50
untruths—our superiority to all other sensate beings, represents the most serious of
all ecological heresies. We know it from the vantage of despoliation to be the central
paradox of all. And while the nature of paradox consists of seemingly contrary intuitions colliding in some indisputable act of consciousness that fixates on the tangible, rights the odds, it is time and reflection that together constitute some other
intangible. Because these appear from any vantage point to be contraries—substance and the insubstantial—the paradoxical unraveling of our presumptions of
fixity has never acted as a call for unity, except, at rare moments. By the brutal show
of force in the rigid, almost military-like garden designed by, for example, Niccolò
Tribolo for the rapacious young Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519–1574) at his Tuscan
Villa di Castello; a benign but clearly manipulative arrogation, of shrubs shouldering row upon rectilinear row. Taken to other, human extremes, one senses about our
tolerance levels for paradox the frustrated, angry, submissive euphoria of an entire
nation calling for death camps that will exterminate the Other.
In parading this seriously pathological self-image—self-conscious biomes, economic, political, egotistical, that connote our attempt at subordinating fellow life
forms (not just Constitutions or Magna Cartas)—we have encouraged one another,
and by mathematical import, our communities, to presage a message of progress
and, implicitly, enough time to mete out our enunciations, hazards, and eclipses.
From this maelstrom of fictions, these psychic grandeurs of success, as against our
idealized prelapsarian earth, no conclusion about ourselves that would in any way
hint at the genocidal or the suicidal is likely to be gleaned. We have learned to gloss
over darkness, relying on collectivities, village life, and the great urbanizing
devolvement unto anonymity which cities afford us all. The megacity—ten, twenty,
thirty million people crammed together—represents the ultimate vanishing act for
individuals. Simply, such conurbations empower us to hide the traumatic truth of
human beings within the group, as Elias Canetti trenchantly perceived in his devastating book Crowds and Power (1960).
9
All of those identities and the data associated with their uncountable memories may be likened to bits of data, whole lifetimes
that amount to more than general macromolecules without purchase but nonetheless, in all their microscopy, mirroring the miracle of life, as was persuasively contemplated by Werner Holzmüller in his compelling work Information in biological
systems: the role of macromolecules.
10
Such truth might not be so alarming in the case of a Monet spending most of his
later years at his Giverny gardens, indulging the light upon lily ponds in over 250 oil
paintings, countless other sketches. But in biological disambiguation, personal aesthetic relish or philosophical claims cannot rationally be sequestered from the
species- wide out-of-control syndrome that has broken with the overarching steady
flow of ecological coherence. Our lack of cogency is our destiny, the strangest paradox of all.
9 Masse und Macht, Chaasen Verlag, Hamburg, 1960; Victor Gollancz Ltd and Viking Press, 1962.
10 Translated by Manfred Hecker, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., 1984.
6 The Ecclesiastes Factor
untruths—our superiority to all other sensate beings, represents the most serious of
all ecological heresies. We know it from the vantage of despoliation to be the central
paradox of all. And while the nature of paradox consists of seemingly contrary intuitions colliding in some indisputable act of consciousness that fixates on the tangible, rights the odds, it is time and reflection that together constitute some other
intangible. Because these appear from any vantage point to be contraries—substance and the insubstantial—the paradoxical unraveling of our presumptions of
fixity has never acted as a call for unity, except, at rare moments. By the brutal show
of force in the rigid, almost military-like garden designed by, for example, Niccolò
Tribolo for the rapacious young Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519–1574) at his Tuscan
Villa di Castello; a benign but clearly manipulative arrogation, of shrubs shouldering row upon rectilinear row. Taken to other, human extremes, one senses about our
tolerance levels for paradox the frustrated, angry, submissive euphoria of an entire
nation calling for death camps that will exterminate the Other.
In parading this seriously pathological self-image—self-conscious biomes, economic, political, egotistical, that connote our attempt at subordinating fellow life
forms (not just Constitutions or Magna Cartas)—we have encouraged one another,
and by mathematical import, our communities, to presage a message of progress
and, implicitly, enough time to mete out our enunciations, hazards, and eclipses.
From this maelstrom of fictions, these psychic grandeurs of success, as against our
idealized prelapsarian earth, no conclusion about ourselves that would in any way
hint at the genocidal or the suicidal is likely to be gleaned. We have learned to gloss
over darkness, relying on collectivities, village life, and the great urbanizing
devolvement unto anonymity which cities afford us all. The megacity—ten, twenty,
thirty million people crammed together—represents the ultimate vanishing act for
individuals. Simply, such conurbations empower us to hide the traumatic truth of
human beings within the group, as Elias Canetti trenchantly perceived in his devastating book Crowds and Power (1960).
9
All of those identities and the data associated with their uncountable memories may be likened to bits of data, whole lifetimes
that amount to more than general macromolecules without purchase but nonetheless, in all their microscopy, mirroring the miracle of life, as was persuasively contemplated by Werner Holzmüller in his compelling work Information in biological
systems: the role of macromolecules.
10
Such truth might not be so alarming in the case of a Monet spending most of his
later years at his Giverny gardens, indulging the light upon lily ponds in over 250 oil
paintings, countless other sketches. But in biological disambiguation, personal aesthetic relish or philosophical claims cannot rationally be sequestered from the
species- wide out-of-control syndrome that has broken with the overarching steady
flow of ecological coherence. Our lack of cogency is our destiny, the strangest paradox of all.
9 Masse und Macht, Chaasen Verlag, Hamburg, 1960; Victor Gollancz Ltd and Viking Press, 1962.
10 Translated by Manfred Hecker, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., 1984.
6 The Ecclesiastes Factor