Читать книгу The Boulevards of Extinction - Andrew Benson Brown - Страница 13

Plurality of Cataclysms

That a higher being doesn’t exist—a far more dangerous scenario than its contrary. A god brings with its existence certainty of our end, an obligation to carry out its revealed prophecy, the assurance of a final resting place. Our armageddon, though, is restrained only by the limits of fanaticism’s response to randomness. It is not natural disasters we have to fear most, but the anxiety of causal connections these events induce, the post-traumatic stress arising from our modes of divine representation. It would be prudent of us, therefore, to take as an axiom the nonexistence of higher beings and from there infer the necessity of inventing them (to multiply Voltaire’s statement), extrapolating different possible manifestations in the minds of madmen and equating each creed with an exclusive god. Intelligent design has the same form as the description of intelligent design—and we will not discriminate between them. As a matter of plausibility we will restrict our imagination to what has been institutionalized. A run on the bank or a supermarket riot will not be initiated by fringe cults or bygone myths; the popular imagination grasps only at the pregiven and readily available. To estimate our range of ends, we need only take orthodox religious traditions and vary them slightly—the evolution of deranged charisma is only a hop away from spirituality’s present customs. The range of our beginnings, too, should be taken into account, since our final condition may closely resemble an initial one. As far as the content of our thought experiments in mass destruction, certain traditions will be more reasonable to draw on than others. The eastern religions are too benign, peaceful worldviews that direct all violence inwards—Buddhist monks only set themselves on fire, never others. Moving westward, polytheism is found to be another unlikely candidate for collective irrational dread, given its limited adherents and minimizing nature—its practice of placing a few on the altar to avoid a universal apocalypse. A heap of gods are more suited to our planetary persistence: they need something to sport with. Monotheism, by elimination, is the most credible aspirant to our downfall, and our surest guides to ascertaining God’s strategies of creation and destruction are his scribes and theologians. The tradeoff between impotence and malevolence is shored up with transcripted guarantees.

Prosaic Regression

Within flux there are always unnecessary constants. In every period and place one finds variations on the same things which one feels should never have been there, but are. It indicates the process for everything that recurs but shouldn’t, things for which there is no good reason or purpose. Across time the same types of objects stagnate, repeatedly playing little to no vital role in events. They constitute the refuse of every epoch. Behind these things, similar but never quite the same, lies a common force of irrelevance, mundaneness, vulgarity—an elan trivial. It is the rule of continuity in change, an essence of rubbish imminent in everything. The process of the original void, it flows through all the world’s temporal parts. In each stage of the world’s degeneracy, in any given society, it manifests its trash, slowly but surely piling up, imperceptibly rolling forward and unfolding its genealogy of decay. Against the current of existence is the current of nonexistence. Running opposite the stream of life, the stream of languishing pours from the other mouth of spacetime, part here, part there. The river of slime gurgles forth, decomposing every leaf blown onto its banks and rusting every city caught in its path.

Beginning in germs, passing through generations of protoplasm, the imprint of the germ is ever present down through the most advanced organisms—especially in the most advanced organisms. As life “advances,” its diverse inclinations conflict more and more across individual creatures, each of whom wants life for itself. Of the bifurcations of the trivial impetus in creatures, only its human highway has been wide enough to allow the full breadth of its waste. This original inertia each individual retains and uses to further personal contentment—listlessness and apathy.

Under it, life is means without an end. There is only a beginning, an impulsion that perpetuates itself through biology. Looking back, we can’t say it was all “for” something, but neither are we at liberty to look forward to our own futures. The impulse is an instinct towards deceleration, the future destined to be simply a constriction of the present state of affairs.

Among the most developed lines of evolution, those rare, highly structured organic systems with everything to lose, there is one that can choose to lose it.

Civilization: confluence of the streams of life and languishing, paragon and nadir of consciousness, spacetime’s most advanced manifestation and a microcosm of the universe’s red shift. In ascending periods—Vico’s Ages of Gods and Heroes—where organization is the rule of procession, the trivial impetus is latent, present but on the margins. But organization peaks in the Age of Men, at which point decomposition takes over and initiates a descending period, where the trivial impetus proceeds through division and strife. It splits up ever more, with life scattering in manifestations increasingly antagonistic, less and less complimentary. The discord within the civilized species goes on increasing in proportion as it extinguishes the lesser ones and confines their last descendants to zoos. The machine churns out pop art, expressing generic desires in found junk, consecrating the trivial impetus on the aesthetic level.

The conscious intellect: from its reawakening in the renaissance through its optimization in the enlightenment, to its numb sluggishness today, the sedated thoughts of twenty-first century man are tied together by life’s Lethe, trickling onward in ever-renewing deterioration, every contemplation fading into a moment’s amnesia.

The very freedom which allowed men to create and achieve will, when life has been made safe enough, sets in motion an automatism of the inconsequential: behaviors that begin as coping mechanisms for surplus leisure and gradually congeal into sloth until the last freedom—the freedom to move—is taken away. In a late civilization the evolution of the vegetable indicates the fundamental direction of life.

Towards the Age of Plants: starting off by feeding on others, people end by feeding on themselves. Desperate to stave off boredom, they flutter about through a haphazard and directionless kinesis, a hubbub of syncopated accents. Fatigue setting in, their actions decrescendo, stored up energy accumulating and converting into mass. Without the need to expend themselves obtaining food, the creatures bend towards the lampshade, consuming starch in order to produce the sunlight their curtains obstruct. Perfecting the method of growing without moving, their consciousness dims in proportion to dispelled locomotion, the habit of breathing all that distinguishes them from their furniture.

Our separation from the lower organisms is regrettable but not insurmountable. The path to man having been staked out by evolutionists, the path from him can be left to the priests. Gradually deemphasizing our traits in the order of our most sinful tendencies, starting with the spine. Flopping on our bellies, degraded to invertebrates, a species stripped of its pride is ready to be firmly rooted in the soil, then reduced to ashes—reunion of animal and vegetable inclinations. Science and religion are not so incompatible after all; perhaps God intended to enter the world only to smash man into nothing, leaving Creation to gravity, heat, and slime. The Father insinuates himself into planetary influence as the finality which nature forgot to incorporate into her original impulse. His good works, far from being evidenced everywhere, leave their mark only on paleontology.

The memory of humanity’s former verdure lingering in a few restless species, they make a last ditch attempt to reestablish freedom. The inquisitive, like ivy vines, inch their way up the fence towards the sun, snaking tendrils into the past to guide them; while the enraged, like Venus fly traps, close their lobes on the last remaining flies buzzing about. Climbers and insectivores, self-actualizers and revolutionaries—the last remnants of sensible, conscious life swaying in the wind.

Perfect Fit

Man no longer works at what isn’t already abbreviated. The cotton shirt rack packed to go, he throws his suitcase into a hot wash cycle, dries it on high, and slips it into his pocket. The button-ups will look cute on his abridged girlfriend. Anatomy and female liberation: two embellishments that make his Barbie doll the superior other half to his own reduced existence.

Revising the Combat Myth

A single god has no great rival to combat in the beginning; even snapping his fingers to turn on the light is an overexertion. A thought and it is done—no great challenge. This is why we were created, to have someone to fight. We are a compensation for the boredom of the first five days. Rigged struggle between a force of nature and the insects, God weighed the dice and loaded his boxing gloves. With the dual gifts of free will and the tree of knowledge, the Father invites us to become like him only to slap us down when we rise to the challenge. And by this act he saves us . . . the certainty of his domination over us is our shield against the very evil he coaxes us towards.

Hippocratic Growth

Bloodletting, by relieving hypertension, takes the iron out of type A personalities. Frontal lobotomies, the side effects of type B’s idleness. Balancing the humors by default through outdated medical practices, the last remaining set of generic traits gets to work reshaping the world to suit its disposition; in an attempt to stimulate cooperation, the human race begins competing in type C attributes: enhancing introversion with insulin shock therapy, refreshing depression with radiated water, optimizing perfectionism with cocaine, increasing submissiveness with the “rest cure.” Free of the economic burden of developing medical technology, reverting to established ineptitudes of experimentalism allows health to subject character to its rate of progress.

Fleeing Creation

Heaven cannot get away from the earth; it recedes and the earth ensnares it in gravity, throws up a mountain to penetrate it. Thus it is with God: he runs away, man catches him by the robe, pulls him back, embraces him. The Lord’s service is never complete; like a cow we must always be milking him for love. God would let us go to keep hold of falsehood, has tried to let us go for its sake, so precious to him is the autonomy of error as against our own antipathy toward it that he would surround himself in fantasies of uncreation as a way of burying the Original Mistake. The last time God escaped he tried to hide, to square himself away in a secret place. He was sought out for a long time before finally being found by a man who locked him in a basement.

“What is your name?” the man asked a straightjacketed God.

“Father.”

“No, surely you are beyond that.”

“Son.”

“Surely you are higher.”

“Holy Spirit.”

“Less material.”

God made no answer.

“Well?”

“I’ve told you everything.”

“Then tell me my name.”

Rummaging for a Nucleus

Politicians: Pinocchios with nose jobs.

Artists: angels with insect wings.

Entrepreneurs: Borgias who, in lieu of a strongman to dismember, display their daughters’ torsos on billboards.

***

Truth, soul, and morality are wrongly connected with these occupations in modern times. It is not just their antitheses that are necessary for success, but the substitution of some wholly other quality immune to the strictures these entities impose. Reaching into each other’s pockets, some for wallets, others for acceptance, all for pomp—charm’s hubris.

Homo Detentus

Compassion is not in itself a determinant of morality. The highlight of goodness, it is also evil’s comeliest mask, even its incubation. After saving the life of a woman who reminded him of the freshness and vigor of his gymnasium days, a polite uniformed gentleman hands out sausages to youngsters. “Step right this way boys and girls,” he says, smiling as he shepherds them toward the gas chambers. “You’ll find more sausages in there.” Then the SS officer goes home to play hide and seek with his children and write poems about the beauty of Auschwitz. A refined aesthetic sensibility, the wistfulness of departed youth . . . this is why he had to kill with kindness . . .

The boss who allows his worker a smoke break differs from this only in degree. He is only slightly the lesser monster, flogging the spirit in eight-hour shifts. Character that directs its development towards the toy aisle is the fatality of maturation. Nor do the employee’s vacations build his character—he spends his two weeks playing with the toys he purchased on discount. He needs to recuperate, to take a break from his “responsibility,” much like the concentration camp laborers who lay idling in their bunks at night, relieved just to have gotten through one more day. And if they do not get through the next at least their suffering will be at an end, spared from the indignity of dragging themselves along on an installment plan. Blessed by stockholders, profanation of caseworkers, Working Man must be sacrificed at every moment but never killed. Holocaust of the incombustible, he is a burning offering with firepoof flesh, a Shoah showoff. Placated with political rights in domestic life, he steps in the voting booth once every four years to exercise his multiple-choice license, rapturously pressing buttons. The death that should have swept him away in the cradle is delayed for the better part of a century by the grace of Father Time, who loaned him a badge to clock in and out. Withheld by society for his value to it but without value in himself, the employee is existence’s detainee.

Obliged to mend his vest and resist union encroachment, Working Man makes the best of his situation, recovering his tradition by hanging pictures of chimney sweeps on his wall. But joining the martyrs of the industrial revolution means not allowing the manager any final victory. Turning to ask for a raise, bee meets boss face to face and, showing his stinger, is slapped away. With the threat of despair and meaninglessness hovering over him, staved off only by morale booster circles and company cheers, Working Man realizes that connecting with a tradition is only half the restoration. Recovery from a vocation can never be complete; time is swept away with strokes of the broom, talent wasted on price checking. So, fearing for what life remains he escapes, contriving a machinery mishap and starting a family with the settlement money, reminding his grandchildren that without the felix culpa of accident insurance they wouldn’t be where they are.

Intermediaries

Between Chaos and Earth, between Earth and Hades, Erebus reigns: caretaker of the middle depths. His province is Tartarus, the relative hell that comes after death and before afterlife. Spatially the lowest, as far beneath Hades as the earth is distant from the stars, Erebus is temporally intermediate. Even to us, the middle-beings of creation, he is so: born of the primeval void and arriving prior to us, he lies in wait beyond our mortal days to punish us before sending us off to a vague netherworld. Both place and deity, object and subject, he hovers in the background of Greek mythology, barely mentioned by the ancients. There is nowhere to situate him, falling as he does between the cracks of categories. Most bards only mention the metaphysical extremes of Being: its vitality in an Aphrodite or its shapelessness in Chaos. Erebus is not suitable for allegorizing. His existence is the confusion of a shepherd who, ardent to poeticize his itinerant poverty, saw the Muses in the faces of his sheep and carved a laurel staff from a tree.

Might we today find our place in Erebus’s example? We too do not fit into a cosmogony; we surpass every explanation and fall short of every aspiration, both more than our gods and less than our dreams. Perhaps, like him, we can only make sense of ourselves in a transitional state, one that for us involves inhabiting the relative extremes in our imagination: the spaces before the earth, the period after the fall—proceeding as if these were our natural domains.

Eternity of Mondays

How to cope if every day were a Monday, no weekend or paycheck in sight? Sitting at the beginning of the universe with their backs to the window, lacking rest to splurge, the busy compress a month into an hour, letting off steam by shoveling coal. Shouldered in business, the clerk writes two desperate memos to every secretary—a plea and a command; editors overschedule deadlines to default by choice. Breathing agenda: luncheon meetings, water cooler meetings, toilet stall meetings. The copier sabotaged, the programmer turns to paper, ink, and stapler for bulletin board crimes—his famous typing style masked by his cursive, mystery of the cubicles.

With partnerships formed, contracts drawn up, updates installed, comes the rush-hour revelation: that nothing was accomplished. When idle summers disappear more work gets done—and becomes pointless. The reality of labor is stripped away with the days of rest. Without laziness to lull them into entitlement and squander their achievements, the assiduous begin to understand their busyness. The weekend sets life aside for work; only when work becomes total is life again appreciated. Beach photos and corporate awards are the wisteria of wilted potential.

A Geological Survey

Cosmopolitan man, when he travels into the country, is always looking up into the sky and marveling. But seldom does he look at the ground and wonder at its hidden layers. The stars are bright and distant, safer to contemplate than the opaque mystery beneath our feet. It takes a cataclysmic event to draw attention to our place in Earth’s history. A river dries up and shrivels a town, a city is consumed by mass wasting or falls through a crevice—these things demonstrate us to be only the most recent sedimentary strata.

But we have yet to glean from nature’s hyperboles anything other than scientific theories and tourist attractions—hypotheses and hyperborean gawks of a summertime people. If we paved our highways with Precambrian layers of rock, we may be able to fool archeologists of a later age into thinking our strata of collapsed overpasses spanned a supereon, instead of representing the brief cross section of civilization it does—rush hour pileup of road rage and intoxication, the slow-motion perception before the sediment deposition. More likely, though, our layer of societies will be eroded into a hiatus of geologic time, leaving only an unconformity comprising igneous prehistory and a metamorphic future.

Approaches to Misanthropy

A certain amount of silliness is indispensable to affirming life while defying its guidelines. The silly person resists the reverences of social engagement with an extravagant cheerfulness, a spontaneous misanthropy, a sardonicism too engaged to be resentful. With the comedian domesticated in the world of entertainment (the place everyone goes after clocking out from life), the silly person—a comedian who has not been housetrained, a jester without a legitimate outlet thrown into the world of the everyday—threatens the order of things by conflating life with entertainment.

Others do not forgive the lack of solemnity for customs that silliness implies, its inference that to disregard the rules of society is to disregard “the social animal” as a whole. Above all they resent the silly person’s lack of bitterness, the blithe approach to his dismissiveness. Not in a position to accuse the silly person of cynicism, they take revenge on him by withdrawing their respect, even trying to persuade him that simply by being silly, by lacking sufficient respect for the world, the silly person therefore lacks self-respect. The variety of mistreatment that silliness invites throughout the stages of life, from adolescent bullying to denunciations of unprofessionalism, is all aimed at encouraging the silly person to believe in his own self-denigration.

Different in behavior and mood, but not fundamental attitude, is the curmudgeon. The curmudgeon protects himself from others by being overly serious, but at the cost of affirming nothing. His is a noble misanthropy. Dignified, responsible, dependable, it is a misanthropy that refuses to spurn the beneficial effects of pride. Ripened by reclusiveness, refusing to let the crowd eat away at him, the curmudgeon is in the end consumed by his own vanity, fattened on the very qualities he most despises in his fellow men and served up with hibachi-style slapstick.

The affinity of silliness and curmudgeonry goes unrecognized. Observers are surprised to see them getting together for drinks; they ridicule the two sitting there, the one catching his laughter in his cups, the other watching his ice melt all night. No one would expect them to complement one another so well, each offering the other just what he needs to flourish. Silliness cures curmudgeonry of solitude, while curmudgeonry treats silliness with respect. Silliness has a free ride home, while curmudgeonry has more entertaining company than the radio. In the end they are the same person, the silly young man and the old curmudgeon defeated by the world. In anticipation and memorandum, they raise their drinks and toast to misanthropy’s principal coping skill—drinking.

How do silliness and curmudgeonry meet? In middle age. Impatient of sobering up enough to drive home, a drowsy silliness takes the bus and finds the only available seat sticky with dried soda. Overriding his desire to close his eyes, he stands all the way home. This is the awakening of his dignity, of his need for segregation from all sitters front and back. From now on there would not be enough common humanity to tie him to the bus stop.

Zeitgeist Mimesis

When the spirit of an age is corrupt, one’s only option is to embody the memory of a great one—to be an old soul. But then, men do this in great ages as well; it is only the attention of their contemporaries that motivates them to go beyond the past. The oldest souls are freshest, but when eyes are closed to tradition they stagnate in bygone glories, transmitting what goes ignored. In both style and content they are relegated to the necessary but invisible status of cultural reproducers.

The Age of the Old Souls extends even through the twentieth century. “Antiquity” now includes any cultural artifact older than six months—mass consumerism has so sped up the maturation process of society’s products that they become ancient while still in the limelight.

The Cowboy and the Matador

Approaching their target, one branded while the other waved his cape. When the dust settled the matador was tender, the cowboy was tourniqueted, and the bull was nowhere to be seen. After coming home each claimed victory—this culture war propaganda was the most success they could have hoped to accomplish. When two traditions lay hands on a common object their practices rip it in half, like contending mothers without a Solomon.

Conceding to Truisms

“People are all different.”—Yes, in three ways: they are bats, peacocks, or falcons. Some have no eyes, others appear to have a thousand, and a few have two good ones.

“We must respect each other’s differences.”—Yes, and we do . . . after they are branded.

Vanity, Urbanity

Cosmopolitanism is exclusive. It leaves out the land, even geography itself. With the world contained in every major city, the sphere shrinks to a series of points. The City: coalition of egotists, fallen angels working together towards private ends. Always wanting more, each ends up with nothing. Every metropolis is a conspiracy of Nonbeing, and cosmopolitan man, as the most cultured beneficiary of this aggregate of toil and whims, is its prophet.

What if the pluralism of our age could be condensed into a single individual embodying all of our progressive values and directions? What would this representative man be like, this distiller of many essences? Would we finally have a mediator to unite us?

Philanthropic in desire, so is the Cosmopolitan in belief. Ashamed not to have an opinion, to be ignorant of any possibly relevant question, he goes beyond his knowledge of the world to persuade himself of beliefs regarding everyone’s place within it. That the pluralist is an inept Sherlock regarding many clues to his environment is no prevention of it from conforming perfectly to his theories of motive. Releasing his suspects before questioning with a shower of golden doxologies, he turns away from any potentially conflicting truths; if pointed out he forms an alibi from events far flung in place and time—bringing knowledge into the pluricentric realm. The important thing is to construct beliefs in conformity with his benevolence—to make himself into a solar system of unverified ideas. His ideal image is a maximal-opinionated self, an individual with all the most relevant beliefs possible. For every question put, every new choice and topic presented to him, every new hope raised, there is a state of mind to correspond to it. His states follow his minefield of wishes and justify any behavior in others, while confining his own to the caricature tropes of violin-scratching and choking on snuff. On every issue he is a multithinker, filling a high-minded view into every shoe put in front of him, denouncing the naysayers—all the while not renouncing the absent beliefs that would fit a behavior just as well, remaining concurrently inclined towards all of them. The thread between convictions and obligations becomes tangled into a knot as every stumpy-fingered Boy Scout dreams of being an Alexander with a pocket knife. So does the skeptic—hushed name of the pluralist—half-heartedly yield to all erratic dispositions, thrusting desires into situations to posit as principles, forming a bumper carousel of dogmas, an inquisition of concussive hugs. He keeps his ears raised to the media, listens to small talk for the first chance of infiltrating a conversation: an opinion is his means of espousing the good of all—himself among them. “For the sake of confidence,” he tells himself, ordering his life so that all his acts are public works. When human possibilities are woven into an infrastructure every project falls into disrepair.

The Cosmopolitan is both the linguist of Babel and its chief architect, making his rounds among the divergent tongues, correcting misunderstandings, forging cooperation. Absorbing all differences into himself, he makes his personhood a site of conflicting views and hostile lifestyles, and by filling himself up with “humanity”—chaos of irresolvable components—negates himself. The cosmopolitan mind ambles from downtown through Chinatown in an unblinking blur. The juxtaposition is so glaring he doesn’t realize the mist of discord rising through the vents. The mixing of restaurant-cultures leaves out the obvious. He is lost in a surface of subtlety, distinguishing flavors and staring into his swirling wine glass for proof of quality. Dichotomy—that sense of incompatibility which can only be properly grasped by the country gentleman—is lost in favor of trade name variety. Under the monopoly of difference, deviation bears the same manner everywhere.

Reverence for a Nice Story

The most celebrated lie of our age is that we can all be birds of many feathers. This Huma bird that is all birds, this mythological Persian tale, can only be perpetuated by flying unseen high above the earth. When it alights the bird of paradise will breed hysteria. The tendency to flock towards resemblance cannot be overcome naturally; through the ornithologist’s binoculars an attraction of opposites is a confused jumble, making classification impossible until the muddle sorts itself into a hierarchy. But by then the ornithologist would not be interested in taxonomy so much as entertainment, tossing popcorn kernels into his mouth as the winged battle over seeds ensues.

The Way of Many Peoples

First, an open society stops deriving Ought from Is. Soon enough, it has only Is. Finally, it becomes Was.

If there are many truths, there must be only one Falsehood. But when Truth reigns, there is no limit to the number of falsehoods that are tolerated.

The Househusband

A man apart, the Househusband’s sole outlet for his testosterone is to vacuum again. He has finally succeeded where the great conquerors, builders, and scientists failed—he has mastered his environment. But with the blinds closed he has no one to brag to of his domination.

Woman’s condition is a choice of entrapments. But for man the luxury of choice is reserved only for the most courageous: to be a breadmaker by birth and not a breadwinner by trade—not to choose his path, but to realize his destiny.

He stands in proud silence for the returning Businesswife to notice, but she only kicks off her pumps and asks about dinner. As he applies the nail polish remover, he confesses that dinner didn’t go as planned. He had felt sorry for the animal: it just wasn’t wild enough. He tried to set it free, but it just stood there at the door not knowing how to cope, and when he tried to slaughter it out of pity he made a mess of things. There was nothing to salvage from his sympathy.

He pauses, waiting for her to notice. Before he’s toweled off her feet, she kicks away his hands and trickles nail polish remover across the rug on her way to retrieve a microwave dinner from the freezer. She only ever says something when she sees dirt.

She doesn’t give him anything that night. In his frustration, he wonders whether he coiled up the vacuum cord clockwise or counterclockwise. Being in agreement with synchronized time would give him solace. It would assure his place within the framework of civilization. But being uncertain, he weeps. Maybe he was all those things the other men in the neighborhood called him, after all. A woman. A fag. A freak beyond the bounds of nature. A househusband.

Should he, like Oedipus, believe he can alter his fate? Should he peruse the employment section?

The next morning he opens a newspaper to the job listings and finds an ad for . . . a maid service.

***

First moral: Mundane things are precious to all but the worldly.

Second moral: A man who flouts tradition to enter a woman’s world is more than a man, but still less than a woman.

Third moral: Glory and truth have lost their feminine appeal: a woman enters a man’s world today only to pay the bills men can’t. Boudicca arises to pass out her business card among the Romans; Hildegard chants pop songs and writes volumes about her inspirational experiences.

Fourth moral: Role reversals are applauded from the conventional positions: actor, misfit, liberal.

Fifth moral: For every door marriage closes, it breaks a window.

The Known World

The “hyper-rationalists”: working only towards what is certain, they sit in a room, pay their insurance bill with their welfare check, and wait for the daily mail. A force they cannot see provides them with guarantees contingent on legible prayers. In crises where their petitions sit undelivered with the flag up, they don’t panic—they call their mothers and ask for advice.

Children’s letter to the Postmaster General: “Dear Sir, why is it that your blue angels rest on the Sabbath but my daddy has to work a cash register?”

Playing Corvinus

With wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses that engulfed his face, the idol wandered among his subjects in disguise, noting their habits, memorizing their mannerisms, preparing for his next big role. Since he always portrayed someone average, it made sense that he should impersonate averageness itself. Whenever he saw an interaction that seemed inauthentic, he would intervene, dispensing justice to the bad actors of life. If someone mispronounced a line when speaking to him, he would make them repeat it. If spoken with an inappropriate amount of emotion, he would start insulting them to extort the right delivery. If he witnessed a fight and saw little blood, he would step in to choreograph it and send a bystander to the store for corn syrup.

Occasionally the idol would see someone performing a skill adeptly. Here, too, he slapped down a sense of evenhandedness. If a construction worker was building a house with too much precision, bricks had to be laid with gaps, timbers mismeasured, windows made slightly angular. The idol would then instill in him alcoholism or blindness, some character trait that made the construction worker sympathetic to his fellow men. If the idol’s waiter memorized his drink order without writing it down he would claim it was wrong, charging the waiter with anterograde amnesia after drinking the tapwater of Lethe—a movieworthy condition. If a firefighter rescued an entire family, the idol would throw one of the children back to retrieve the dog. This was a firefighter who inspired heroism in those he saved. It was the idol’s task to see that ordinary people had dramatic stories about their ordinary abilities. An unrelatable life is an unremembered life.

Glory Days

The movie star who jots daily thoughts in his Fame Diary . . . from dead end job to megalomania to painkillers to long weekends in the asylum . . . would he blame it all, in the end, on the writing process? If only he had never reflected on his swank, he mumbles in a pharmacological haze to the psychiatrist . . .

The saddest cases are the celebrities without a straitjacket to restrain their dramatizations. The famous never achieve serenity, even in death: although their influence may cease the gossip carries on. Their public image is exposed everywhere, flaunted by peddlers, critiqued by pundits. Perverse details are brought to light; interpretations abound among scholars even as rumors become facts in the eyes of the multitude. The ghosts of the famous are the most tormented of spiritual beings: they can’t go on talk shows to set the record straight or give biographers the birds-eye perspective. The other side of the story remains off limits to the living.

The Way to Perfection

Worse than dismissive criticism is fulsome praise. The former, at least, might be true. Or at least helpful.

Oneness of Being

Greatness? People on television.

Deposing Recognition, the bastard Fame is coronated from an obscure abstraction into the sensation of personhood.

In past times the common people had no first-hand impression of the regality of greatness; the form of elevated minds was beyond conception. The scandal of Galileo was the immateriality of the celestial navigator. The name was known but not the flesh. Then the photograph invented the household face, the phonograph the voice in the air. With the movie camera, Edison brought mouth to mug and invented the celebrity: embodiment of the new greatness, a light bulb that brightens and shortens its filament life with each new perceptual leap in technology.

***

“Fame—its ideal type,” says the professor, “is a natural outgrowth of sociability based on the unequal distribution of merit. In this sense the desire for it is instinctual, evolutionary, and functional. Widespread praise is a result of fulfilling one’s potential and meeting a shared need in a way that few others can.”

“Thank you for clearing that up for us, professor. Please continue.”

“But what is fame, metaphysically?” he asks, pausing to tuck in his beard. “It is for one’s body to transcend itself and become an object in the consciousness of everyone, to usurp people’s thoughts and direct them outward, from self to other.”

“Excellent! Where would we be without your rigor, doctor? Oh wait, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to presume. You are a credentialed philosopher, aren’t you?”

“Uhh . . .”

“What a silly question, of course you are—you have a job! Anyway, the question that’s really on my mind is, what is this obsession for fame that has ballooned into the mania of our age?”

“Elementary, my boy, elementary.” He pauses to blow pipe smoke in the boy’s face. “It is a desire for every person to want to become an object in the consciousness of others. A society of monads, where substances are reduced to appearances, each striving to make itself into ‘the one true appearance,’ to dominate all of mental space and render everything else a series of modes. For a person who rockets to fame, it is as if the universe of Leibniz suddenly becomes that of an empirical Spinoza. Monadology becomes a material monism, where the persistence of God’s existence—that is, the existence of the famous person—is dependent on the continual observation of all the little modes.”

“This is all very confusing. But if you keep going on like this I might understand something.”

“Naturally. But to continue . . . democracy, you see, in creating the equal opportunity for everyone to be an object unto others, causes the desire for it to run rampant in each person, while simultaneously making the possibility that any one person will actually become so miniscule. Such a person can increase the chance of discovery by forming a standardized personality, that is, a person fulfilling the criteria of averageness. If such a person is born average, then they are all the more likely to want to generalize themselves, and all the more likely to succeed—having been born with commonly shared traits, they think it natural to sweep themselves outward into the minds of others and popular culture at large, to standardize themselves into a universal superego lording over the psyches of all. A success story is nothing but a gloss of accident. It is a tale for the limp and lame, an inspiration to the hopeless. It pushes down the top to provoke the dream that the cornerstone can be a floating parapet. In practice everyone is made average, but in ambition no one is a brick in the wall. These two conditions, though contradictory, sit in the democratic mind side by side.”

“I get it! You’re talking about reality television.”

“Well . . .”

“Does it really make viewers stupid like everyone says?”

“Not quite. It creates the hope that, by being superior in averageness, they are worthy of their obsession: to be worshipped.”

“I see. That’s good it doesn’t make them stupid. Say, what do you think are the mental and emotional implications of all this? But try and hurry it up. Dancing with the Chefs comes on at eight.”

“It is a fact of human psychology that one can only emotionally handle knowing a relatively small group of people intimately. Sympathy can only be dispensed within a close circle. Could not, then, assuming intimacy is mutual, the reverse be true—that one can only handle being known among a relatively small group of people? It would seem that the mind is radically unequipped to deal with the consequences of being at the focal point of widespread attention disseminated through modern technology. Of having one’s image projected around the world, talked about by millions, thought about constantly, inhabiting the mass cultural consciousness. To not know anything about people, to know merely that they know you, that your every behavior is a subject of their curiosity and amusement, can be overwhelming. Megalomania, in the form of the development of manifold personality disorders, is the common upshot. Celebrities often substitute their intimate personal relationships for their fan collective. In a sweeping philanthropic gesture, they bestow their image of themselves to the world and shut themselves away to spare past contacts the disagreeable impulses they always wanted to unleash upon them. The result is either to retreat into their mansions in Sunset Boulevard-style, or to turn one’s network of personal associations into a mutual support group composed solely of other famous people . . .”

“Hey, wouldn’t that be great?” the boy sighs. “My friends are so normal, so . . . boring.”

“ . . . and it is the people who most crave this fame whose breakdown is most absolute, who become imbalanced—or rather, more imbalanced—when their coveted object does not bring them the happiness and contentment they expected it to. They find that the adoration they sought is both conditional and continual: their every gesture is subject to constant scrutiny. Anything unconventional or eccentric is immediately exploited. Fame genericizes the person beyond the bounds of realism (he must be able to be encompassed by the ego of every person, and therefore must be relatable to all), to an extent that the personality cannot handle: to be normal in every conceivable way, to be ‘perfectly normal,’ in the sense of being the embodiment of all standardized characteristics.”

“How does somebody become like that? Good enough to be famous?”

“For a person of real potential these characteristics are no mean feat to attain—it is as difficult to suppress ability as to cultivate it. To become famous, one must incubate qualities that are the antithesis of Castiglione’s courtier. Where the courtier has vast cultural knowledge, the celebrity is oblivious to all but his ego. Where the courtier has wit, the celebrity flaps platitudes with a silver-plated tongue. Where the courtier has military prowess, the celebrity is ready to get in a drunken bar fight to defend the honor of his one-night stand. Where the courtier is proficient in several musical instruments, the celebrity once held a violin while a recording played in the background. If the courtier was the model Renaissance man, today’s model figure is the peasant suddenly granted a noble title on the condition that he don a jester’s jingly hood and motley speedo—left out is the critical function of the jester, the divine right of the nobility, and the peasant’s stock of useful everyday knowledge. The result is a figure of charm rooted in a useless beauty devoid of any classically sublime aesthetic.”

The boy looks at his watch. A quarter to eight. He tiptoes out of the room. The professor doesn’t notice. Gesticulating wildly, he continues:

“And then, after the triumph has faded and the weight of routine threatens total breakdown, comes the negative epiphany: that fame is not about adoration, but envy—though not at first of the sort you imagined. For it is not your achievements they are envious of (there are none), nor you (you have no talent). It is, rather, your fame itself they envy (or rather, the fame momentarily descending to inhabit you), and the effect of your fame. They imagine your fame soothes you to sleep at night, while it in truth it has become an unending torment to you. Secondarily, they envy your wealth, which they imagine brings you pleasure, but which at best is an inadequate consolation. And if this unlikely realization comes to you, it may be followed by this rare pearl: that there is no ‘long view.’ Fame in our age involves a contraction of time, both subjectively—in the Warholian fifteen minute sense—and historically: out of unworthiness, your actions are inscribed in no annals, rest in no cultural memory. So when Silenus says that the best thing for mankind was not to have been born, we could perhaps amend his carpe mortem admonition as the next-best alternative: ‘to be forgotten soon!’ And in fact, Silenus’s statements of ought are facts for the celebritas species: the people of the present forget you soon, and for the people of the future it is, for all practical purposes, as if you never existed at all.”

World as Swamp Bog

Schlegel’s “Postulate of Vulgarity” is not just a lens for historians to view the past, but a lens cap for society to obstruct even present sublimity. All that is lofty, grand, and noble, that appeals to the cerebral sensibility or is in any way genuinely great, evoking an awe beyond measure, a sense of wondrous mystery surrounding the origins of its manifestations . . . is too extraordinary to notice. Billboards being the cardinal model of communication for a gridlocked population, the infinite becoming of poetry takes on the limits of the prose caption’s word count cut-off in the margins of the audiovisual feast.

Beauty finds itself twisted, extended, reduced to things it had never formerly consented to participate in: paintings of charming rustic huts, celebrity photos doctored for weight loss, or in the case of the really vulgar. . .a Strauss symphony. Even the dainty is trampled underfoot.

The Apeirokaliac: one who has never been surprised by the beautiful is galvanized by shock of the coarse. Rather than being transported by the wonder resulting from the experience of novelty, the Vulgarian feels only titillation. Often afterwards, over an appetizer, it is mistaken for wonder, and in the retelling it stinks of garlic and onion flavoring.

A discerning mind does not stop at merely spotting bad taste; he feels it his duty to condemn it as well. An ethical overlaying onto the aesthetic dimension, bad taste reinscribes as a species of morality what, for our age, has remained an autonomous sphere distinct from it.

Champion of erratic locomotion, the Vulgarian turns banalities into anthems. Communers with the sublime having isolated themselves in their attics to concentrate and mope, the Vulgarian becomes by default the last patriot willing to carol his bawdy allegiances in the street. The abstract is subsumed under the mundane, to the libido’s mode of knowing, the sensus communis of the Roman holiday. Moving in the opposite direction of Abelard, he intends to be a sensualist and becomes thereby a nominalist—universals are matter for his tongue, which dies gradually from increasing numbness. In the end a quiet impotence results. There is no Historia Calamitatum, no hindered achievement—the Vulgarian’s life is the story of a lust affair with himself not worth relating. Not because he is totally naïve, but exactly because, in admitting his defects in the way of innocence, he continues to walk the path. There is often some degree of monastic reflection in the Vulgarian’s life—his vulgarity is not simply physical, but the animalization of the spirit. Metaphysics, too, is the province of a particular being. We are disgusted by his final confession: he just couldn’t help himself.

Vulgarity: all that emerges out of the rectum which lacks substance. If the sublime is a mother-of-pearl cloud, the vulgar is a puff of flatulence. The fart is proof that aesthetics can ascend beyond itself and develop ethical connotations. Art cannot convince the nose of the legitimacy of art’s sake—its kingdom is the reptilian brain. The gas-passer’s stink gives off an aura of coarseness, a bubble of vacant space visualizing his lack of ingenuity—with a match, pyrotechnics could have redeemed the incivility of not excusing himself.

Suburblimity

Confronted by an infinite suburban landscape which we can imagine imperfectly only with the help of an aerial photograph and partially grasp with our intellect only through maps and blueprints, we shudder not just from the mere beholding of it but also from the consequences of its existence—terror over tasteless uniformity of living space mixed with queasiness of exhaust fumes and shouting children. We witness nature laid waste at our own hands: not bothering to refer it to our intellectual capacities, we vanquish it out of spite that its total conceptualization is beyond us; it melts away against the power of machines even as our lethargy fails to stir itself and gloat. It is a destruction we accomplished out of ignorance, experiencing the sublime only as an after-effect of negligence. The Sublime: a realization that setting no limits on ourselves is our fatal limitation, a feeling that presses upon us and does not allow our detachment—a jackhammer setting off a migraine, so relentless that skull and street become indistinguishable. Antithesis of Friedrich’s paintings in which we put ourselves in the shoes of subjects observing the sublime from behind, we instead find ourselves standing below a sea of smog, bending over and holding a mirror to our face, too apprehensive to crane our necks upward.

The man who lassos the moon thinks only of harnessing lunar energy for his midnight paddleboat ride, contemplating it for the sake of itself only as it crashes into his reservoir. As he spends all his remaining thoughts pedaling for his life, the passenger he was so eager to impress finds herself lamenting her date’s moral corruption and wanting only the view they once had. But the sky will not be whole again, and against our denials of debasement the forces of nature are almighty. Mother’s laws are not our own, but higher than us, falling upon the world and crushing our audacious autonomy.

Ward of the Flies

Evil is easy. Only the first murder—obeying the command to pull the trigger—is hard. After that desensitization occurs rapidly; the will acquiesces, even justifies its acts and delights in cruelty’s conformity. The Milgram subjects, profoundly pained to administer fatal voltage, become eager Nazi soldiers—the singular refusal, the “good man” despite circumstance, is quickly dealt with. Invested with authority from the beginning rather than obedient to it, initial pangs of conscience are blocked by chemical surges of sadism—Zimbardo’s Abu Ghraib experiments. The brutality among children lost in nature is shamed by the amusements of commoners in imaginary status roles with real props. And after irreparable crimes of civilization are perpetuated from fictions, we go home to the lie of “the ordinary.”

Where is the moment of innocence here? Before the first murder? But sin was always within us, presupposed, and after manifesting itself prompts no reflection—never innocent, neither is guilt admitted. Pure evil is unknowing—Death in The Seventh Seal—and its mortal instrument the antithesis of Antonius Block. A bureaucrat returning from a long campaign in the filing cabinets finds a plague of messiness spread over the land and takes up extreme measures to cure it. The need for justification—the attempt not to explain, but explain away—is fully realized in duty, abyss of the “why.”

For some, duty isn’t enough; they overlay sadism and alcoholism to enhance the demands of expectation: the mind exempts itself from pain via pleasure as the body records all the suffering inflicted on others. In the end the torturer becomes alienated from his consciousness and unable to weather the physical ailments cruelty has imposed on him. The hybrid constitution of the torturer breaks down on both sides: ensnared in a libertine finitude, the will overasserted, sensuality and pride are denied through exhaustion.

After the self, duty is all one has left; by the merciful power of grace, subjectivity is judged in accordance with the law and given the strength to keep going forward, an empty shell injected with larger purpose. The effort to clothe duty only consolidates its solitude—it does not permit a rivalry of motives, above all the temptation to kindness. Whereas selfishness only discounts the significance of others, duty excludes none: all, including oneself, have importance only insofar as they submit to the rule. Matter and spirit alike are surrendered as tools of obedience.

Marketing Stickers

“Child-friendly”: a label containing forgotten meanings and bygone values too dangerous to be recaptured, appreciated only by those unable to understand what they are bound to lose.

“For singles”: the wild public inauguration to domestic life sought out by those who have outgrown their innocence.

“Family-oriented”: seen clearly only by flesh-peddlers, the infertile, and the lonely.

The New You

Advertising rises to an art when it stimulates not a perceived need, but boredom. Generosity sweepstakes, patient repetition, diligent associations, claims of skyrocketing temperance—a cavalry charge of techniques weaseling the tedious virtues into subliminal consciousness to make people fidget in their jiggling bodies, necrohabits, and abusive relationships. This campaign of discontent would implant not a longing for this or that product, but a heartache to jump on the bandwagon of another existence altogether. To lodge ennui in the soul is to commodify life, to make a conspicuous consumption of unfulfillment.

Levels of Senility

We say that age brings individuals wisdom, communities reverence, institutions prestige. But opening a history book shows us that age in a state brings decay and chronic disorders of public character. At this point the prudent among us chide ourselves and apply this macro-principle down the social ladder. Only then will we know future generations better than they know themselves.

Tragic Currency

One can’t write tragedies about important figures today, as tragedians in the past wrote of royalty. The pride of the powerful fails to convince us. They are too transparent, too accidental: in the right circumstances, any person could have held their position—precisely why we envy or resent them. We rightly recognize that the campaign funds of the politician misdirect his charisma and crush his vision. Under monarchy money was a prerequisite of greatness; in democracy it is greatness. Money is the tragic hero of every democratic drama: it, and not individuals, decides the course of history, while the consequences of its flaw—that it runs out—cannot be overcome by any amount of Spartan will or Athenian guile. This is why the lot of money is most movingly expressed on the stage through its empty-handed victims, the scavengers of rare coins who don’t even die clutching air, but linger on past the anticlimax. The modern tragic individual is distinguished by his lack of dramatic significance, his irrelevance in contemporary life. He is a supporting actor playing out the content of his pockets.

Comedy is the proper treatment of the powerful. Where the tragic hero feels guilt, the clown is shameless. Even when a CEO’s buffoonery with his capital is exposed, he does not acknowledge ignominy but pleads innocent. Having become accustomed to these episodes of corporate life, we watch the trial with all the relish of a sitcom. Our cynicism stabilizes the stock exchange; the CEO’s pain mitigates our frustration and, for a moment, we laugh at corruption’s fallen partner. The judge tries to throw the weight of the world on his shoulders and hold him accountable for ruining it—a fact which we accept but can’t bring ourselves to believe: we would not tremble to be his neighbor as we would a trivial rapist or murderer; instead of closing our blinds we would open our doors, hoping to coat ourselves in his hemorrhaging lifestyle.

How to Philosophize with a Screwdriver

“He is a scholar and a gentleman.”—One never hears of such a unity anymore. When social roles specialized they had nothing to balance them, they lost their sociability; each moved in the direction of maximizing its internal logic. Thus gentlemen, to retain their status, have devolved into merchants; while scholars, to regain their lost reputations, have fallen into Nobel laureation. Sycophancy to princes was somehow more dignified than to prizes or dead presidents. One pledged arms, life, and soul, but never lunch meetings or lecture tours.

Scholars of expression, come forth—and show these intellectuals how to be learned. Obliviously we tread over buried treasures, tracking eroded footsteps through windy dunes. Future minds will be digging through the sand for centuries. But we men of experience, unknowing of the world’s depths—we are relegated to the surface. The most we hope for is to find an oasis to wade in and forget our thirst.

The new father of “modern” philosophy—the philosophy culminating in our concerns—is not Descartes, but Russell. “The Right Honorable Earl,” mirroring the ambiguity one cannot help but feel towards empty titles in a period of fluid mobility, started a new trend: the academic first as obscurantist, then as populist. With the journal article, he moved philosophy out of the salon and into an office where philosophers smoke their pipes for stimulation as they read and discuss themselves. With the pop-philosophy book, he crammed the subject into a compact car and drove it into the marketplace. What results is the dumbing down of a mystification. To be told in small words what cannot be understood in big ones does not lead to comprehension. The interested reader, expending much time but little effort, becomes more than ignorant but less than knowledgeable: he becomes “informed.”

Medieval scholasticism that eschews its faith while retaining its terminology, academia is reason taking a sabbatical. Like a reverse-alchemical process that turns gold into base metal, eternal questions are compartmentalized into methods. Philosophy of Brains limits experience to the interior images of eggheads, warring against divergent techniques of analysis; injecting himself with chemicals for a PET scan, the Cerebellicist records the metabolic changes of his thoughts before overdosing on observation. The Alphabet-Reckoners go further, so impudent as to educate the scientists: the tweed shirt waves logical paradoxes at an inattentive lab coat and points him in the direction he was already looking towards.

The master asks after some coffea arabica. The maiden recommends with a curtsy that visiting the public sphere of the coffee house would be more stimulating than drinking alone. The master is disdainful of her contribution, rebuking the maiden for her absentmindedness and rejecting her suppressed premise: if he wanted stimulation, he would not drink arabica. He always has his morning coffee, and arabica is the least bitter form of reliability. He knows she is only pretending to be absentminded out of laziness, and gets up to make the coffee himself. The maiden cannot, after all, be trusted to mill the beans without an electric grinder. In the real world people use their feet to get things done. The master asks himself why he even retains a maiden, since it is always he who does all the work. The laborer should reap the benefits. The last thing he needs is someone to follow him around explaining his own behavior to himself. It is only respect for her parents’ memory that prevents the master from dismissing the maiden from his service.

***

Object of oblivion: all the ways idleness, lassitude, the disquiet of empty thoughts went into meriting the philosophy professor’s paycheck—blood and sweat of student fees. The paycheck is not just the instrumentality of living, but far deeper than what we thought it was. Beneath it—beneath everything—is less. All along a veil of presence had been cast over the paycheck so as to not overwhelm us with its bare nothingness; to uncover the setting of the paycheck—the night jobs of insomniac grad students—is to swoon about in void-vertigo.

***

The only way one can use philosophical terminology these days is to take it hostage: buy an academic’s book and mail a new page to him every day. With any luck, he’ll define your ransom with a restraining order. “The defendant is prohibited from approaching within five hundred feet of the plaintiff’s book . . .” If only contemporary philosophers would appeal to a judge to design their book cover, so the curious will instantly know where they stand in relation to it. The law is perhaps philosophy’s last friend, the one who stays behind to help clean up after everyone else has left the party. But then, the law is obliged to be everyone’s friend . . .

***

To sum up the history of the “love of wisdom”: the journey of philosophy begins in wonder; the Journal of Philosophy ends in bewilderment. Philo + strophia: love of turning. Philosophers today are dancing masters. “Step here, and here, and here,” they say. Good form is a product of technical mastery; those who try to keep up with the incessant twirling of the bios theoretikos collapse in dizziness.

Children grow into imbeciles when neglected. When the educated retreat into research caves, mass culture learns to tie its shoes with a safety fuse and brush its teeth with matches. If our basic pyromania skill-set doesn’t end in self-arson, the smoke from our knowledge will asphyxiate us. The leviathan has grown too large for sailors to navigate without trembling for uncertainty—rightly so, for they have lost their mastery of the sea. The armada scattered, the sailors of each ship lower their flags and drift along, charting lonely bays.

The New Pedagogy

Learning by doing: a child who gets the idea of a hat by using it after Dewey’s fashion—lecturing into it. Sounds conveyed into the ear indirectly are transformed into expectations of entertainment: the child, hoping Dewey will pull a rabbit out, receives instead a sluggish lesson on the reflex arc. An adolescent deprived of magic grows to imitate the habits of knowing.

Dewey the Destroyer: progressive education is philosophy’s euthanasia. The only way to make the aim of the philosopher compatible with that of the nonphilosopher is by unplugging the superannuated search for wisdom and hooking everyone up to the science industry. Academia and the factory are two islands stranded by one sea, bridged only by journalism dialectics and the sophisms of media moguls.

The Forgotten Pessimists

Mainländer, von Hartmann, Michelstaedter—residue from a time when pessimism’s popularity inspired every adult with an unhappy childhood memory to compose a master’s thesis on despair. Periods when the temptation not to exist has become a fad may be indicated by the loci of lesser figures in this tradition. Not imaginative enough to merely write about suicidal scenarios, they must either commit themselves to one or achieve a worldly success that prevents them from sympathizing with the act in any way whatsoever. It is instructive to read such figures for the manner in which their posthumous reputations lived up to their theories.

If Schopenhauer had taken lessons in civic duty from Dr. Pangloss, von Hartmann’s system would be the result. It did not occur to him that his best of all possible worlds—one in which the species strives towards nothingness through collective asceticism—is outclassed by a better possible world—ours—in which the same goal is achieved more swiftly through collective hedonism.

Mainländer: if he would have only put off his admirably consistent conclusion a bit later, giving himself enough time to establish an influence consistent with his thesis: to make the world that comes after him the ruin of a self-annihilated god.

The inference of the 23-year old Michelstaedter, the same as that of the 23-year old Cioran—that we must live in the moment, on the crest of an unending temporal wave—requires an effective method of entertainment, one that is not adequately achieved by systematizing playful rhetoric within a dissertation. Hence why Michelstadter was led to the limits of an austere logic while Cioran felt no such obligation—not so much by the validity of that logic as its utter boredom.

Given that a man seeks to become his own principle of non-contradiction, his metaphysic of suicide might for once take an original variation. Where is the heroic nihilism of ending one’s life through gluttony? That life has no essence without good nutrition is as compelling an essentialist bias as any to protest against. The persuasion of a high-fat diet; knowing that one wants healthy arteries and seeing no way to unclog them. Alone in the desert of processed food, nougat makes naught of thought.

The Underworld Optimist

As the pessimist learns to smile at the grimness of life, so the optimist need take up his good conscience. He too must learn. Not to take the opposite track and frown—that would cause him to be misidentified. Everyone knows that the satirist is at home in laughter, but no cheerful soul ever spoke of progress with a grimace. No, the optimist must learn the art of the paroxysm. Coughing, hacking, sneezing—expelling his jolly slogans loudly and violently, sending out a snotball to accompany his words of inspiration. He coughs in lieu of disappointment; if his expectations are too extravagant he spits up a bit of blood to foreshadow their miscarriage. His friends will think him in need of manners and medicine, giving themselves just enough pause to sober their idealism with a wrinkled nose and curled upper lip. Principles that can endure the common cold are stronger for having been tested. The more unremitting the viral infection, the surer one becomes that things must get better soon. The late stages of consumption cannot but bring on a fortified zeal for life. Retreating into hostile territory, the Hadean optimist confines himself in a sanatorium to prove his health, refusing to give up on progress just because he moves against the grain; for him, retrograde motion is a sign of eventual advancement, battling death the ultimate evidence of one’s verve. In a sequestered obscurity without glory, without a statue to pay tribute to the fallen soldier, there is only the prospect of life to propel one onward, the knowledge of advancing medical science. The experimental subject can look forward to a haler humanity; the invalid hopes the hospital food will improve. Beyond their individual lives lies a future where illness is not necessary and death can be rescheduled.

This realist of hope despises his green, sunny archetype—he who has never known the winter snow, the summer monsoon, a plague of locusts, one who limits his cheerful outlook to his own life, selfish for happiness. Bellowers of the Neverlasting Yay! are cynics in the making, secret sons of despair who curse fate at the first occurrence of misfortune. Enduring optimism, pitiless and implacable, can only be spread by an epidemic.

Selective Determinism

Among the enlightened, free will is not yet sophisticated enough to influence more than one automatic behavior at a time. Breathing is interrupted by a sudden thought, thinking halted by a deep breath. Asphyxiation or benightedness: absorbed meditation is a rare enough habit that the majority of people escape this dilemma. Theirs is a different doom: not in the choice between instincts, but unconquerable drives.

Swan Song

Our civilization has no genius of collapse—an Alcibiades who parades his people down an avenue of ruin with the flamboyant insouciance of a homecoming prank. We totter and sway to the flat trumpets of bandcamp cadets. If only greed or sloth or some other deadly sin were the prime cause (at least then we could give the old excuse that our natures made the downfall inevitable), rather than effects of the sheer incompetence of good will lacking experience. Familiar enough with history’s seismology that the more perceptive among us can feel a spike coming, we are relegated to watching leaders try to beat their drums in sync with the masses, who stomp their feet with increasing randomness.

Society’s Rickety Scaffolding

Civilized man admires an unhinged instinct, appreciation fizzing into obsession as his sophistication advances towards effeteness. His last course of action, as admirable as it is foolish, would seem that of Tennyson’s Ulysses, setting out for adventure with the misguided conviction not to yield and the hope of regaining a strength forever lost. Sailing past the sunset for proof of life, he lands in a tropical Eden and discovers his elemental self.

Hoping to lubricate butchery and enslavement with wonder, he ensures that the manner of his arrival will be sufficiently grandiose for the tribal men to take him as a god. But the civilized man is surprised to find many of the rural inhabitants of Papua New Guinea wearing t-shirts, looking at him only with mild curiosity instead of the awe he needed. To regain at least a mirage of his former strength, he tries to exploit their primitive prejudices by brandishing modern gadgets. They laugh, pulling out rusty, outdated models of the same tools given to them by previous explorers. No matter, he realizes. In the end, strength doesn’t lie in technology or perceptions of godhood, but in a state of health. By spreading infection among the natives he can dwindle their population enough to make conquest all the easier. So he coughs on them. Their faces take on a look of disgust, but though they take offense they stand unaffected. They are immune to his cold; they have already adopted the worst of Western man’s diseases and made them their own.

Without the possibility of conquest, the civilized man has nothing to offer but diplomacy. Before leaving for home he makes a blood pact with the tribal chief and contracts a rare brain disease.

Defeated, he heads back to his private jet and pours himself a drink. The primitives are gone from the earth. Modernity has extended its reach over everything. Soon these virile semi-barbarians will gain the resources they need to overrun him. Then they too will become like him, urbane and enervated. Even in their current state the gap was too narrow to seem magnificent by comparison.

The white man’s burden had been lifted. There was no one left to civilize.

More Than Geographically Isolated

Lacking a ruined continent like the Europeans, Americans cannot take refuge under grand columns and sigh with Doric docility, grooving tattoos of past glories into our flesh columns. But neither can we live in a perpetual present like the Greeks, the example of that prior society still too heavy on our memory to invent a series of heroic epics culminating in our presence. To say nothing of the Chinese, for whom one’s own individual existence is just another flower on the garland, the continuation of a living antiquity.

So we are relegated to live in the space of the recent past—the limbo between a golden age and raw life, the lost and the sweaty. Mythologizing what little figures and episodes we have of our history, but with too much evidence to believe the stories about cherry trees and liberation from tyranny (the penny-yoke of a sugar tax), our near-present is a slush of folklore and irony, each interpenetrating the other in turn.

The Greeks, looking back to an age of Gods, aspired to divine deeds but only realized the best that humanity could accomplish. We, with portraits of great men on our walls, aspire to money-changing and can’t manage to turn enough dollars into food stamps.

If we had never broken away from the British we could still claim the Bard as ours. Instead he is just another verbal concession. Having survived the infancy of self-determination, we do nothing but gaze out across the Atlantic as we die from neglect in toddlerhood, pronouncing our first and last word with nervous hunger. But “Mama” is more interested in her sisters than us.

Constitutional Checks

Life having become so common, one is surprised to find it valued more than ever. But human rights, too, are Malthusian. Liberty is the new war, access to the pursuit of happiness the new potato famine.

“The Rights of Men”: by the power of an abstract principle, to be indifferent to the realm of ideas—unalienability of umbecility; free of the caprices of feudal lords, to obey the whims of the stock market; to choose one’s devourers, to submit education to ambition, to inherit the genetic mutations of parents and let children set standards of taste, to bestow a written history to every subculture and erect a world literature on a sea of endangered dialects, to substitute talent for self-expression, to consume oneself into a coffin. In the end a boorish civil society balances itself out: those with a short-term cultural memory receive justice in Alzheimer’s. Natural law, bestowing political freedom through immutable ethical principles, introduces the determinism of drives, giving people the opportunity to pursue their annihilation at the most rapid rate possible without even consciously choosing it—the only genuine dignity one has in life.

Idioms Spewing Idiots

The world makes anglicisms with the same profusion that it once made latinisms and gallicisms, but with none of the enthusiasm, none of the connotations of borrowed refinement. Dumbed-down oral behavior engulfs all objects of expression and infects foreign cultures in a pestilence of sensual neologisms. Every historic district becomes an erogenous zone as abstract terms gain a new sense of possession. Archaisms, once spoken with such delicacy for fear that the tongue would grate against the palate and flaw pronunciation with a faint but devastating detail, are rendered inefficient by the cheaper production value of monosyllables. The gauge of imperial corruption is not moral degeneration within the mother nation, but the exportation of its depravity to the provinces via word of mouth. Conversations, devoid of the grace and wit of the French, cut out the chiffon cake—for we are now even lacking in substance-as-triviality—and lay the most important emphasis on the smooth transition from beginning to ending. The salutation inaugurating every colloquy foreshadows its parting phrase and becomes a metaphor for weariness.

Noose as Lasso

Age of God: 1607–1776

Age of Heroes: 1776–1945

Age of Men: 1945–Present

***

In America’s Age of God, poor men of piety carved tracts of land from a forest of native corpses and sacrificed its own population to the starving time—divine justice needs scapegoats and martyrs.

Provident Periwigs of the Founding Fathers: as Athena disguised Odysseus in the form of an old beggar, so did the Lord impart an aspect of divinity to an epoch of bad hair days. Men of genius and valor powdered their heads before their muskets so the combined eruptions would be heard worldwide.

In an Age of Men that covers stupidity with hair growth formulas and puts a safety lock on spray bottles, the triumphs from the Age of Heroes seem superhuman. An industrialized army unable to capture a few primitives hiding in caves lacks the honesty to explain this earlier success without recourse to heavenly aid. But total victories give way to endless stalemates because God abandons a people only after virtue leaves them. Technology dissolves moral force through impersonation.

The way back to virtue? A mountain of scapegoats and martyrs that surpasses the Hindu Kush.

Commentary on The Discourses, II.31

The danger of trusting refugees: despite any promises they give, they will betray their adopted country as soon as they get a chance to bring their native one into it. The desire to transplant their own culture upon the one that took them in, though initially nonexistent when a matter of a few scattered individuals escaping poverty or persecution, becomes strong once the displaced population becomes large enough. Why else would they have been driven from their homeland in the first place? They employed the same strategy there, too: even their own culture they wanted to purify—remake or congeal. Failing in that—unable to either renovate their own traditions quickly enough or assimilate to changing regimes—they simply migrated somewhere else to achieve their goals. Unlike their fellow countrymen who decided to stay put and endure, refugees have a drive to non-adaptive survival: they do not suit themselves to circumstances, but alter circumstances to suit themselves, and if successful ultimately transform those around them. Theirs is the will to enculturate.

America’s strength and its curse is that it has always been the land of refugees. Whether this characteristic is a strength or a curse depends on the dominant type of refugee.

An Invasion of Greatness

The most penetrating analysis of American social life was written by a Frenchman. The most acclaimed twentieth-century American writer was a Russian. Our greatest logician was Austrian, our greatest physicist German.

Without just wars for America to fight, geography cannot donate its useful exiles to us. We are forced to turn to our own population for intellectual originality—a barren strategy, if not a dangerous one. After the steady flow of Grecian culture stopped, the Romans produced only a few dry moralists to oppose the loud virtues of the enfranchised barbarians.

If only we could plant tyrannies in the other developed nations, our influx of peacetime freeloaders might be outweighed by a band of refugees with scientific training in border-hopping. The Europeans could be the first to make an orderly research project out of illegal immigration: sending a control group of tortured Basques across first, dropping Finnish paraskiers onto mountaintops at regular intervals. Testing the reactions of east coast beach populations with a rising of nudes from the sea, wine-soaked Mademoiselles are interspersed with a placebo effect of castrati to gauge the rate of depopulation. After the invasion has been reliably reproduced, the published results might be exchanged for green cards.

Barring this, where will the great Americans of the twenty-first century come from? —The cosmos and the gutter. Above and below, but not parallel to us. Competing against aliens and rats, the last natives will lower their flags, don them as capes, and hunker down in their fallout shelters, too busy fending off abduction and plague to do anything worth remembering. With a xenophobia that scorns expatriation and a tobacco-chewing addiction that discourages evacuation aid, the Midwesterners will make their final stand—with the prize of “Greatest” jointly awarded to what experiments on their chosen few and swarms the rejects.

Aetoichthymachia

Predation is the condition of soaring; one cannot simply live off the view. In the next life when philosophers are eagles and businesspeople are fish—even then the fish will swarm the eagle and pull it under when it swoops down. If man’s nature seeped into animals the food chain would become a circle of absurd altercations, a burlesque worthy of a pseudo-Homer. Transmigration has not equalized oppression because there is no point—man needs no help in endangering himself.

Palpable Endearments

Socialists are callously insensitive to our attachment to objects—a bond far more incorruptible than that between people, the more so as it is removed from them. Trinkets associated with the body parts of dead mothers are talismans of sorrow and nostalgia, reminders that the flesh has seen happier days. Much preferred is an object that honors another object through facsimile in a chain of inert mater going back to the garbage of Eden. The first pair of underwear, botanical snugness of soiling and decomposition—a testament to the heritage of stains, the primogeniture of use-value.

A God for Everyone

god—first decapitalized, then degendered. The father no longer reigns alongside just one son, but shares a crowded throne with Muhammad, L. Ron Hubbard, and Joseph Smith’s joint-heirs of christ. Would that he had castrated himself sooner, or at least been formally usurped and thrown into a spacious dungeon.

The good comedian who never laughs at his own jokes, god is now finally able laugh at ours: an androgyne wrapped in the cloak of mother nature and raising the shield of paternity. Created to live outside ourselves, experiments of temporality, we take revenge by toggling our maker’s gender roles to reflect the needs of each stage of civilization. When small tribal populations with high mortality rates were the rule, a fertility goddess was called for; when expansion and conquest was paramount, an aggressor deity. das goddess having sowed the soil in blood and der god having dwindled native pagan populations through disease, a new transformation is now required to fit the age of equality: die deity, safely neutered by a definite article to make us all feel uniformly privileged.

The new myths: baby zeus playing with scented candles instead of lightning bolts, safeguarding his adolescent skirt-chasing with spermicide. As a result of his imposition of free choice on the erotic escapades of the olympians, the generations of heroes are omitted from the Ages of Man. Hopping from Arcadia to the Iron era, Homer’s jingoism is disregarded in favor of an abridged edition of Hesiod. By the time Virgil has nothing to write about and bowdlerization leaves no one avid for Ovid, the people are weary of polytheism and ready for something less hierarchical. Shaving his beard, plucking his eyebrows, applying black eyeliner, getting a pixie cut, donning a purple robe, a drag queen yahweh struts down main street at the head of the diversity parade, waving to the groupies. One does not pray, but claps to a new world order: “Thou shalt not segregate bathrooms,” “Thou shalt not take the name of humanity as a singular masculine pronoun.” Unrepentant men with type A personalities become doomed to an afterlife as Chihuahuas; traditional housewives with a closetful of mom jeans are punished as polyandrous phalaropes.

Absolute Philanthropy