It Sounds Better
Words provide us with strategic ambiguity necessary to navigate the social environment
One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.
—Voltaire
Eric Hoffer, the great longshoreman philosopher, once remarked that in the United States, there is
…particularly among the educated, a romantic, worshipful attitude toward nature. Nature is thought to be pure, innocent, serene, health‐giving, the fountainhead of elevated thoughts and feelings. It is now a mark of intellectual distinction to run down man and extol nature. When some years ago I wrote an article in which I questioned nature's benevolence and suggested that the contest between man and nature has been the central drama of the universe I was rewarded with a shower of brickbats.
That was about fifty years ago, but things haven't changed much.
When people say they “love nature” they usually mean they like landscaped gardens and tame forests and mountain trails, not wild forest vegetation, desert, floods, epidemics or earthquakes.
When they say they “like animals” they usually mean that they like puppies, not rats or snakes, that is, they like animals that have been selected to hijack human bonding pathways.
In other words, when they say they love nature and animals, they usually mean nature and animals that have already been adapted to the man himself, tailored according to his wants and needs. (Much like when they say they like some exotic cuisine, but they actually eat some Western adaptation because they couldn't stand that cuisine in its original form).
“Nature” devoid of all the dangers that nature in its natural state brings.
“Nature” in which humanity is inscribed.
The experience of nature and animals of urban people is so narrowed by our adaptation to them that we tend to assume that "nature" is exhausted in what are really our own creations.
Perhaps we could, therefore, more appropriately say that what people actually love is not so much “nature” but their own creations, that is—culture.
And it also sounds better: it's more convenient to say “I love animals” than “I only love those cute little animals that are bred so that I could like them”.
Likewise, “I love nature” sounds better than “I love culture”. The latter sounds somewhat self-serving. You love what you have created for your own needs and preferences? Nothing noble about that!
If people could somehow communicate “directly,” without the mediating role of language, all of the mentioned would not be possible since ideas and concepts are not subject to same ambiguity as words are. Words provide people with sufficient strategic ambiguity that enable them to simultaneously convey to others what they selfishly want while leaving the impression that their wants are much more sublime than they really are.
This, I think, is an important function of language.
You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live—is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? (…)
In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein.
—F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil