Nature's Progress

Human beings have a pesky tendency to evade, avoid, and escape. We seek freedom at any cost but often have no idea what this holy grail will give us. We have an uneasy relationship with nature, especially our own. “In the beginning was nature,” writes Camille Paglia in her brilliant work, Sexual Personae (1990). “The background from which and against which our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature…Feminists, seeking to drive power relations out of sex, have set themselves against nature.”