Nature and Civilization

In the small town where I grew up there were two highways that intersected in the middle of town and lead in four directions out into the rest of the world. At a certain distance in each direction there would be a town limit sign with the name of our little town Hayneville on it. That was a marked boundary where the civilization of our town began. Civilization loves lines and boundaries. City parks seem to acknowledge that we need nature and are nature ourselves but they are in the city. City parks have sidewalks and street lamps and water fountains and lots of things that can not be found in the raw jungle. Sometimes we need real nature to remind us of primal things so we go to the desert or lake or sea or mountains where the focus is pointed to the uncivilized.



Chaos and Nature are scary in that there the wolf slaughters the lamb and death and destruction are as common as birth and creation. Things seem out of control in nature but are they really out of control? Could it be that they are out of the control of the city government but that nature does have its laws. Physics teaches about those laws and they could care less what the kings, mayors, voters, or legislatures have to say about them. The laws of nature are laws that do bring order in to what otherwise would be chaos. To the civilized eye nature may seem to totally out of control and it is when it comes to obeying the laws of mankind but it is not at all disorderly when it comes to the laws of physics. At the smallest and largest levels nature does seem to honor patterns and relationships that keep things controlled in a kind of natural if not civilized way. So just as there is nature right in the middle of the city as close as the nearest tree or lawn there is also order within nature making it anything but a simple chaos.



The fact is that civilization has its own idea of how to control matters with the goal of keeping pain, sickness, and death away from the tribes of mankind. The police are the thin blue line drawn to protect civilization from internal forces of chaos and the armies are the thin green line that is drawn protect the civilization from external forces. If these lines fall the civilization falls to chaos from internal or external lawlessness. Every grouping of mankind needs to maintain control both inside its ranks and beyond its ranks to be protected. Certain religious groups have rejected government as too secular but when they are isolated and there are no other governments to protect them from the internal chaotic actions of some of its members even the religious societies finally face the fact that they too will be destroyed unless they post their own sheriffs and Vatican guards. that protect a civilization from external forces of chaos.



There comes a time when the police and armies can not protect us from the laws of nature that seem like chaos to our civilized viewpoints. At those times we run to the central scientific bastion called the hospital and look for help from the final line of support for our bodies the doctors and nurses. They are indeed often just as heroic as the police and the military in their efforts to protect us from the chaotic forces that would take our lives in sicknesses unto death.



The miracles of modern science like the power of the modern weapons of military warfare have grown stronger in their ability to protect us and prolong the victory of nature to bring upon pain and death but death does win every time. Nature wins and just as when it is time for the mother to bring the baby into the world birth comes so too death comes no matter the intentions and efforts of mankind and civilization.



This is something true in every small town like the one I grew up in as a boy and it is equally true in the largest and most powerful cities in the history of the human race. There is a cemetery in every city and town as a reminder that civilization's laws and will have a limit as certain as the town limit. For some reason we love to put walls around our cemeteries as well. That might be an effort to keep death inside those walls once again away from the city of the living.


As someone walks along the ground they might walk past the city cemetery, the city park, the police station, the church and temple, the city hall, the schools, the library and even right to the hospital onto the maternity ward where the newborn babies lie screaming their first cries of life.
Underneath the entire city of man lies the earth itself. Civilization has nothing from which to rise than chaotic nature. Nothing could have produced the city of mankind but nature. There is no real city limit sign because it is made of metal from nature and the city wall is made of the materials of nature as well. The city is nature denying itself. The cities rise from the fields and then they crumble back into the fields. Man is made of dust and to the dust man returns. Man was dust and is dust and will be dust. So too the cities of man. Some may feel this is a statement of futility but if you look closer it is magic dust indeed! For those who have eyes to see could we be living in the field of miracles? Is it a field of death or a field of birth? Seems the potential for the actual is in the field and that potential is all but infinite and the field,the dust, the cities and the people of the cities are all one potential actuality. It is the uncontrollable awesome beautiful terrible life of nature and its cities of man. There is a miracle full of magic in the field where death blooms into life and life melts into death and the unformed forms and uniforms again. It is the parent and the grave of man and his cities which never once is detached from anything going on above and below its surface. Nature has the first and last word and speaks its word all the way in between the two. Should such a source and end and provider of man every be called anything other than mans friend. The Garden of Eden must certainly have been such a Friendly Field in which to build the cities of man.