The answer depends upon your particular life circumstances. At one stage in my life, when I worked at a job that began before daybreak, I would often rouse up before the clock-radio, out of my anxiety that I would oversleep. Now that I am retired from that job, I can enjoy letting my body's own internal "clock" wake me up.
Thinking about what wakes us up in the morning is an easy place to begin reflecting upon a complex question: Namely, what is natural? That sunrise certainly is natural, in contrast to that electronic clock that mimics the sun's 12-hour-average day. Our body's internal "clocks" are also natural -- although they can be thrown off their rhythms by our having stayed up late the night before, using artificially created electricity to run our man-made computers.
There is more at stake in that word "natural" than the matter of how we wake up. That is because in trying to understand ourselves, we try to discover some aspects of our human nature that have some connection to the world of Nature. Even as we declare some human actions to be right or wrong, we also describe some of those actions as being "natural" or "unnatural." We ask, "What is human nature?"
Over the past few decades, a number of scientists have presented depictions of human nature that have drawn upon the biologist Richard Dawkins' idea of "the selfish gene." As Dawkins now famously wrote:
"We are... robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules
known as genes."
However, there is something askew about Dawkins' characterization. He attributes more personality to genes ("selfish molecules") than he does to human beings. Whereas genes are able to guide outcomes, we are just robots.known as genes."
One of the conclusions Dawkins puts forward from his depiction of genes is that humans are fundamentally selfish in nature. As he wrote, "We are born selfish." It is here that the philosopher Mary Midgley stepped in to critique what she saw as being the crude simplifications resulting from selfish-gene rhetoric. Midgley admits the valuable point that genes that contribute to the reproductive and survival potential of a species are more likely preserved. But she points out that part of that process is genes' making us naturally mammals and social creatures. And so, one of our gene-related potentials is our ability to take care of other individuals. As Midgley puts it:
Such people would leave no descendants."
Midgley underscores our natural potential for offering care by spotlighting a parent's love for their child (even if that child does sometimes wake up the parent who wanted to sleep longer). Even though as an infant our earliest yearning was to be loved, love was built into our mammalian, social nature.
Midgley's worry is that "the crude metaphor" of "selfish gene" has been employed to promote "an ideology of everyday cynicism." She writes:
"To repeat -- officially, the doctrine of selfish genes does not mean
that individuals are motivated only by self-interest."
that individuals are motivated only by self-interest."
Our human lives and societies are complex integrations of the natural and the man-made. Valentine's Day is an artificial, societal construction. And yet, like those natural cycles of the sun, Valentine's Day's annual rhythm can wake us up again to the importance of being loving. Loving toward partners. Toward friends. And even by being courteous to the stranger we meet.
~ ~ ~
(Where do you see love at work?)
(The Dawkins quotations are from The Selfish Gene, © 1976, 1989, pp. 127 & 3.)
(The Midgley quotations are from her article "The Origins of Don Giovanni" in the magazine Philosophy Now, Winter 1999/2000, p. 32.)
