Nature isn't your friend
The naturalistic fallacy and the appeal to nature combine into an ideological complex that opens the door to tragedy and exploitation
The story is six years old, but given the current climate (in Washington and elsewhere), it's worth retelling: in mid-2019, tabloids all over the English-speaking world were lamenting the death of 40-year-old British mom Katie Britton-Jordan, a victim of breast cancer. Diagnosed with the disease in 2016, Katie chose not to follow the treatment course recommended by Medicine. She decided to entrust her life to a vegan diet and a combo of "natural" therapies. According to the Australian newspaper The Sun:
She was advised that the best course of action was to remove the breast, followed by a course of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
Doctors said it was treatable, but without medical intervention she would die.
But after doing her own research, she decided to turn it down and take an alternative approach, adding that it was "the best option for me".
This "alternative approach" included, in addition to the vegan diet, highly expensive measures devoid of scientific backing, such as injections of mistletoe extract, turmeric, and the use of hyperbaric chambers. The estimated costs reached tens of thousands of pounds, and a crowdfunding system was set up to support the "treatment" (conventional therapy, if accepted, would be covered by the English public health system).
Posts on social media make it clear that Katie really wanted to heal and live. Mother of a two-year-old girl, she said she wanted to see her daughter grow up.
The original decision to deny science-based therapies and seek a "natural and holistic" cure made Katie a celebrity in the British tabloids in 2017. Newspapers such as Daily Mail and Mirror published glowing profiles, highlighting the decision's supposed "heroic" character.
Apple cider vinegar
Katie's case is far from unique. In 2015, 29-year-old Australian Jess Ainscough, who had attained some degree of celebrity as a blogger under the nickname “The Wellness Warrior,” died of cancer she had decided to treat by “natural” means three years earlier. Ainscough inspired a character in the recent “Apple Cider Vinegar” Netflix miniseries.
Jess even wrote an article for the Australian media, explaining and defending her decision to "politely refuse” surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation and begin “searching for natural cancer treatments", arguing that a “natural approach aims to treat the body as a whole. Nutrition, meditation and exercise working together to strengthen our immune systems so we are better able to fight disease - without any harmful side effects”.
Katie Britton-Jordan and Jess Ainscough were victims not only of cancer and quackery but of a cruel ideology that causes pain and unnecessary deaths.
And what ideology is that? It is something that unites the most cynical of capitalists — who hope to convince the “enlightened” middle class that, by paying through the nose for some nonsense labeled “organic,” all environmental sins, past, present, and future, will be atoned for — to the most sincere believers in genuinely alternative lifestyles.
It is a complex of ideas that includes the naturalistic fallacy (the notion that ethical decisions should be guided by the way things happen in nature), the fallacy of the appeal to nature (the idea that "natural" things are always better, healthier, safer); and the good old postmodern distrust of “great narratives,” which appears here in the form of a paranoid stance towards what scientists and experts linked to the “mainstream” (universities, independent government agencies, big companies) say.
Here also comes the observation made by Sir James George Frazer at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century that one of the intuitive rules of superstition is the "Law of Contagion" or "Law of Homeopathy": the emotional impression that everything that has contact with a substance "gets contaminated" by the properties (chemical, physical, moral) of said substance.
This is a powerful psychological effect, even today: most people, for example, tend to refuse to wear a shirt previously worn by a murderer, and many fear consuming products from plantations treated with insecticides or herbicides even after the food has been washed, boiled, cooked, etc.
Profit is quite natural
It is not difficult to find the ideological nexus that unites Katie Britton-Jordan's belief that chemotherapy "poisons the body" to the misleading advertisements that point out purported benefits of products proclaimed to be "GMO-free", or "detox diets". Politically, this "Naturalistic Complex" has an enormous versatility, finding staunch adherents both on the right and left. There are even naturalistic-entranced liberals that even seem inclined to forgive RFK Jr's anti-vax shenanigans just because he blurts out the approved fallacies and platitudes about “healthy” eating.
This happens because nature is wide enough for anyone to find in it examples to support, if one wants to embrace the naturalistic fallacy to its fullest, absolutely anything, from the most debasing forms of "meritocracy" (after all, isn't it "of the natural order" that the strong shall devour the weak?) To the most unbridled sexual freedom.
In turn, the contagion superstition's exacerbated reach caters both to the dietary taboos of ultraconservative religious groups AND to the new pseudoscientific dietary taboos of the New Age and the soi-disant "conscious consumption".
In a world where both ends of the left-right political spectrum feed fundamentally on fear, paranoia, and resentment, the terror of the "artificial" is just another rhetorical and psychological weapon. And from a marketing perspective, people with such fears represent just another niche to be exploited.
Nature, after all
The underlying problem of this Naturalist Complex, which cost the lives of Katie Britton-Jordan and Jess Ainscough (among many others) is the illusion that there is some kind of essential, striking, and irreconcilable difference between the products of nature and those of human action.
Nonsense: humans are animals that have evolved on Earth, as well as plants and bacteria. The products of humanity — pizzas, fishing rods, cities — are no “less natural” than a bee's honey, a spider's web, or a beaver's dam.
Natural and artificial are descriptive categories that, in and by themselves, do not distinguish essential characteristics, ethical values, political commitments, or therapeutic properties. If the consumption of certain ultra-processed foods can increase cancer risk, the consumption of certain foods, such as cassava, in its natural state — fully unprocessed — can cause almost instantaneous death.
Categorical error
This confusion between the merely descriptive (natural, artificial) and the essential (sinful, godly, nurturing, toxic) appears, for instance, in the article in which Jess Ainscough defines what she saw as her options: “The way I saw it I had two choices: I could rely on the slash, poison and burn method offered to me by the medical profession and become stuck in the 'cancer patient' category, or I could take responsibility for my illness and bring my body to optimum health so that it can heal itself.” And a little further:
“Our bodies are designed to heal themselves. It is really that simple. Our bodies don't want to die. The environment we subject them to and the food we feed them determines whether they will flourish or flounder.”
The distinction she saw (of food, environments, treatments) was between "natural" and "toxic". But these are not antonyms: there is no shortage of poisons, carcinogens, pathogens, parasites, and allergens in a pristine landscape untouched by human hands.
“Nature” isn't your friend. Nor your enemy. It just is.
"Natural" is not synonymous with good and safe, just as it does not necessarily mean bad and dangerous. Products, foods, and therapeutic systems should be evaluated on their own merits, not embraced or rejected because of a badge of origin.
It would be interesting to investigate the roots of this semantic network that dresses the word "natural" in a mantle of holiness, but it is urgent to recognize that it has been abused by advertising, promoted by ignorance, and exploited by charlatans.