Looking out my window watching the birds fly, the children play, and the stock market collapse, I am reminded again of how far our society has distanced itself from nature, and has made true earth-based biological self-reliance the thing of memories and anthropology textbooks.

Our politicians are of no help.  Democrats are at least up front about standardizing and mandating our participation in the interwoven inter-dependencies that deprive us of real natural self-reliance and leave us vulnerable to suffering the effects of abstract calamities that happen halfway across the country; Republicans, on the other hand, sing an alluring song of self-reliance while in fact sewing us tightly into an even more intricate web of global dependency that places the fates of millions of retirement nest eggs at the mercy of the gamblings of ever fewer and increasingly unaccountable hands and leaves the livelihoods of Americans vulnerable to the catastrophic effects of the bad judgments of a privileged few halfway around the world.

But political soapboxes are neither my pleasure nor the purpose of this post, only a scene on which to comment along the route to my destination: the harmful physical, emotional and spiritual consequences that befall our seemingly deliberate renunciation of our biological natures.

A good teaching example came my way in a Jeff Jacoby column posted by another user, titled A World Without Children.

The sentence that really caught my eye and brought about in my mind an avalanche of causes and effects was this:

"The Sexual Revolution, by making sex readily available without marriage, removed what for many men had been a powerful motive to marry."

There is much truth - and undesirable consequence - impregnated in that sentence.

When a society deliberately and yet arbitrarily makes it difficult for people to meet emotional and biological needs, people are more likely to make pressured decisions and poorly thought choices in order to fulfill them.  Hungry people, for example, are more likely to steal, assault others, choose unhealthy foods, or skimp on food safety than are well fed people.

Now consider Jeff Jacoby's statement for a minute.  It recalls a time in history when American culture was dedicated to keeping both men and women in a chronic state of sexual starvation.  Men faced numerous artificial obstacles in obtaining it, and women were vigorously discouraged from finding (or admitting) any pleasure in it.  Worse, and hypocritically so, men were tacitly congratulated for beating the system; the women who handed these men their scoring successes were frowned upon as tramps.

The system rewarded just about everything except ethical behavior.

Today most people agree that to marry someone so you can have sex with that person is a short-sighted and foolish reason to marry.  Yet that is exactly what American society expected back then; marriage was, for many, less a statement of love and more a hard-won right of physical access for it own sake for men; for women, a means of economic support in a society that did not yet offer women many opportunities for relative self-sufficiency.

That such artificial pressure would lead to bad marriage choices and sentence many couples to life-long unhappiness should surprise no one.  Sex became not a beautiful form of intimacy, but instead something of an entitlement for husbands, and of unpleasant duty and obligation to wives.  Husbands were evaluated by many for their abilities more as providers rather than loving partners and companions; wives were evaluated by their competency as servants.

Rather than treating sex as the beautiful and sacred thing that we now pay lip platitudes to, we confined it so severely that the resulting marriages often were little more than culturally sanctioned prostitution in which women were possessions.

But what gets artificially suppressed in one of its human guises usually manifests itself in a different and less adequate form.

We remain a species that needs some form of touch and physical contact between us, so it is not surprising that societies that stifle and impede sexual contact, and even ordinary touch, make up for it in violence, both domestic and otherwise.  This unpleasant substitute kind of human contact is most prevalent - and accepted - in the warlike regions of the Middle East, where sex is suppressed more severely than it ever was in American culture. 

Forsake love, and war may fill the void.

Interestingly, this is one area where our society is taking some small steps back toward nature somewhat.  We are beginning to think in terms of accommodating our sexual natures instead of merely frustrating them.  We still have a long way to go, and with many other concerns than just this.

Pagan spirituality is nature-centered, and as such, considers it more physically, emotionally, and spiritually healthful to embrace our natures and to preserve,and to restore, to whatever degree possible in a person's place and time, our closer ties to nature.

I believe that the level of lifestyle luxury that we have come to take for granted is unsustainable in the long run.  The luxury of being able to travel tens or hundreds of miles on a moment's notice is likely to become a piece of history, even as many people have built their entire lifestyles upon the availability of that luxury.

But as long as we keep sight of our biological roots, the technological advances that made inevitable these approaching hard times will also be the bridge back to a more self-sufficient, natural way of life.

Keep sight of who and what we are, accept ourselves rather than fight and frustrate ourselves, and we may one day enjoy the best of both worlds: a more natural self-reliant way of life accompanied by a technological legacy to make that life as comfortable and enjoyable as ever.