631
that was the “constitution of the German Empire,” as necessarily undertaken and
managed by the King of Prussia, we read of a delivered posterity in which is clear
enough fodder for second-guessing our species’ present hegemony.
8
Homo sapiens thus set the stage and courted a melodrama all too familiar to our
kind. Our recent evolutionary history reads of bifurcation points, preposterous highgrounds, antipodal modalities between those brief interstices of relative calm, and
the all-out assaults that had become the norm; salient, defining destinies soon to
have engulfed a planet entire, whether deliberately or inadvertently determining at
the collective, conceptual level to do so.
67.3 The Historical Amalgam
The authorship of so much vice is easily contested, given an ethnographic record of
very small and scattered vegetarian communities. But their amalgam does not
appear to have exerted much suasion on the critical mass. This is the real story, the
one we resist to speak of because its intellectual and emotional reverberations will
not admit to any clear exit strategy. Yet, many are the poets who have guessed the
fineries of its final denouements, the bangs and whimpers, eco-crashes and epitaphs
with no voice left standing to utter their name; or even guess upon the origins of
such exiles. A careful scan of the cacophonous tombs by the likes of Oswald
Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Will and Ariel Durant, Edward Gibbon, Herodotus,
Xenophon, Pliny the Elder, Clarence Glacken, Josephus, many others, makes abundantly clear that we made ourselves. A psychological equivalent of enormous,
global “negative-yielding corporate debt.”
9
Species-wide, we don’t have a lens for
gauging the extent of our outcast zoology, our banishment. Dante and John Milton
certainly sized up the cosmic melancholy of our predicament, our fall from any
sense of grace. Having done it to ourselves, the absence of a baseline by which to
judge our predicament has followed upon our entire story. Never has an evolutionary cul-de-sac been so written in the open air—trillions written off in blood—for all
to see (Fig. 67.3).
Simply told, our histories, by such volumes of insistent reiteration and echo, built
up the edifices of this killer vertebrate. The evidence of the Anthropocene dates
back those millions of years in that our collective energies clearly chose a path,
which only in more recent millennia and centuries has been abetted by technological aids and the battering rams of a rushing crowd. As Elias Canetti, with every
sentence of his masterpiece, Crowds & Power, has reminded us, “For the same
8 See On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, by Donald Kagan, Doubleday,
New York, 1995, pp. 64 and 85.
9 See “Surge in corporate debt with negative yields poses risk ‘unlike anything’ investors have ever
seen,” by Jeff Cox, Wednesday, 21 August 2019, 8:50 AM, CNBC.
67.3 The Historical Amalgam
that was the “constitution of the German Empire,” as necessarily undertaken and
managed by the King of Prussia, we read of a delivered posterity in which is clear
enough fodder for second-guessing our species’ present hegemony.
8
Homo sapiens thus set the stage and courted a melodrama all too familiar to our
kind. Our recent evolutionary history reads of bifurcation points, preposterous highgrounds, antipodal modalities between those brief interstices of relative calm, and
the all-out assaults that had become the norm; salient, defining destinies soon to
have engulfed a planet entire, whether deliberately or inadvertently determining at
the collective, conceptual level to do so.
67.3 The Historical Amalgam
The authorship of so much vice is easily contested, given an ethnographic record of
very small and scattered vegetarian communities. But their amalgam does not
appear to have exerted much suasion on the critical mass. This is the real story, the
one we resist to speak of because its intellectual and emotional reverberations will
not admit to any clear exit strategy. Yet, many are the poets who have guessed the
fineries of its final denouements, the bangs and whimpers, eco-crashes and epitaphs
with no voice left standing to utter their name; or even guess upon the origins of
such exiles. A careful scan of the cacophonous tombs by the likes of Oswald
Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Will and Ariel Durant, Edward Gibbon, Herodotus,
Xenophon, Pliny the Elder, Clarence Glacken, Josephus, many others, makes abundantly clear that we made ourselves. A psychological equivalent of enormous,
global “negative-yielding corporate debt.”
9
Species-wide, we don’t have a lens for
gauging the extent of our outcast zoology, our banishment. Dante and John Milton
certainly sized up the cosmic melancholy of our predicament, our fall from any
sense of grace. Having done it to ourselves, the absence of a baseline by which to
judge our predicament has followed upon our entire story. Never has an evolutionary cul-de-sac been so written in the open air—trillions written off in blood—for all
to see (Fig. 67.3).
Simply told, our histories, by such volumes of insistent reiteration and echo, built
up the edifices of this killer vertebrate. The evidence of the Anthropocene dates
back those millions of years in that our collective energies clearly chose a path,
which only in more recent millennia and centuries has been abetted by technological aids and the battering rams of a rushing crowd. As Elias Canetti, with every
sentence of his masterpiece, Crowds & Power, has reminded us, “For the same
8 See On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, by Donald Kagan, Doubleday,
New York, 1995, pp. 64 and 85.
9 See “Surge in corporate debt with negative yields poses risk ‘unlike anything’ investors have ever
seen,” by Jeff Cox, Wednesday, 21 August 2019, 8:50 AM, CNBC.
67.3 The Historical Amalgam