9
Part three is, admittedly, a sobering conclusion, a meditation on what we perceive to be the only too real cartography of doomsdays our species is courting. We
call it “A Natural History of Existentialism” although everything about it is terribly
unnatural, other than the very inclination to have written it. That exercise has been
painful, certainly striking of a certain misanthropy, a suspicion at best of our species’ dangers to itself and to all others. From its ashes and ruins we hope—through
the data and the arc of fast-looming icebergs before our species’ Titanic—to invite
consideration of desperate, last-minute alternatives that may still be within our
grasp. We make some recommendations, but few predictions.
Ultimately, this is a work of painfully deferred hesitancies, written under the overarching influence of a global pandemic. After all, we are people, and throughout the
book we are alleging that our species is the sole problem. Not an incoming asteroid
or Black Plague out of our control. It is us. We can hardly hope to write from an
objective perspective outside the self-inflicted disaster for which we are all culpable,
perhaps some more than others, but guilty as a species, which verges on the very
invalidation of natural history, calling upon metaphysics to somehow exhume fresh
air and some novel, tenable, passionate twenty-first century ethical Renaissance.
Nothing less can fix it. If it can be rectified at all. We must face up to our own psyches
in the unmerciful collaboration that is human history in its war against the planet.
This is not a book of conclusions and omniscient narration, or even a study guide
to the perplexed, which presupposes a level of understanding and the fact of having
digested so much bad news as a dutiful precursor to a happy ending. The psychoanalytics that have evolved in Act One have not been exorcised from the human psyche.
While art has continued to effectively curate our quixotic and teasing landscapes,
celebrate the beauty we presume to recognize, and render commentary on all the
shortcomings of collective human behavior, there is no true beginning or end, either
in paleontology, physics, or so-called futurism, which makes for an exhausting Act
Two, and as yet unimaginable Act Three. Dramatic effect is not an issue, to be sure;
but any principled promotion of values that may gain traction in coming months and
years requires a pronounced collaborative wherewithal to see it through. There is no
telling. Humanity is quite capable of deceiving herself with numbers that prove
whatever we want to prove. Aesthetics are equally deft in the flight from numbers,
just as politicians and economists, philosophers and cosmologists, left to their own
minions, can make any scenario or system of cognition work, or founder.
A book holds down any number of temptations that are marginalized for want
of time, space, patience, or the actual formulae for working them out, a situation
that might suggest an eschewal on principle of happy endings. That does not recognize our disposition in trying to make a certain case. With respect to its inevitable,
existentialist- like pronouncements, there is the ever-present risk of putting forth an
argument that unavoidably by paragraph two, page one, has readers daunted and
dismayed. Nonetheless, somehow, without recourse to a didactic or pedagogical
authority it is our hope to actually discover hope in the process of moving beyond the
tyranny and orthodoxy of the ambiguous (Fig. 1.2). Timing is inevitably a flirt, and
the present era, with its swiftly normalized mantras and jeremiads, will work against
any novel introduction of data or interpretive gradations. It has all been said, but not
much has changed, over thousands of years of exhausting historical precedent.
1.3 A Counter-Intuitive Discourse
Part three is, admittedly, a sobering conclusion, a meditation on what we perceive to be the only too real cartography of doomsdays our species is courting. We
call it “A Natural History of Existentialism” although everything about it is terribly
unnatural, other than the very inclination to have written it. That exercise has been
painful, certainly striking of a certain misanthropy, a suspicion at best of our species’ dangers to itself and to all others. From its ashes and ruins we hope—through
the data and the arc of fast-looming icebergs before our species’ Titanic—to invite
consideration of desperate, last-minute alternatives that may still be within our
grasp. We make some recommendations, but few predictions.
Ultimately, this is a work of painfully deferred hesitancies, written under the overarching influence of a global pandemic. After all, we are people, and throughout the
book we are alleging that our species is the sole problem. Not an incoming asteroid
or Black Plague out of our control. It is us. We can hardly hope to write from an
objective perspective outside the self-inflicted disaster for which we are all culpable,
perhaps some more than others, but guilty as a species, which verges on the very
invalidation of natural history, calling upon metaphysics to somehow exhume fresh
air and some novel, tenable, passionate twenty-first century ethical Renaissance.
Nothing less can fix it. If it can be rectified at all. We must face up to our own psyches
in the unmerciful collaboration that is human history in its war against the planet.
This is not a book of conclusions and omniscient narration, or even a study guide
to the perplexed, which presupposes a level of understanding and the fact of having
digested so much bad news as a dutiful precursor to a happy ending. The psychoanalytics that have evolved in Act One have not been exorcised from the human psyche.
While art has continued to effectively curate our quixotic and teasing landscapes,
celebrate the beauty we presume to recognize, and render commentary on all the
shortcomings of collective human behavior, there is no true beginning or end, either
in paleontology, physics, or so-called futurism, which makes for an exhausting Act
Two, and as yet unimaginable Act Three. Dramatic effect is not an issue, to be sure;
but any principled promotion of values that may gain traction in coming months and
years requires a pronounced collaborative wherewithal to see it through. There is no
telling. Humanity is quite capable of deceiving herself with numbers that prove
whatever we want to prove. Aesthetics are equally deft in the flight from numbers,
just as politicians and economists, philosophers and cosmologists, left to their own
minions, can make any scenario or system of cognition work, or founder.
A book holds down any number of temptations that are marginalized for want
of time, space, patience, or the actual formulae for working them out, a situation
that might suggest an eschewal on principle of happy endings. That does not recognize our disposition in trying to make a certain case. With respect to its inevitable,
existentialist- like pronouncements, there is the ever-present risk of putting forth an
argument that unavoidably by paragraph two, page one, has readers daunted and
dismayed. Nonetheless, somehow, without recourse to a didactic or pedagogical
authority it is our hope to actually discover hope in the process of moving beyond the
tyranny and orthodoxy of the ambiguous (Fig. 1.2). Timing is inevitably a flirt, and
the present era, with its swiftly normalized mantras and jeremiads, will work against
any novel introduction of data or interpretive gradations. It has all been said, but not
much has changed, over thousands of years of exhausting historical precedent.
1.3 A Counter-Intuitive Discourse