law of Nature teaches us that all this progress and its web of trillions and trillions of micro struggles and arrows pointed in the right direction can all come crashing down and drag us back into the sludge -- or even destroy the sludge itself.

This pattern of assiduous and painstaking ascent -- over lifetimes, centuries, millennia, or millions of years -- suddenly struck down by the brutal chaos of an unfeeling cosmos is all too common even on our own tiny planet.

Just the most recent example, the The Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event of approximately 66 million years ago, when a lump or rock 10 to 15 km wide smashed into the Earth, tells us that. Like mammalkind and humankind ever since, the reptilian life forms that predated that event had been progressively evolving from an earlier baseline towards greater and greater intelligence and sophistication, only for almost all that progress to be seared into the archaeological record as a smudge of cinders. A slightly bigger asteroid would possibly have ended all life on our fragile planet.

This true Law of Nature, a law of godless chaos with no hint of the qualitative about it, consumes the petty, Right-wing "Law of Nature" with its incremental advances and conceits of order and purpose, just like Cronos eating his own childish children.