Organic Meaning

 Hello everyone. It seems that April has not been a great month for me. I have been unable to motivate myself to talk to people online, and I have been having more trouble taking care of myself (eating etc) than usual. Even as I write this, I don't know what I have left to hope for, and it seems that I am always going to feel like my body is tainted by male puberty.

I have been working on a number of writings concerning Marxism. The following is a part taken from a thing I am drafting which discusses gender. I have no idea if it is any good, but I thought it would be nice to post something for once, even if it is unfinished.

Organic Meaning

Let us first acknowledge that human society is a natural construct. Everything that we do is downstream of human biological capacities; if this were not so, then we would no longer be human beings. Just as bees make hives and honey, humans make meaning.

A primary fact of human nature is that we emerge from the bodies of other human beings. The experience of birth is our first foray into making meaning; among the first categories we ever create is ‘mum’. Our internal world of meaning always starts from that baseline, even if we are orphaned or the product of surrogacy. There is nothing we can presently do to escape this fact; at the same time, I see no reason why we ought to.

Though these two paragraphs begin our investigation quite concisely, I should acknowledge that some may find my statements rigid, ambiguous, or perhaps even bigoted. What is and is not natural? If society is biological, how do we account for social change? Why bother with change at all if everything we do is already ‘natural’?

Just as a discussion of social change is impossible to conduct without addressing communism, a discussion of gender is impossible to conduct without addressing the human animal. Indeed, the real thesis of this essay is that these things – politics, gender, biology, culture, psychology – are all expressions of one natural process: the process of nature itself, which is not a static object outside of us, but rather a system in flux of which we are a part. When it comes to the topic of gender (and of race), we often see people from all kinds of political perspectives and walks of life expressing frustration at social constructivism, because social constructivism in the popular consciousness tends to view society as an object which is separate from the human organism.

I can subdivide what I am trying to say here into a set of smaller theses:

1. The human body has certain capacities and constraints.

2. Culture (of which technology and society are a part) exists within these parameters.

3. Culture can reshape human behaviour, within the constraints of the human animal.

4. Though culture can make human constraints more malleable (e.g. through technology), we cannot become entirely new animals on a comprehensible timescale.

Since we are concerned with human nature, let us first investigate the nature of being alive. What does life do? It takes energy from its environment, and it changes that energy into other forms. This is our cosmological function. We are the mould on a discarded piece of bread – an interesting byproduct of a wider system which could easily exist without us.

At its most basic level, the human animal performs the cosmological function of life by consuming stored energy in the form of plant and animal matter, then cycling it back into chemical forms which are easier for other organisms to break down. Provided you are regularly eating and shitting, you are already succeeding quite well at being human.

Life cannot be alive forever, however. Life must replicate itself if it is to continue converting energy. As placental mammals, humans do this by giving birth to live young. Infant mammals cannot get food on their own, so to survive they must first rely on the milk of the animal that birthed them – this is the eponymous characteristic of the class Mammalia. Reliance on the birthing parent for food is common among other tetrapods, and even among animals from other phyla – including arthropods. ‘Parent from which I was birthed’ and ‘food’ may very well be the two most fundamentally meaningful things in animal psychology.

It is worth mentioning that humans don’t become pregnant out of nowhere. Many humans can produce either eggs or sperm, and they are driven by their psychology to behave in ways that cause eggs and sperm to come into contact. Natural selection has left humans as sexually dimorphic animals, which means that (broadly speaking) humans who produce eggs are shaped differently to humans who produce sperm. Humans are then motivated by sexual attraction to better facilitate egg fertilisation; a human who produces sperm is likely to be visually attracted to the posterior of a human who produces eggs, for example. But sexual attraction isn’t terribly neat; not all humans who produce sperm are visually interested in the bodies of humans who produce eggs (or vice versa). Many humans capable of producing sperm more resemble those humans which produce eggs (or vice versa), and there are also many humans who would prefer to avoid the pain of giving birth altogether. Fortunately, the human species is still able to replicate itself, because life does not need to be perfectly uniform in order to perform its functions¹.

Notice how at no point in my explanation of (as certain propagandists often like to call it) basic human biology did I ever use the words male, female, man, woman, mother, or father. Indeed, I could go on to objectively explain (in tedious detail) all the things that humans do, without ever mentioning the fact that humans divide themselves into men and women – nor any other such division, such as race or nationality.

That being said, the tedium of my explanation is something that many will fixate on. Our brains often prefer to use one word in place of many words. ‘Mother’ is so much easier to digest than ‘human who birthed me’, which quickly gets difficult to parse when reading blocks of prose. This conciseness principle becomes very apparent when handling abstract concepts – we all know what a ‘thought’ is, but it’s very hard to break down ‘thought’ into a short phrase that doesn’t involve using the verb ‘to think’, or any synonyms thereof.

Note how I just said that ‘mother’ is easy to digest. Ease of understanding really matters to us because language is a process of sharing meaning. We don’t just want to keep our meaning to ourselves; we want to share that good stuff around. There’s an inherent empathy to language where we are often taking care to make our words ergonomic; comfortable enough for the other person to correctly & easily interpret us – even if we intend to insult them.

We’ve discussed a number of things which constitute ‘human nature’. We exist as consumers within the food chain. We generally enjoy having sex, because it often has the side-effect of producing more humans. We create meaning, which begins as a navigational tool for seeking food and safety, but eventually branches out into words and, soon after, abstract ideas which we share with other humans. There is much more to human nature – such as co-operation and competition – and perhaps I will write about these things alongside an expansion of my ‘naturalistic theses’ later. But for now, these things are what I am here to fixate on:

1. It is in our nature to categorise things.

2. The things that we do (including categorisation) are things that our bodies do. Our bodies constrain us in certain ways, but our bodies are also what facilitate our behaviour*. Our bodies also exist in relation to other people’s bodies (such as our mothers who gave birth to us) which can also influence our behaviour.

(3. Gender is a kind of meaning.)

*Behaviour refers to both the behaviour of individuals and human culture on a wider scale; culture is the sum of the behaviour of more than one human.

 Footnotes

1. You could say that life is quite lazy – instead of consciously directing itself towards a perfectly uniform existence, it instead unconsciously stumbles its way into being merely good enough :p