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vignette, feelings of disgust about gay sex are combined by its critics with
the moral argument that it 'goes against the natural order'. However, often
cognitive, moral and aesthetic references to nature are made separately, as
youshoulddiscover.
As the task should have demonstrated, it is almost always possible (but
not obligatory) to refer to natural phenomena in all three registers. For
instance, if I were an Earth scientist I could describe and explain the nature
of Arizona's Grand Canyon with reference to geological and hydrological
processes operating over millennia. If I were an environmentalist, I might
moralise about this self-same landscape, arguing that its striking geomor-
phological uniqueness demands that it be actively protected from 'human
interference' in perpetuity. I might, furthermore, draw an ethical lesson from
the Canyon's great age: that it reminds us how short human occupancy of
the planet has been and yet how quickly we're destroying a natural world
that provides us with material and spiritual sustenance. This ethical argu-
ment would, in turn, have an aesthetic basis: those fortunate enough to visit
the Canyon enjoy and are often moved by the sheer beauty and scale of
what they see. Here, then, our reference to a feature of the 'natural world'
operates in the domains of 'reason', valuation and emotion - it involves
both head and heart.
This simple example reveals that the antonyms of Western thought not
only divide the world into ontological pieces, but are often
normative
too. They are frequently enrolled in arguments about how the world
ought to be
for moral, aesthetic or pragmatic/practical reasons. They help
us delimit things that become objects of ethical and emotional concern
(or not, depending). In this sense, they are rarely apolitical or inno-
cent. Environmental scientist Barry Commoner's well-known 'four laws
of ecology' (formulated in 1971) are a case in point (Commoner, 1971).
Law number three, 'nature knows best', runs the 'is' and the 'ought'
together seamlessly in one pithy, but grand, formulation. It has an apho-
ristic quality that makes it seem self-evidently correct to many upon first
hearing.
The second complication is that the terms listed in
Figure 1.5
each have
more than just
one
set of established meanings and connotations. In a
famous essay entitled 'Is female to male as nature is to culture'?, the anthro-
pologist Sherry Ortner argued that, in several societies worldwide, women
are unthinkingly linked to 'nature' and 'emotion' more than to 'culture',
and that this is a way in which men maintain control over the minds and
bodies of females (Ortner, 1974; see also Lloyd, 1993; Roach, 2003). While
Ortner's observation about the symbolic and semantic aspects of patriarchy
was (and remains) richly suggestive, it also gave the questionable impression
that the meaning of 'keywords' remains historically invariant and one-
dimensional. Williams, whose book
The country and the city
was published the
