When “Natural” Becomes Conservative Territory
Right now everybody thinks that the buzzword “natural” falls neatly into the liberal worldview. It’s like “organic,” but just one or two degrees of virtue lower — buying “organic” is always more righteous than just buying “natural.”
Well, I’m here to tell you that this is quickly going to change. In a recent piece for The Federalist, I discussed a new effort to quash breastfeeding campaigns that feature how it is the natural way to feed your baby:
“ Martucci and Barnhill detail how pro-breastfeeding campaigns by the U.S. Department of Health, World Health Organization, and other state-level departments promote breastfeeding as natural and “mom-made” over formula feeding. Admittedly, “it makes sense” to promote breastfeeding, as part of the decades-long effort to reverse the mid-twentieth century embrace of formula feeding (fully supported by the medical community).”
The authors expressed concern that featuring “natural” would give credence to the anti-vax movement, which, as I note in the piece, is absolutely asinine.
But the next argument reveals their real problem with promoting breastfeeding as natural. They write:
“Coupling nature with motherhood, however, can inadvertently support biologically deterministic arguments about the roles of men and women in the family (for example, that women should be the primary caretakers of children). Referencing the “natural” in breastfeeding promotion, then, may inadvertently endorse a controversial set of values about family life and gender roles, which would be ethically inappropriate.” [Emphasis added.]
It’s deterministic! We can’t have biology getting in the way of progress toward perfecting self-glorification. We can’t have OB-GYN office posters of blissful mothers cradling their nursing babies making men who are attempting to live as women (or women who’ve cut off their breasts in an attempt to live as men) feel bad. Because in 2017, to make someone feel bad is the worst, and such offenses cannot continue with impunity.
But Martucci and Barnhill discourage such references to what is or isn’t natural “unless they make transparent the ‘values or beliefs that underlie them.’”
This argument is blatantly ideological. The authors want to ditch the promotion of the “natural” because they don’t want traditional values and beliefs — usually consistent with natural human behavior, like breastfeeding and composing organic families — shaping health decisions.
The left is comfortable, even zealous, in promoting “natural” when it comes to the food we eat, preserving natural habitats, or preventing “man-made” climate change. But where human nature is concerned, they yearn for the complete overthrow of the natural order.
You see, the category of food is where we immediately place the word natural in our minds, and indeed the grocery aisle will be the last stand for progressives before they finally surrender this term and its more virtuous cousin organic. They must, because sooner or later, they must come to realize that there is absolutely nothing natural about their worldview; there’s nothing in their values system that tethers them to naturalism at all. They love Mother Earth, sure, but they hate natural when it comes to anything other than food.
So now breastfeeding is under attack. Stage 1 is manipulating the language to shift the paradigm, as I discuss in the piece. The left’s disruption of the natural goes well beyond social stigma and linguistic obfuscation, though: it is physical. Even the parts of you that, if everything's working right, should remain in you, such as your eggs, are encouraged to be separated from your body and frozen in case you don’t get around to procreating until much later in life. And if you have the money for it, you can have scientists make several of test tube embryos (from which you can pick the sex), further divorcing intimacy from procreation. Anonymous donor genetic material is also encouraged in the left’s new world, if you don’t have an opposite sex partner to raise a baby with. You can sell some eggs or sperm yourself to pay off loans. And if your baby is "unwanted," you can have your offspring, your flesh and blood, destroyed and sucked out of your body, and the Planned Parenthood clinic will throw it out with the trash.
Note these are all very unnatural procedures, regardless of their ethics.
But even in sacred halls of Whole Foods, progressives are not particularly attached to the natural. Most of the Whole Foods congregation are nominal, not true believers: what they really love is virtue-signaling, and buying cartons of cage-free eggs and organically grown celery is the way to signal that you’re more virtuous than everyone else. Most of the support for “organic” comes from how GMOs and synthetic pesticides supposedly harm your health anyway, not the health of the Earth. Life is all about you; going natural is just one way to make it so.
The left isn’t stocked with tree-loving hippies anymore; they’re still there, especially in tenured university professorships, but they’re not the majority voice. Today, the left is full of humanists, self-worshippers, who believe human happiness is the ultimate good and that we, the people, are too ignorant and too bigoted to find our own way to it. We must have a collection of intellectual elites harness the power of a massive central government to mete out happiness to the masses. (We shall see, of course, how the tension between totalitarianism and the quest for happiness will lead to even more misery.)
Instead of accepting how nature, especially human biology, binds us together in a beautiful scheme, the left is determined to shatter any natural order, mold us all into mostly identical, supposedly interchangeable blocks, and with them, rebuild society.
As far as human biology is concerned, “natural” will be embraced only by those who acknowledge that sex is who we are, not what we’re assigned; that sex differences are real, consequential, and complementary; that female biology is inextricably bound up in motherhood; and that attachment to one’s biological parents is good for children.
This will never stop being true. But there are some who will never stop denying it.
You can read the whole piece here.
