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More on Doing It Naturally
By Psyche | November 1, 2007
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Natural Law appears to be a map that does not correspond to any real territory, but like other Idols it becomes almost “real” when the worshipper stares at it long enough with passionate adoration. Like Catholic statues of Mary, it will even seem to “move” or ‘come alive’.
–Robert Anton Wilson, Natural Law
The late, great cosmic schmuck Robert Anton Wilson published Natural Law in 1987 partially in response to editor Samuel Edward Konkin II’s butchering of an article he wrote for the New Libertarian magazine, and, it seems, as an attempt to try to stem a certain perceived propensity in indulging in misguided line of thought harkening back to a “pre-scientific” era.
Indeed, Wilson makes a careful distinction between “natural law” in an ideological sense versus scientific. He writes: “Aristotle originated and Thomas Aquinas developed the idea of the world made up of ‘entities’ each possessing an indwelling ‘nature’, which can be known by abstract reasoning from abstract definitions.” He distinguishes this from science, noting that “[S]cience has not employed this Aristotelian-Thomist-Cartesian model for over 300 years. Science does not assume ‘natures’ spookily indwelling ‘within’ things, at all, at all [sic]. Science posits functional relations between ‘things’ or events…A so-called natural law in the physical sciences is not a law in the legal sense at all, but a statistical or mathematical generalization from which predictions are deduced…”
It’s ironic that Wilson, in writing against what he terms a “‘medieval investigation by reason’ i.e., by inventing definitions and then deducing what your definitions implicitly assumed” (emphasis original), the subject of the ideological “natural law” against contraception comes up (indeed, the full title of the book is Natural Law, or Don’t Put A Rubber On Your Willy) and forms a humorous basis for his arguments.
It’s an interesting exercise to contrast this with Richard Dawkins in his distinctly more scientific work (though equally, if unintentionally, amusing when it comes to his diatribe against computer viruses in the footnotes – another time, perhaps) – repeated statement that contraception is unnatural. Here we have Dawkins stating this – presumably – with some scientific reasoning behind this (though it was not explored in The Selfish Gene) and yet here Wilson is railing against ideologists stating what “is” or “is not” right based on abstract “natural laws”.
One is tempted to ask, “What is it with men and contraception?”
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