660
matter has its physic in perpetual flux. Ecosystems are cumulative ambassadors of
this completely inexplicable, constant change.
That is to acknowledge the now arbitrariness of “true” and “false”; and that
encompasses what Sartre often referred to as true, or false consciousness. We see far
less dialecticity in the scope of human conscience. It either is, or is not present. The
problem with non-dialectic conscience is not its presence, but its manifestations, or
lack thereof.
Hence, between all such categories no meaningful (or unmeaningful) existence
can be reliably asserted. No consequences proffered. Nor any associations confirmed. The contact that might be posited between entities is as infirm and inconsolable a configuration as that glass trough holding tied lobsters waiting to be boiled
alive. We have no way of understanding the lone halibut somewhere off the coast of
Iceland in the middle of a stormy winter’s night, swimming half-a-mile deep. That
is the extent of our full ignorance. Trying to grasp the follicle mite squirming for
space in an eyelash.
The bedside comfort of a great book, not necessarily its accuracy, teases our
efforts to move outside in proportion to the extent that we can go deeper inwardly.
All of the hazy interstices, coordinates, passing time as measured in our vagaries
and extravagances or illnesses of mind, appear before us as a general swell of existence we cannot hold on to. If we could, the damage we inflict could conceivably be
even worse.
No distribution model of any particular philosophy, metaphysic, scientific paradigm, set of details, questions or answers, satisfies the demands of reality, not in our
case. And while moral tensions and undefined suasions exert certain practical limitations upon one’s mobility, a basic restlessness gives to human life illimitable
dreams, no matter what or who the dreamer.
Nor can we, who impose every predominant stressor, presume to gauge the full
range of stress-response among fellow species. What we can attest to, as historicallyand- future-obsessed organisms, is the reality that a majority of all past ecological
destruction was natural. Five calamities dating back 2.45 billion years.
1
As sweeping as the losses were—between 75% and 96% of all terrestrial and/or
aquatic life forms on average per global event—they were not deliberately imposed
by a living, co-habiting species that finds itself at the center of the Anthropocene,
and soon, the Eremozoic, what E. O. Wilson has named the next geological epoch
of loneliness
2
; conscious of its actions, and fully ignoring its consequences. This
utterly undermines the seriousness of our ability to actually ever engage in meaningful conversation, especially in light of the present condition for wild animal biomass proportions on earth.
Evidence for one of the earliest human massacres, of 27 other people, was
unearthed at the Nataruk site in Kenya in 2016, dating to the end of the Stone Age
and last Ice Age, roughly 10,000 years ago.
3
It was at approximately this same time
3 See “The Big Five Mass Extinctions,” by Viviane Richter, https://cosmosmagazine.com/palaeontology/big-five-extinctions, Accessed August 29, 2019; See also, The Sixth Extinction: An
Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2014.
72 On the Nature of Equivalencies
matter has its physic in perpetual flux. Ecosystems are cumulative ambassadors of
this completely inexplicable, constant change.
That is to acknowledge the now arbitrariness of “true” and “false”; and that
encompasses what Sartre often referred to as true, or false consciousness. We see far
less dialecticity in the scope of human conscience. It either is, or is not present. The
problem with non-dialectic conscience is not its presence, but its manifestations, or
lack thereof.
Hence, between all such categories no meaningful (or unmeaningful) existence
can be reliably asserted. No consequences proffered. Nor any associations confirmed. The contact that might be posited between entities is as infirm and inconsolable a configuration as that glass trough holding tied lobsters waiting to be boiled
alive. We have no way of understanding the lone halibut somewhere off the coast of
Iceland in the middle of a stormy winter’s night, swimming half-a-mile deep. That
is the extent of our full ignorance. Trying to grasp the follicle mite squirming for
space in an eyelash.
The bedside comfort of a great book, not necessarily its accuracy, teases our
efforts to move outside in proportion to the extent that we can go deeper inwardly.
All of the hazy interstices, coordinates, passing time as measured in our vagaries
and extravagances or illnesses of mind, appear before us as a general swell of existence we cannot hold on to. If we could, the damage we inflict could conceivably be
even worse.
No distribution model of any particular philosophy, metaphysic, scientific paradigm, set of details, questions or answers, satisfies the demands of reality, not in our
case. And while moral tensions and undefined suasions exert certain practical limitations upon one’s mobility, a basic restlessness gives to human life illimitable
dreams, no matter what or who the dreamer.
Nor can we, who impose every predominant stressor, presume to gauge the full
range of stress-response among fellow species. What we can attest to, as historicallyand- future-obsessed organisms, is the reality that a majority of all past ecological
destruction was natural. Five calamities dating back 2.45 billion years.
1
As sweeping as the losses were—between 75% and 96% of all terrestrial and/or
aquatic life forms on average per global event—they were not deliberately imposed
by a living, co-habiting species that finds itself at the center of the Anthropocene,
and soon, the Eremozoic, what E. O. Wilson has named the next geological epoch
of loneliness
2
; conscious of its actions, and fully ignoring its consequences. This
utterly undermines the seriousness of our ability to actually ever engage in meaningful conversation, especially in light of the present condition for wild animal biomass proportions on earth.
Evidence for one of the earliest human massacres, of 27 other people, was
unearthed at the Nataruk site in Kenya in 2016, dating to the end of the Stone Age
and last Ice Age, roughly 10,000 years ago.
3
It was at approximately this same time
3 See “The Big Five Mass Extinctions,” by Viviane Richter, https://cosmosmagazine.com/palaeontology/big-five-extinctions, Accessed August 29, 2019; See also, The Sixth Extinction: An
Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2014.
72 On the Nature of Equivalencies