Nature, law and order

Excuse me, mister, please take your pants off. And your shirt, too. Oh yes, and the underwear. No, I must insist. In the interest of law and order I must impress upon you the importance of the order of nature — and nature did not intend us to be clothed. If it did, we would have been born clothed. Like all furry creatures. And that goes for you too, auntie. If you don’t want any trouble with the law in the future, just stick to your birthday suit.

Because the law may make sure that we do not transgress “the order of nature”. The Supreme Court is, at the moment, deliberating on the definition of “the order of nature”, and their findings may drastically alter your lifestyle. It’s because a pack of concerned homophobes have challenged the Delhi high court’s 2009 judgment on Section 377 that decriminalises homosexuality — they insist that it is “unnatural” and, therefore, criminal. Section 377, an ancient law of the Indian Penal Code, deals with unnatural offences, and the concerned homophobes are worried that the high court didn’t go by the moth-eaten morality and made gay sex between consenting adults legal. But, cried the homophobes, the law states that voluntary carnal intercourse “against the order of nature” is a crime!
The Supreme Court is being admirably cautious, asking what exactly constitutes “unnatural” behaviour. “Test-tube babies, surrogate mothers — are they in the order of nature?” the court asked the petitioners. “In changing times can the meaning of the term (order of nature) remain what it was in 1860?”
No doubt this is a stimulating intellectual exercise and I greatly look forward to the court’s findings. However, I have problems of my own. The very idea that going against the order of nature may be a crime worries me. It would mean that we would have to not only discard our clothes, we would also have to shun medicines, stop wearing glasses, eat our food raw, reject the concept of money and embrace the lifestyle of the not-so-noble savage.
Flying high in the sky is unnatural, so we must ban airplanes. Talking to people out of earshot (horror of horrors, talking to people halfway across the world!) is unnatural, so telephones must go. And the Internet. And Facebook, of course. Nature certainly did not intend us to have social networking on the ether. Living high above the ground is highly unnatural, we must only live in caves and mud huts. Watching and hearing people who are not actually inside the little box in your living room is very unnatural too — outlaw television and cinema at once. Medical interventions and surgery are gravely against the order of nature. So is the binding of two individuals by a social contract called marriage.
The natural order demands that diabetics must not take insulin, asthmatics must not take inhalers, the shortsighted or cataract-ridden must not attempt to see more than nature intended, tumours must not be removed, the wonders of modern medicine must not be lauded but totally eliminated. Come to think of it, once we start criminalising going against the “order of nature”, we will also have a huge unemployment problem — doctors, engineers, administrators, lawyers, judges, bankers, garment manufacturers, builders, artists, actors, sound-recordists, filmmakers, medical professionals, practically everybody in civil society would be out of a job.
Civilisation is humanity’s attempt to challenge the order of nature. It is our effort to harness nature and introduce our own order that makes life easier, happier, more just. Nature’s laws are amoral. Nature can kill thousands in a tsunami, or hundreds in famines, or rob millions of their livelihoods in droughts and floods, with impunity. In the animal kingdom it is all about the survival of the fittest, about rapes and killings, the murder of innocents and the killing of the weak and infirm. The order of nature is what we need to be very afraid of. We certainly do not need to set our laws by it.
Especially if we are talking of sex. Remember how the female spider happily devours the male right after she has had sex with him? It’s the same with the female mantis — as soon as she is done, she swiftly turns round and rips off the head of the guy she is having sex with. Surely that is not the kind of sex acts our laws would encourage?
Law deals largely with ethics — nature does not. Law is normative, it tries to guide human action and control natural impulses. The order of nature has no such interest. It exists. It rages. It nurtures. It is devoid of any value judgment. Law and the order of nature do not share the same space.
“In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature’s everyday performances,” said John Stuart Mill, almost 150 years ago. Mixing what is right and the order of nature would confuse issues. “Either it is right that we should kill because nature kills; torture because nature tortures; ruin and devastate because nature does the like; or we ought not to consider at all what nature does, but what it is good to do.”
Ethics is an important component of the law, following the order of nature is not. Our Constitution guarantees freedoms that our laws try to uphold. The order of nature does not. The order of nature may or may not encourage our lives to be “nasty, brutish and short” as Thomas Hobbes puts it, but it does encourage us to forget morality and go for what works best for each of us. That is not the best way of building civil society.
So although I would be very interested in the intellectual discourse on what constitutes the order of nature, perhaps it is rather irrelevant to the discussion on Section 377. Or to any debate about manmade laws that attempt to make life happier, easier and more just for all.

The writer is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com