The natural world isn’t mechanical and efficient – it’s elegant and alive, writes Mark Vernon – which is something we’d do well to remember in these doom-laden days

Reflecting on what is going wrong in our times has become a persistent pastime. Climate. Politics. Screens. Artificial intelligence. I imagine that these newsfeed staples evoke flickers of fear in you, not embers of hope. The planet is undoubtedly warming, as the character of international affairs is shifting. But the rush to foresee Armageddon in these signs-of-the-times readily becomes part of the problem. It leads people to grow trapped like the souls in Dante’s Inferno: part wracked by the past, part terrified of the future.

Automatically defaulting to doom scenarios is a kind of enclosure. It hinders consideration not only of solutions that might appear but, more profoundly, of the conditions of life that make for the opposite of disaster: flourishing, collaboration, soulfulness. Which is why there are individuals who – though fully aware of the threats we face – are calling for a focus on the brighter horizon. Their motivation is not wild optimism but practical realism.

Take the founder of the Soil Association, Eve Balfour. She realised that obsessing over the damage caused by industrialised farming – crop disease, the denudation of the landscape –was harmful to mental health. A better attitude was adopted by pioneers of organic methods. They studied the nature of healthy soils and balanced agriculture. There they found inspiration.

Moreover, that shift precipitated another – one that is overtly philosophical. Contemplating the good, while keeping an eye on the bad, “led, inevitably, to an awareness of wholeness and to a gradual understanding that all life is one,” Lady Balfour wrote.

The same realisation was recorded in Harmony, the 2010 book about living systems by the then Prince of Wales. This richly illustrated tome, full of Charles’s thoughts on farming and architecture, education and art, is not a manifesto but a vision. The subtitle is “A new way of looking at our world”. But really a renewed way of looking at the world is on offer from the “King of Sustainability”, to reference the title of a recent portrait of the monarch by the artist Michael Shellis.

Charles draws on philosophical perceptions that reach across millennia. He notes that insights from seemingly diverse traditions have something in common. They share an awareness of a sacred dimension in the natural world, discernible at scales from the atomic to the cosmic.

Plato is one advocate of this intuition, though don’t ask a professional philosopher to summarise it. They will likely explain that the Sage of Athens believed that this world is but a shadow compared to a higher realm of light. The King does a much better job in my view. “[Plato] held that there is an essential relationship between all of the multiplicity of life that buzzes and whirls around us and the unity of the entire universe that supports it.” Or to put it in a single phrase: there is beauty.

Full marks to the philosopher-king, for Charles knows that Plato was not an armchair muser in pursuit of abstractions, but an engaged human in search of resonance. Take the way in which the founder of the first Academy championed the practice of geometry. His reason was not because he thought students should be tested on Pythagoras’s theorem or Euclid’s axioms like a modern-day Secretary of State for Education. Rather, he knew that a feel for the balance of a circle or the symmetry of a triangle opens the eye of the soul.

Then can be detected the harmonies and patterns that are alive throughout the natural world. Exciting your mind by the beauty of a figure, and allowing your hand to love it by drawing it, prompts an initiation. With practice, your imagination will become more capable of resonating to the dynamics that elegantly shape all manner of things, from flowers and snowflakes, to galaxies and cells.

One feature of this kind of observation stands out: nature loathes straight lines. Charles has an example. If, say, a farmer digs a ditch running directly from one corner of a field to another, the careful cutting will soon be lost. The water will start to idle. Nature is generally inclined to manifest itself as elegant and meandering, not speedy and efficient. As William Blake put it: “Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.”

Idling, then, runs throughout nature, which is why idling fosters wellbeing in us. The patterns written into the grammar of living systems are the patterns that are good in humans, too. We are part of it.

Moreover, when meandering and elegance are permitted, problems are often solved. Think of a bowing and bending stream. Environmentalists have realised that such natural flow of water across a landscape eases flooding, soil erosion and the loss of species. To learn from nature is to learn how better to live. The practice even has a name: biomimicry.

That said, a question might be pressing in your mind. If “letting be” is so beneficial in the natural world, then why doesn’t it happen more often in the human realm? That takes us back to the King’s point about the sacred.

The modern mentality is not just a way of doing things, it is a worldview. And worldviews are like tinted glasses: red ones don’t allow you to see green. The predicament in which we find ourselves, therefore, including the preoccupation with disaster, is a product of failing to perceive the natural world in ways other than as a machine that we relate to by manipulating it, over-working it, and then hoping we can fix it.

But living systems are not machines. You can take a machine apart and put it back together again without damaging its functioning, whereas an organism does not respond well to being dissected. Machines are made of parts, whereas creatures are living wholes. Machines can be coordinated like robots on an assembly line, whereas nature needs to be treated as a unity. A machine can be turned off and on, whereas an organism either lives or dies.

That difference is respected when nature is treated as sacred.

Mark Vernon’s latest book is Awake!: William Blake and the Power of the Imagination (C Hurst & Co).

This article is from Idler #105.

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