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At the end of this piece you say we are much more like Elves than we used to be, but that's not really true. Elvish magic works the way it does because in class

At the end of this piece you say we are much more like Elves than we used to be, but that's not really true. Elvish magic works the way it does because in classical/Tolkien-esque fantasy, the natural world is friendly to elves: they live forever, they're immune to disease, they heal quickly from injuries, they bound effortlessly across treetops or walk over snow banks, etc. They develop a symbiotic relationship with nature because it's kind to them. Nature isn't kind to humans. Sure, we've acquired many of these elvish capabilities: we can live longer if we use fire to scare away hungry bears, we can heal faster if we have some bandages or build a hospital, we can travel fast if we sit in a vehicle. But our relationship is fundamentally with our technology, not with nature. We've developed a symbiotic relationship with technology. Nature is still a deadly Other. So unless we someday genetically engineer ourselves to be more elf-like and resilient out in the forest, I don't think we'll ever adopt an Elvish outlook. We fundamentally improve ourselves via that which we create, and defend ourselves from the hostile environment which existed before us. In fantasy everyone's made by a benevolent creator, in reality we've evolved under the rule of survival of the fittest. The elves didn't dominate their environment because they didn't need to. (PS: In Tolkien, there actually is someone who's out of harmony with the natural order from day one, and has to go engineer his own world as a response. Complete with orcs and trolls and enormous fortresses that keep nature out. He's known as Morgoth and when they finally catch up with him they throw him in eternal jail!)

meheleventyone 5y ago
The world isn't unrelentingly hostile to us though and we have a much closer symbiotic relationship as the world is both the cause of our existence and our life support mechanism. So in that sense we should care a lot more about looking after it. Whereas Elves live apart from it and have no reason to care necessarily which we see in other depictions of Elves in fiction as malevolent forces. The problem is that we much prefer convenience now in our comparatively short personal lives than thinking about the long-term consequences. The view that our relationship is with tech rather than the world and the view of the world as basically a negative thing is a strong part of that.
mellavora 5y ago
What do you mean, Nature isn't kind to humans? Because we aren't immortal? Humanity has spent much more of its time on earth living with a very low technology level than that we enjoy today. If Nature wasn't kind, how did we make it for those hundreds of thousands of years? It is really only since the industrial revolution that we have become crazy-reliant on tech. Tolkien's works were very much about the 'war' between the pre- and post- industrial revolution worlds. Hint: the bad guys are the industrialists (Morgoth being one example).
- armatav 5y ago
  Like any other species, at whatever cost. It’s a mistake to view nature as “good” and technology as “bad”. The only similarity between them is their complete and utter moral neutrality. Only a few of your fellow humans care about you, for sure, and only your technology is fully disposed to your orders; nature does not want you here anymore than it wants you gone. Anthropomorphizing nature is a good way to end up disappointed, it’s not a being - it’s a composition of very complex systems, to quantify its “kindness” is not possible. Humanity as we know it, has always had an incredible technological advantage, even just fire is orders of magnitudes higher advantage than something evolution can give you in a similar timeframe. In fact it’s so powerful, the first technology, that it literally modified our evolution to give us larger brains and closer societies - in some respects highly developed language owes its existence to fire.
  - PicassoCTs 5y ago
    Thank you, i never understood how somebody can anthropomorphize the constant conflict in nature around us. Every tree murders the Savannah below, every Savannah fire is a attempt to get back more land for the grass. Nothing out there is peaceful, even with all hostile predators removed, the battle of each system component against the others continuous.
    - burnished 5y ago
      Fires are actually a pretty important part of grass and tree ecology! Cleansing, reproductive fire.
codeduck 5y ago
Humans are more akin to Tolkein's Dwarves than the Elves. Argumentative, proud, and araricious.
- voidfunc 5y ago
  At first I was going to agree... then I realized we're neither like Elves or Dwarves and its the reason Tolkien included Men in his metaverse. Men are culturally diverse and capable of building great cities and societies. We are adaptable, industrious, but not particularly loyal. We tend to be fearful and vengeful. We don't form a symbiotic relationship with the land (Elves) or have a single-overarching purpose to acquire wealth (Dwarves). We conquer our natural environment and bend it to our will as best we can. The Elves and Dwarves are very one-dimensional in Tolkien's work and they sort of represent specific things.
  - antisthenes 5y ago
    Multiple races in fantasy settings always struck me as just different aspects of human nature. We are all humans, dwarves, elves, halflings, goblins, orcs, whatever, each race just highlights one of the facets of complex human society and behaviors.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  Also much like Dwarves we don't live in harmony with nature, but for our environment to our liking. And occasionally we are too greedy and cause some disaster or another.
- ar_lan 5y ago
  Or maybe Tolkien's humans :)
Juliate 5y ago
Nature isn't kind to humans if you separate the two and if you think one ought something towards the other. But humans are a small element of nature. They originated from this environment, live within it, return to it.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  The fundamental divide between us and nature is this: we care about the fate of an individual. Nature doesn't. We are from nature, and every one of us is thus destined to die, most likely painfully, and our deaths will most definitely inflict pain to other members of our species. Until we can bridge this gap, be no longer bound by the short lifespans we have, humans and nature will remain enemies. Only after the gap is closed, there can be talk of peace - and then, still, we will need to become immune to nature's other trappings, because most of humanity can't survive in a purely natural environment anymore. Once heat, cold, pathogens in water and hungry predators stop being a threat, we can finally start living in respectful symbiosis with the natural world. Alternatively, we could just learn to abandon all our morality: stop caring about suffering and death, treat ourselves and each others as just an ephemeral phenomenon, appearing one moment, gone in another. I don't think any one of us is ready to go to that extreme, and it would require extreme degree of self-lobotomizing anyway. Our survival instincts and our capacity for empathy are built into our firmware, we can't just shut them off for the sake of "being one with nature".
  - Juliate 5y ago
    Nonsense. Nature is not "an enemy", it's where you're coming from and what you're made of and what you're living in. It's something to deal with, for sure. However treating nature as "the enemy" is precisely the model of thinking that brought us here and now, on the verge of being erased by the consequences of our own actions, human-as-a-conquerer. Before talking of nature's trappings, we might as well better talk about human's owns. Our survival instinct saved us within a specific frame in which we could act. When our whole biome disappears or stops working for us, being part and dependent of it, we disappear as well.
  - FridayoLeary 5y ago
teekert 5y ago
This. We can be more elfish with a personal force field allowing us to sleep in the woods without freezing to death or being eaten. Or we can achieve the same with genetic/genomic manipulation. And we will learn to become immortal over time. In any event, it's technology that will make us more elvish. When we choose so, and some people will. It's also technology that will give us access to huge amounts of energy without destroying nature and it is technology which will allow is to live out in space leaving our original world as pristine as it can be. If you ask me this piece is about optimism vs pessimism wrt technology.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  Following along with your reply and the essay, who is to say that the elves are not simply humans with force fields? One for beauty, one for immortality, one for grace, one for safety... With enough force-fields, delicately interwoven with the art of the mind of a god and the skill of the hands of a god, who is to say that the gap between the humans and elves is anything other than a sheet of silicon?
codewench 5y ago
There's a quote I quite like from Peter Watts which I think encapsulates this "technology implies belligerence". He expanded this to "Tools exist for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treat nature as an enemy, they are by definition a rebellion against the way things are. In benign environments technology is a stunted, laughable thing, it can't thrive in cultures gripped by belief in natural harmony" [1] [1](pdf warning) https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Ambassador.pdf https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Ambassador.pdf
mxmilkiib 5y ago
Things like food forests can be socially engineered.
wantsanagent 5y ago
I think you missed the idea that immortality is the inflection point. What you say is true so after technology brings us to a certain point then we can adopt more Elvish ways. The same inflection point is reached in Diamond Age when technology advances sufficiently to allow for "seed" tech to displace "feed" tech.
Fern_Blossom 5y ago
>Nature isn't kind to humans. Nature isn't kind to anything. I completely agree with you, but that needs to be said better since the root concept here is how humans, but nothing else, has fallen out of line with nature. Bullshit. Yea, it's pretty to see a monarch butterfly and how peaceful it must be... except it's probably the lone survivor of its swarm after a flock of swallows decimated all the other butterflies it was with just 20 minutes ago. Animals and plants went extinct pre-humans. All. The. Time. They get slaughtered or diseased without us. The only difference between humans and everything else, we as a species collectively said, "no" to nature ruling our lives. I mean, for fuck's sake, we're such assholes about it, we setup animal sanctuaries and clinics to rescue wild, injured animals. Any other form of nature would have called it "lunch". I'm going onto a soapbox now. I blame modern animal/nature shows for this gradual misunderstanding of "nature". If you're old enough, you remember old school nature programs showed how metal, destructive and viscous wildlife actually IS. All the shows I see my nieces and nephews watch... they haven't watched footage of a bear tearing into a still kicking deer or wolves taking down a screaming baby bison or moose. They need to know if they see a bear, wolf, snake or cougar in real life, it's not going to be cuddly or do a song/dance number. It's going to fuck them up and they need to keep their distance. Going to stack one more soapbox for me to stand on... and this will get me flamed... koalas and pandas deserve to go extinct. Mono-food source creatures are asking for trouble and need to evolve to diversify their diet to properly outpace extinction.
- exo-pla-net 5y ago
  The plant kingdom is almost entirely mono-food-sourced. They almost all rely on the sun, which, pending a nuclear winter, might indeed become a scarce resource. Do plants deserve to go instinct?
  - Fern_Blossom 5y ago
    You do realize plants are far more complex than that, right? I mean, there's water, nutrients in the soil and the importance of mycelium in the dirt. Most plants you can throw in a dark closest for like a week or two easy, then take them out and they'll come back to life. Don't forget, ground level plants in a forest or jungle barely get shit for sun. I'm a cheap bastard that buys "dying" clearance plants from Lowes and Home Depot, then bring them back to life. My dumb redneck green thumb has a lot more respect for plants. Shit, watch some wild bonsai collectors on youtube. They massacre small trees to bare wood, purposely put them in too small pots, under nourish them and the fuckers still grow. Plants are no where near as fragile as a koala and panda. Hell, there was an oak tree on my parents property that was struck by lighting some ten some odd times in a five year period (Florida). We cut it down to a 2 or so foot stump since it seemed too dangerous to keep up with all the damage. Fucker started brand new shoots and refused to accept death. After 10 years from cutting, it grew three solid trunks about 10 feet high or so. A bit taller than a house, never measured it.
vbezhenar 5y ago
I agree with you, nature is hostile to humans. I recently bought a house in a village and first day: I was bitten by a mite. There's danger of encephalitis, so I had to visit a hospital and get some injections to protect. No hospital? Few percents of chances to get ill and die. There are wolves in the forest. They're not generally dangerous to humans, unless you're doing stupid things or you're child, but they're dangerous enough and they'll kill dogs. Finding clean water is a challenge. Mosquito can turn your life into hell without modern repellents. But still I think that it's a worthwhile movement to bend a nature towards human and fill a missing pieces. Because despite all the dangers and inconveniences I just love being in nature compared to the city. Probably the technology and science is not here yet. But imagine that we develop ways to eradicate mosquitoes completely. Eradicate infected mites completely (issue with viruses and bacterias, not with mites, of course). Find a ways to generate clean energy (hardest thing is to generate heat in home, it requires lots of energy). And so on. My dream is to live like an elf in the forest, but without all the negative consequences. It's impossible or too costly atm, but I don't see it as impossible in principle.
- chmod600 5y ago
  Aren't mites tiny (like less than a mm)? How did you even know you were bitten?
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    Sorry, I think it was tick. More specifically, Ixodidae tick. It has few mm size, but it gets much bigger when it drinks blood. It's easy to spot visually.
jimbokun 5y ago
South Park dramatization of this argument: https://southpark.cc.com/video-clips/ji7j1k/south-park-god-damn-stupid-ass-rainforest https://southpark.cc.com/video-clips/ji7j1k/south-park-god-d...
ASalazarMX 5y ago
> But our relationship is fundamentally with our technology, not with nature. We've developed a symbiotic relationship with technology. Nature is still a deadly Other. Lots of interesting viewpoints here, but i think this one's missing: We have a symbiotic relation with our technology, but we make the technology, there's room to adapt it to have a symbiotic (or at least sustainable) relationship with nature.

meheleventyone 5y ago

The world isn't unrelentingly hostile to us though and we have a much closer symbiotic relationship as the world is both the cause of our existence and our life support mechanism. So in that sense we should care a lot more about looking after it. Whereas Elves live apart from it and have no reason to care necessarily which we see in other depictions of Elves in fiction as malevolent forces. The problem is that we much prefer convenience now in our comparatively short personal lives than thinking about the long-term consequences. The view that our relationship is with tech rather than the world and the view of the world as basically a negative thing is a strong part of that.

mellavora 5y ago

What do you mean, Nature isn't kind to humans? Because we aren't immortal? Humanity has spent much more of its time on earth living with a very low technology level than that we enjoy today. If Nature wasn't kind, how did we make it for those hundreds of thousands of years? It is really only since the industrial revolution that we have become crazy-reliant on tech. Tolkien's works were very much about the 'war' between the pre- and post- industrial revolution worlds. Hint: the bad guys are the industrialists (Morgoth being one example).

armatav 5y ago
Like any other species, at whatever cost. It’s a mistake to view nature as “good” and technology as “bad”. The only similarity between them is their complete and utter moral neutrality. Only a few of your fellow humans care about you, for sure, and only your technology is fully disposed to your orders; nature does not want you here anymore than it wants you gone. Anthropomorphizing nature is a good way to end up disappointed, it’s not a being - it’s a composition of very complex systems, to quantify its “kindness” is not possible. Humanity as we know it, has always had an incredible technological advantage, even just fire is orders of magnitudes higher advantage than something evolution can give you in a similar timeframe. In fact it’s so powerful, the first technology, that it literally modified our evolution to give us larger brains and closer societies - in some respects highly developed language owes its existence to fire.
- PicassoCTs 5y ago
  Thank you, i never understood how somebody can anthropomorphize the constant conflict in nature around us. Every tree murders the Savannah below, every Savannah fire is a attempt to get back more land for the grass. Nothing out there is peaceful, even with all hostile predators removed, the battle of each system component against the others continuous.
  - burnished 5y ago
    Fires are actually a pretty important part of grass and tree ecology! Cleansing, reproductive fire.

codeduck 5y ago

Humans are more akin to Tolkein's Dwarves than the Elves. Argumentative, proud, and araricious.

voidfunc 5y ago
At first I was going to agree... then I realized we're neither like Elves or Dwarves and its the reason Tolkien included Men in his metaverse. Men are culturally diverse and capable of building great cities and societies. We are adaptable, industrious, but not particularly loyal. We tend to be fearful and vengeful. We don't form a symbiotic relationship with the land (Elves) or have a single-overarching purpose to acquire wealth (Dwarves). We conquer our natural environment and bend it to our will as best we can. The Elves and Dwarves are very one-dimensional in Tolkien's work and they sort of represent specific things.
- antisthenes 5y ago
  Multiple races in fantasy settings always struck me as just different aspects of human nature. We are all humans, dwarves, elves, halflings, goblins, orcs, whatever, each race just highlights one of the facets of complex human society and behaviors.
wongarsu 5y ago
Also much like Dwarves we don't live in harmony with nature, but for our environment to our liking. And occasionally we are too greedy and cause some disaster or another.
ar_lan 5y ago
Or maybe Tolkien's humans :)

Juliate 5y ago

Nature isn't kind to humans if you separate the two and if you think one ought something towards the other. But humans are a small element of nature. They originated from this environment, live within it, return to it.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
The fundamental divide between us and nature is this: we care about the fate of an individual. Nature doesn't. We are from nature, and every one of us is thus destined to die, most likely painfully, and our deaths will most definitely inflict pain to other members of our species. Until we can bridge this gap, be no longer bound by the short lifespans we have, humans and nature will remain enemies. Only after the gap is closed, there can be talk of peace - and then, still, we will need to become immune to nature's other trappings, because most of humanity can't survive in a purely natural environment anymore. Once heat, cold, pathogens in water and hungry predators stop being a threat, we can finally start living in respectful symbiosis with the natural world. Alternatively, we could just learn to abandon all our morality: stop caring about suffering and death, treat ourselves and each others as just an ephemeral phenomenon, appearing one moment, gone in another. I don't think any one of us is ready to go to that extreme, and it would require extreme degree of self-lobotomizing anyway. Our survival instincts and our capacity for empathy are built into our firmware, we can't just shut them off for the sake of "being one with nature".
- Juliate 5y ago
  Nonsense. Nature is not "an enemy", it's where you're coming from and what you're made of and what you're living in. It's something to deal with, for sure. However treating nature as "the enemy" is precisely the model of thinking that brought us here and now, on the verge of being erased by the consequences of our own actions, human-as-a-conquerer. Before talking of nature's trappings, we might as well better talk about human's owns. Our survival instinct saved us within a specific frame in which we could act. When our whole biome disappears or stops working for us, being part and dependent of it, we disappear as well.
- FridayoLeary 5y ago

teekert 5y ago

This. We can be more elfish with a personal force field allowing us to sleep in the woods without freezing to death or being eaten. Or we can achieve the same with genetic/genomic manipulation. And we will learn to become immortal over time. In any event, it's technology that will make us more elvish. When we choose so, and some people will. It's also technology that will give us access to huge amounts of energy without destroying nature and it is technology which will allow is to live out in space leaving our original world as pristine as it can be. If you ask me this piece is about optimism vs pessimism wrt technology.

BizarroLand 5y ago
Following along with your reply and the essay, who is to say that the elves are not simply humans with force fields? One for beauty, one for immortality, one for grace, one for safety... With enough force-fields, delicately interwoven with the art of the mind of a god and the skill of the hands of a god, who is to say that the gap between the humans and elves is anything other than a sheet of silicon?

codewench 5y ago

There's a quote I quite like from Peter Watts which I think encapsulates this "technology implies belligerence". He expanded this to "Tools exist for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treat nature as an enemy, they are by definition a rebellion against the way things are. In benign environments technology is a stunted, laughable thing, it can't thrive in cultures gripped by belief in natural harmony" [1] [1](pdf warning) https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Ambassador.pdf https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Ambassador.pdf

mxmilkiib 5y ago

Things like food forests can be socially engineered.

wantsanagent 5y ago

I think you missed the idea that immortality is the inflection point. What you say is true so after technology brings us to a certain point then we can adopt more Elvish ways. The same inflection point is reached in Diamond Age when technology advances sufficiently to allow for "seed" tech to displace "feed" tech.

Fern_Blossom 5y ago

>Nature isn't kind to humans. Nature isn't kind to anything. I completely agree with you, but that needs to be said better since the root concept here is how humans, but nothing else, has fallen out of line with nature. Bullshit. Yea, it's pretty to see a monarch butterfly and how peaceful it must be... except it's probably the lone survivor of its swarm after a flock of swallows decimated all the other butterflies it was with just 20 minutes ago. Animals and plants went extinct pre-humans. All. The. Time. They get slaughtered or diseased without us. The only difference between humans and everything else, we as a species collectively said, "no" to nature ruling our lives. I mean, for fuck's sake, we're such assholes about it, we setup animal sanctuaries and clinics to rescue wild, injured animals. Any other form of nature would have called it "lunch". I'm going onto a soapbox now. I blame modern animal/nature shows for this gradual misunderstanding of "nature". If you're old enough, you remember old school nature programs showed how metal, destructive and viscous wildlife actually IS. All the shows I see my nieces and nephews watch... they haven't watched footage of a bear tearing into a still kicking deer or wolves taking down a screaming baby bison or moose. They need to know if they see a bear, wolf, snake or cougar in real life, it's not going to be cuddly or do a song/dance number. It's going to fuck them up and they need to keep their distance. Going to stack one more soapbox for me to stand on... and this will get me flamed... koalas and pandas deserve to go extinct. Mono-food source creatures are asking for trouble and need to evolve to diversify their diet to properly outpace extinction.

exo-pla-net 5y ago
The plant kingdom is almost entirely mono-food-sourced. They almost all rely on the sun, which, pending a nuclear winter, might indeed become a scarce resource. Do plants deserve to go instinct?
- Fern_Blossom 5y ago
  You do realize plants are far more complex than that, right? I mean, there's water, nutrients in the soil and the importance of mycelium in the dirt. Most plants you can throw in a dark closest for like a week or two easy, then take them out and they'll come back to life. Don't forget, ground level plants in a forest or jungle barely get shit for sun. I'm a cheap bastard that buys "dying" clearance plants from Lowes and Home Depot, then bring them back to life. My dumb redneck green thumb has a lot more respect for plants. Shit, watch some wild bonsai collectors on youtube. They massacre small trees to bare wood, purposely put them in too small pots, under nourish them and the fuckers still grow. Plants are no where near as fragile as a koala and panda. Hell, there was an oak tree on my parents property that was struck by lighting some ten some odd times in a five year period (Florida). We cut it down to a 2 or so foot stump since it seemed too dangerous to keep up with all the damage. Fucker started brand new shoots and refused to accept death. After 10 years from cutting, it grew three solid trunks about 10 feet high or so. A bit taller than a house, never measured it.

vbezhenar 5y ago

I agree with you, nature is hostile to humans. I recently bought a house in a village and first day: I was bitten by a mite. There's danger of encephalitis, so I had to visit a hospital and get some injections to protect. No hospital? Few percents of chances to get ill and die. There are wolves in the forest. They're not generally dangerous to humans, unless you're doing stupid things or you're child, but they're dangerous enough and they'll kill dogs. Finding clean water is a challenge. Mosquito can turn your life into hell without modern repellents. But still I think that it's a worthwhile movement to bend a nature towards human and fill a missing pieces. Because despite all the dangers and inconveniences I just love being in nature compared to the city. Probably the technology and science is not here yet. But imagine that we develop ways to eradicate mosquitoes completely. Eradicate infected mites completely (issue with viruses and bacterias, not with mites, of course). Find a ways to generate clean energy (hardest thing is to generate heat in home, it requires lots of energy). And so on. My dream is to live like an elf in the forest, but without all the negative consequences. It's impossible or too costly atm, but I don't see it as impossible in principle.

chmod600 5y ago
Aren't mites tiny (like less than a mm)? How did you even know you were bitten?
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Sorry, I think it was tick. More specifically, Ixodidae tick. It has few mm size, but it gets much bigger when it drinks blood. It's easy to spot visually.

jimbokun 5y ago

South Park dramatization of this argument: https://southpark.cc.com/video-clips/ji7j1k/south-park-god-damn-stupid-ass-rainforest https://southpark.cc.com/video-clips/ji7j1k/south-park-god-d...

ASalazarMX 5y ago

> But our relationship is fundamentally with our technology, not with nature. We've developed a symbiotic relationship with technology. Nature is still a deadly Other. Lots of interesting viewpoints here, but i think this one's missing: We have a symbiotic relation with our technology, but we make the technology, there's room to adapt it to have a symbiotic (or at least sustainable) relationship with nature.