The Last Feast of the Microbes
How to Live in a Dead Civilisation
What follows is an attempt to describe something that is ultimately unspeakable. I hope that it is evocative and provocative and appeals to your imagination. If you read this as a rational argument only, you will surely find it lacking. I make no apologies for this.
The first section establishes a metaphor which will be returned to again and again. The second is an inquiry into what we have historically called civilisation. The third examines civilisation in our current moment. After that, the remaining sections aspire to be something of a transrational participatory thought experiment.
Without reading the work of C.G. Jung and Peter Kingsley, I would not have had the experiences which have led me here, so I mention them here because not to do so would be dishonest. But this exercise is not going to be one where I quote and unpack their ideas. I take full responsibility for my statements, but it would be absurd to try to take credit for them.
Fauna and Flora
Living organisms do not exist independent of one another. In fact, as human beings, the intricate web of co-evolving relationships that defines and maintains our existence extends both outward and inward, up to the cosmic scale and down to the cellular. Not only do we exist within an unknowably complex and diverse system of organisms, but we also contain untold multitudes of individual life forms.
There are, living within our gut alone, approximately 1.3 bacterial cells for each “human” one, and each one of the 1000 different types of microbe is genetically defined by its 2000 strands of DNA. The genetic diversity of our biome outnumbers what is typically considered as human by 100:1. This is without even mentioning the variety of fungi, viruses and phages that make their home inside the human body.
We consider ourselves as separate from these tiny life forms. We imagine them in some sense as foreigners, making a visit to the island of me-ness that exists in a perfect void of our own biological sovereignty. Similarly, we can’t help but think of ourselves as outsiders when we visit the wild places that remain in this world.
Behind this skin is me and out beyond it is non-me. But in many respects, our existence might be thought of more completely as a process. It’s not just that we have relationships to the ecosystems we inhabit, or those that inhabit us, it’s that we are those relationships.
At this time, one hardly need hammer home the importance of our intimate relationships to microscopic life. The links between gut health and mental health are well documented and so are the links between spending time in nature and general wellbeing. But these metrics of “mental health” and “wellbeing”, can themselves exemplify the view of completely differentiated and dualistic separateness that is a big part of what I am questioning here. So to help set the tone for what is to come, let us take in this famous quote from neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus.
“Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other. Everything breathes together.”
Whilst we live, gut flora consumes the food that we eat. In doing so, they simultaneously sustain themselves and make it possible for us to digest our food. They even produce vitamins that are essential to our functioning — surely this is the very essence of symbiosis and sustainability. We all “breathe” together. But what happens when the food stops arriving in the gut? What happens when we die?
In a dead organism, gut flora changes its mode from symbiosis to extraction. The microbiota begin decomposing the body from the inside out. They consume the carbohydrates, the amino acids and lipids that seep out of the dead cells. In most cases, this process continues uninterrupted until there is nothing left for them to eat, and they disperse into the surrounding matter. But sometimes, the process causes a build up of gasses within the body, such that it violently bursts, as in the case of so many famous beached whales.
To put this succinctly, when an organism stops providing nutrition for itself and its internal ecosystems, it dies, and its symbionts become parasites, sometimes with explosive consequences.
But this is not an essay about gut health. This is an exercise in speculation. Look around at the way we live, at the way we’ve been living for centuries now. We are drawn to extractive and parasitic modes of survival like moths to a flame. The best most of us can hope for is to become less parasitic. We actually have no idea how to be a contributing part of a symbiotic whole. If civilisation is the organism, and we are the microbes, it would appear that whilst we still live, it is dead.
Define Civilisation
Nobody really agrees on what constitutes a civilisation. Throughout the history of anthropology, the word has often been used to denote a crude distinction between an “advanced” society and a “savage” one. The problem with this is that it constitutes an open door through which all manner of ethnocentric biases and tribalistic hangovers may enter. So a civilisation then becomes any society that thinks, speaks, looks and acts sufficiently similarly to the norms which one is accustomed to. Obviously this is inadequate. Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention can see the way this type of logic has been deployed throughout colonial history. Labelling foreign peoples as primitives and savages is but a swiftly taken step toward owning them. All empires are brutal, ruthless and cruel, but savagery is in the eye of the beholder, apparently. Whatever our definition of civilisation is, it’s going to have to do better than this. We need the term to be more than a linguistic sleight of hand employed by our most primitive instinct: fear of (and contempt for) all that which is other.
Another approach we could take would be to do what lots of clever scholars would do and just ask Cicero. The word Civilisation derives from the latin civitas, defined by Cicero as “properly a political community, sovereign and independent” which was bound together by the law. But one cannot help but feel that something is lost in translation here. The law, as we know it, cannot be what binds us together, not really. Not now that it has become an entangled web of endless legal jargon; an impenetrable and ever worsening knot (to the layperson) of complicated specialist knowledge. Not now that the institutions that create and uphold it have been so obviously inept and corrupt for so long. The same problem remains if we try to define civilisation according to its systems of governance. If civilisation is found in the binding together of its citizens, we are still left with the question of what is the process by which we coherently interact? A clue to this can be found in one of Cicero’s most famous utterances, unrelated though it may (for now) seem:
“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”
(The relevance of this will be drawn out in detail later.)
Another way that people use the word seems to have something to do with the products of a society. Just try to read the phrase “ancient civilisation” without picturing a pyramid. Indeed, one could be forgiven for thinking that until very recently, the distinguishing factor between civilised societies and non-civilised was whether or not they figured out how to build them. These days we might say “look at our towering skyscrapers and expansive infrastructure! Observe our technological, scientific and medical prowess; our thriving chains of commerce and our bounteous marketplaces!” and we can imagine that this is what it is to be civil. We can conjure up our crude images of savage, ape-like hunter-gatherers and convince ourselves that to be civilised is simply to be not-that. That civilisation is on the one hand a process by which we rise up out of the muck of history, and on the other a collection of objects and achievements that seem indisputably to denote our ongoing progress away from that primordial underachievement.
Another aspect of this to highlight is that civilisation appears to have something to do with surplus. Some anthropologists would say that a distinguishing feature of a civilisation is a capacity to generate surplus food through tool use, agriculture and division of labour. Today we see these sentiments echoing through the language of economic growth. But here is an interesting moment to return to the metaphor of gut flora. Because in a living organism, surplus food (for the microbes) is a result of food coming in from the outside, a process whose continuation is in turn afforded by the act of the microbe’s digesting it. Perceived surplus is a feature of this symbiotic relationship. Whereas in a dead host, there is no real surplus, only the illusion of it. Once the corpse has been consumed, that is it.
What if, like microbiota, newly born within a dead body, we simply don’t remember what it would really mean to participate in a living one? What if we are lacking the genuinely nutritious sustenance which would be the necessary prerequisite for the symbiosis that actually defines the life of a civilisation? What might that nourishment look like? How would we know? And what nourishing sustenance is it that the civilisation has stopped consuming, that we, under different circumstances would be helping to digest?
I’m not arguing for a return to primordial naïveté. I’m not attempting to romanticise antiquity or prehistory. I’m speculating that this civilisation, “Western civilisation” may have grown out of, been fuelled by or was built on the foundation of something which has been lost, gradually, in a complex process which has taken place over the last two millennia. What that something might be will be discussed soon.
Modern Civilisation
Thus far, industrialisation has been more or less synonymous with a move (further) away from symbiosis and towards extraction. Modernisation has, in large part, brought about a movement towards consumption and consumerism. As time passes, culture becomes more ironic, more self referential, and originality seems to become more and more impossible. Our primary cultural relationship to the past is that we transform it into crude pastiche products and then consume them. Then we sit around talking about how utterly worthless our base cultural products are, taking some meagre pleasure in our ability to dissect and define the precise type of bullshit we are being sold. Creativity moves from being a source of wonder into being a source of fodder for our impressively developed critiques.
When we turn to the natural environment, the dynamics of extraction are most abundantly apparent. It’s obvious that until recently we’ve been acting more like microbiota in a corpse than we have like those in a living body. What is perhaps more difficult to stomach is that even with the explosion of ecological awareness in the last sixty or seventy years, this is still the case. We have barely changed. Even the most environmentally conscious, highly motivated eco warriors are, in the grand scheme, just as complicit in this dynamic. We might think that because we take public transport to the protest and buy our washing up liquid from the zero waste shop, we’re opting out of the deplorable behaviour of humanity. In reality, this is just conscience offsetting. The truth is we can’t opt out.
The only thing stopping our gut flora from consuming us while we live is the fact that food keeps arriving in the stomach from the outside. We are like this.
Sure, we have all kinds of bright ideas about sustainability and green energy. It’s just that we have to clear the Congolese jungle, rend the earth, and send children to work extracting cobalt from the dirt in order to produce the batteries that can make it all happen. We just need to pluck Mongolian farmers out of the countryside to send them off to work in rare earth mineral refineries so that we can sit around with our touch-screen devices, bouncing our ideas about green revolutions off satellites which in turn fall to pieces, gradually turning the empty space around our planet into an orbital wasteland; a rubbish dump of titanium and aluminium fragments, flying around our planet at 18,000 miles per hour — ten times the speed of bullets.
A couple of months ago, in my breathwork practice I experienced a vision of myself wading into this lake. I looked down to see the flesh of my legs bubble and burn away, and fell in completely. I rose up a skeleton, and looked around to see others also rising up; thousands of skeletons all moving slow and dumb towards the centre, where a great oak tree without leaves stood on an island.
I have been haunted for months by a mental image of the earth from space, clad in iron restraints, great black chains and a huge lock at the centre. I often see it when I close my eyes. I include descriptions of these experiences only so that you understand my motivation for writing this piece. This is not “evidence” for anything. I’m just letting you know what it is that I am trying to make sense of here.
When I look at these images, I see cannibalism, not sustainability. I see increasingly efficient extraction, not emerging symbiosis. I see the hubris of revolutions, but not the righteousness. I see a culture working out new ways to accomplish the externalisation of harm, not one engaged in honest attempts to grapple with it. And when I talk to the people who are possessed by the intuition that we are running out of time to turn this ship around, all too often the question that is being asked is who’s fault is it? But what if it’s nobody’s fault? What if there is just something about the context that we are all born into that predisposes us to this mode of extraction with a sense of grim inevitability?
Sociologists, ecologists, anthropologists, political scientists, economists and many other theorists will undoubtedly be quick to point to the particular factors that they are tracking which they think explain our behaviour. If we can just solve this or that problem, just widen this particular bottleneck — just work out nuclear fusion, just reorganise the welfare system, just get enough people above the poverty line, just regulate or deregulate the market properly— if we can just campaign effectively enough on the metrics that happen to be key within our own fields of specialisation, maybe then we can tip the balance. It’s not that any of them are necessarily wrong about their particular piece of the puzzle. But what if our efforts to think ourselves into a new symbiosis are doomed to fail, not because we haven’t come up with the right idea yet, but because the mode of coming to know that we are utilising is actually not capable of delivering us to that end?
It’s like we are attempting to complete a jigsaw puzzle, one with so many pieces that everybody has to complete a segment on their own before we assemble them all together. The puzzle might have many pieces missing, but we wouldn’t find that out until we try to put it all together. And this particular puzzle has the additional unusual problem of complexifying and increasing in size exponentially over time. Our strategy is as doomed as this metaphor.
The Myth of Progress
Underpinning all of our attempts to utilise our own clever inventiveness to bring about the healing that our civilisation appears to so desperately need is quite a simple mythology: Things are getting better. Or if not better, then things are expanding. Intelligence is increasing in scope and breadth. Consciousness is continually arriving at greater levels of inclusiveness. Science is always reaching greater levels of explanatory accuracy. The universe is dreaming itself always into higher states of awareness. Hard drives are getting bigger. The economy is growing. Lifespan is getting longer. AI is getting smarter. Negative entropy is complexifying at the same rate that entropy is accelerating. It comes in many forms, but this mythos can be found deeply entwined in the thoughts of everyone from new atheists to corporate lobbyists, to new age mystics. But behind every manifestation of it lies an assumption: that in our forward motion, only the unimportant will be lost; that the telos of the universe and our role within it is as predictable and assured as the second law of thermodynamics. The strongest genes, and the strongest memes survive, and this logic is sufficient to afford all manner of guarantees. The arrow of time points only in one direction, and that is where we are all going. It’s all very reassuring.
But all too few are acknowledgements that we might lose track of something important as we march forwards into the future. And it’s not only the loss of that which we forget, but also that we can’t actually even acknowledge that we forget at all. And when we oh-so-casually define civilisation as the process by which we rise up out of our primordial ignorance, we fail to notice the childishly silly hubris that this gives rise to. Because if we believe that civilisation is just the attainment of what we have now in comparison with the low resolution ideas we have about how people used to live in the past, we have set up a frame which innately classifies this — now — as superior; as more civilised. If civilisation is just about surplus, then more is more is more and more is better. It’s not a rigorous idea, and I’m not claiming that anybody would really choose to own this preconception, had they stopped to think about it. But we are scared and lazy, and this is exactly the kind of impertinent hubris that we can end up carrying around below the threshold of conscious awareness. Without knowing anything directly about the deep past, we pass judgement upon it, and we underestimate our ancestors at every chance we get.
After this it’s very easy to imagine a world where the dynamics of extraction harnessed to ever more powerful technological capacity will provide the solutions to the very problems it has created. It’s very easy to engage in attempts to “save the world” which unconsciously presuppose that the products of our “progress” are really what we are hoping to “save”. It’s very easy to talk about green revolutions through a medium which symbolically represents (in the realest sense imaginable) the very pinnacle; the cutting edge of the blade that has scored and scarred the flesh of the Earth so deeply, and without the slightest trace of cognitive dissonance: Our computers and smartphones — the very symbol of our ruthlessly efficient and deeply extractive mode of being.
What We Left Behind
This is where it becomes impossible not to mention Carl Jung and Peter Kingsley. In this striking conversation with Jungian analyst and author Murray Stein, Kingsley surfaces what I have come to see as the key insight for understanding Jung’s work, and one which is singularly critical to this essay. He plucks out a single sentence from Jung’s infamous Red Book which, when properly understood, is an idea that continues to unpack itself in one’s mind over a very long time.
“To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation”
C.G. Jung, Liber Novus, Reader’s Edition p311
You’re going to have to use your imagination in order to get this. It’s the only route of approach left open to those who are trying to remember what their ancestors have forgotten. But there is a clue to be found by examining cultures who still have intact oral traditions. An oral tradition is an insurance against forgetfulness, and the point is that it has never been about just handing knowledge from one generation to the next. That is an illusion we have created for ourselves by storing knowledge on pieces of paper. An oral tradition is not just a primitive library. It is a way of living such that life itself constitutes a ceremonial act by which the dead are continually respected, contacted, listened to, renewed and reborn.
These (as well as many other)profound ontological differences must be paid due care and attention. And if we truly stop to examine our understanding of such things, we notice something: We cannot possibly know what the phenomenology of this ontology is like. Or if you prefer words that don’t end in ology: we must not pretend to know what it is like to actually experience life through the lens of a foreign set of unconscious preconceptions about the nature of existence.
First, we have to accept that we have deeply unconscious preconceptions about the nature of existence. To be clear, unconscious means we absolutely don’t know about them. The first thing most people want to do when they hear this is to try to become aware of their own preconceptions and replace them with better ones. Stop that right now. This is a call for humility, not an adolescent challenge to hubristically redesign your ontological foundations just by thinking about it. The purpose of accepting the fact of our unconscious preconceptions is simply to help us in acknowledging that other people have different ones, and that we are incapable of knowing what that means for their experience of reality.
This is an invitation to notice just how uncertain we should really be about the nature of our ancestors’ existence, and how reluctant we should be to assume that we, for all our toys and trinkets, are any more cognitively, physically, morally, emotionally or spiritually developed. I am obviously no exception to this, so what follows is a mere speculation, but one that is trying to come from a place of humility and respect, and one that is at least attempting to look back instead of arrogantly projecting itself always and only into the future.
The Enchanted World/Death and Rebirth
The overwhelmingly vast majority of us have no ability to experience the world as an animate, enchanted place, not only populated by, but actually composed of concretely real spiritual beings. Most people won’t even see a single problem with this. And that handful of you who are reading along, nodding in agreement, remember: understanding the propositions that make up these sentences is not the same as experiencing what they are attempting (and failing!) to describe.
So imagine, if you can, that existence is in some sense powered or underpinned by a cycle of death and rebirth. This may not sound very new. But this is an invitation to feel into this in a new way. Imagine that creativity has nothing to do with novelty, but is instead about performing diligent maintenance upon a bridge to the past, across which the dead are permitted to emerge again into a new time. It’s not surprising that this is difficult to do. If you’re finding it easy, you aren’t doing it. Imagine that every birth is a rebirth. Not just the literal births. I’m not talking about our childish Western distortions of Eastern concepts of reincarnation. Every idea, every thought, every feeling, every complex, every aspect of your psycho-spiritual existence comes into being through a kind of birth, and each of these a rebirth. Imagine it. Imagine that creation is about becoming pregnant and swollen with the intentions of your ancestors, with all their unfinished business and unfamiliar priorities. Not just your inevitably narrow vision of what an ancestor is — try to take into account the absolute incomprehensible vastness of your ancestry, and imagine your life as the womb; as the vessel of their transformational gestation and re-emergence.
Can you do it? No. Of course you can’t. Nor can I. It’s not something you do with a mind. This is the whole crux of it, right here. What we have forgotten is a complete embodied way of being, not just a set of propositions. A whole style of living that brings us into a diligently enacted alignment with the symbolic underpinning of our reality and the ceaseless turning of it’s tireless engine; the cycle of death and rebirth. It’s not something that could be written down in a book, or something that could be understood by talking about it. This article is a badly translated echo of a misremembered dream, not an instruction booklet for a civilisational defibrillator.
Nor is this an argument for a simple, impossible return to a purely instinctive, primitive existence. This is a reminder that using the frame of our ontological preconceptions is not a good strategy for understanding the past. This is an invitation to try stretch the imagination like the under-used muscle-group that it is.
Learn to Notice
Go with me here. Stop merely reading and start participating in this drama. Slow down with me and pay the kind of attention which zooms in and out so wildly that it engenders a swaying kind of ontological vertigo. Do not expect things to make a narrow and precise kind of sense. Sense wider and weirder.
Try to notice the way your conditioning throughout life has given rise to a particular style of consciousness. Notice the specific character of your style of existence. Not just the surface details. Notice, for example, the unique nature of the interplay between your physical sensations and your emotions. Or step back and try to observe the utterly idiosyncratic way your thoughts organise themselves. Try to discern a soft and elusive sense of the inimitable fingerprint of your complex sensory interface with the world. Notice the eccentricity of your being — the profoundly subtle feel of it, like nothing else in the universe. Notice how fitted you are to the swirling, flexing, overlapping, multifaceted, multivalent and dynamic environments that you inhabit, and those that inhabit you. Notice the way meaning itself is defined by relationships, how the meaningfulness of any one thing is contingent upon the meaningfulness of every other thing. Everything breathes together.
Now. Feel backwards in time through your life and try to pick up on the vaguest and subtlest of senses of how all this came to be. Contemplate the scale, the sheer complexity of your personal biography; the unfathomable number of experiences big and small, traumatic, ecstatic and utterly commonplace that now, networked in some unthinkable fashion constitute your psychology, your mentality, your physicality, your sensitivity, your intuition, your intellect and every other arbitrary category we may choose to impose upon the constantly re-emerging inter-relational process that calls itself you.
Slow down the breath, close your eyes for a second. Try to sense who you are in just a little more detail. Pause.
Now ask yourself, what if all this has taken place inside a civilisation that is more like a corpse than it is like a living organism? What would that mean for me? What would my dynamically swirling, constantly complexifying, boundless, borderless, yet profoundly discernible self be fitted to? Would this explain anything about the habits and addictions that I am so attached to? Would it clarify or helpfully re-contextualise any of the struggles that I wrestle with? Focus it inwards and outwards. Flex those muscles. Try this worldview on for size.
Then imagine what it might be like if your life had been always in alignment, not only with the natural environment, but also with the encompassing psycho-spiritual reality that is beyond the grasp of thoughts encoded in language to explain or even describe. Imagine if the very character of your consciousness and the style of your daily existence were informed (from the micro up to the macro) by not only the physical ecology, but also the ungraspable psycho-spiritual ecology in such a way that your life could reflect the deepest intangible aspects of reality, and be an actual part of that dynamic oneness; a symbiont, and not a parasite.
See, that which we think of as primitive is not simply so. Symbiosis is no primitive matter. We are not microbiota. For us, being a symbiont has complex requirements. The fruits of our progress do not make us more capable of performing these duties, only less. We prefer to rig the game than learn to play well. It’s not our fault. We literally just got here and we’re trying to figure it out, scrabbling around for ideas of how we can become symbiotic again but with all the wrong tools for the job, and no idea what we’re doing and no good ideas about why.
Everything Breathes Together
All events are coordinated. So we can’t just “fix” the environment, or social inequality, or the economy, or any other category we think we can divide things up into. All things depend on each other. So we will not escape the ruin of this civilisation by picking an arbitrary handful of metrics and attempting to bring ourselves into a statistically provable sustainability. This approach is nothing but an implacable argument for a heedless, endless increase of bureaucracy. Everything breathes together. Not just everything physical. Not just everything we decide is “real”. Everything in the world is full of signs. That which is beyond our understanding is nonetheless part of the whole. That which evades our rationality simply persists in spite of it. There are things we cannot know because the way that we know things is a hammer and not everything is a nail.
Reading these words and grasping their meaning is, in this very moment, generating in you, a sensation of knowing which would trick you into imagining that you can have some kind of closure. You can’t. Working from the place of that kind of knowing is like trying to grow a forest, starting with the canopy. Trees need leaves but seeds still have to come first and roots still have to be at the bottom.
So here’s my claim, for which I am presenting absolutely nothing that I would describe as evidence. Civilisation is a reciprocal process; a bond between the living and the dead; a collective dream from which a cognitive and cultural grammar emerges which affords and characterises a particular style of life, a specific mode of consciousness, a non-arbitrary way of being, which in turn facilitates the birth of the old into a new time. To put it as succinctly as possible, civilisation is that which facilitates the widespread maintenance of the death/rebirth cycle by self aware beings. This is the nutrition that affords the symbiosis. This is the difference between a living civilisation and a dead one. It’s not just an insurance policy against forgetfulness, it’s also an insurance against the overwhelming forces of hubris and narcissism that have long since taken root in our myths of progress and accelerated our psycho-spiritual inflation with the terrifying velocity of a runaway greenhouse effect.
And the damage is done. Western civilisation has infected every corner of the globe with its forgetfulness. The co-opting and subjugating drive of global capital is a big part of it, but I’m not just talking about capitalism. This is broader. The CCP is running on the fumes of western civilisation just like the rest of us. The remaining indigenous people are growing more vulnerable to the well meaning anthropological missionaries of Western exceptionalism by the day. Even (if not especially) those diligent would be world saviours who seek to learn the ancient ways in order to reverse engineer some sort of global sustainability are the carriers of this amnesia inducing future obsession. And not only have we forgotten, but now we’ve also handed over control of our minds to machine learning algorithms that are literally designed to make us physically addicted to devices that make us forget more and more rapidly. Now that “progress” is a matter of finding ways to improve, streamline and intensify the rationality machines that make us forget faster, it is over.
So what should we do if any of this is true? Should a microbe in a dead organism do anything but consume the corpse? No. But there is one more big piece to this without which this essay would be not much more than a depressing endorsement of the amnesic extraction that my heart seems determined to grieve over. There is one more thing that needs to be said.
We have to come to terms with time, and with death.
The Vastness of Time and The Smallness of Death
Look. Maybe you don’t, but if you want to have a meaningful and intentional relationship to the sacred, or to the spiritual, the deep symbolism, or the archetypal background of reality (or insert some other word or phrase if it will prevent us from getting stuck on some semantic dispute) then something you will have to come up against is the utter vastness of the timescales that are at work. Oneness isn’t just a resource for stressed out consumers to tap into for a calming breath. It is also the endless void that threatens our very sense of self in moments of desperate clarity.
(The good news is, the transcendent is real. The bad news is the transcendent is real.)
This is not a recapitulation of some daft cliche about how small and insignificant you are. It is so much more and less than that. Because in one sense, it’s not just that you are a tiny speck in an endless ocean of space and time — it’s that the same goes for this entire civilisation. Perhaps the full collapse of this civilisation will take another century or two or more. Perhaps the idea that it’s suddenly going to go boom like one in a million dead whales is yet more hubristic exceptionalism. Perhaps we will just sink slowly down into the dark like the vast majority of other sea going organisms whose internal and external symbiosis has ceased.
But the thing about defining civilisation as that which facilitates the widespread maintenance of the death/rebirth cycle, is that it does provide us with a place from which to act, even if we are forced to conclude that our civilisation is dead. It’s very simple really, but in all likelihood we’re all still carrying some ontological preconceptions that prevent it from being obvious. So I’ll try to make it so.
You are not just this life. If you need to find some horrendously convoluted naturalistic or secular context to put this idea into before it can mean anything to you, go ahead. But just consider that the meaningfulness of what you can explain may always be contingent upon that which you can’t.
The reason I am chipping away so cruelly at our certainty; at our confidence in our ability to know things; at our hopes and aspirations; at our faith in the future and our grand plans for it, is simply because there is something deeper that I believe we can find foundation upon. You do not have to, nor could you, accomplish whatever it is you are driven by in this lifetime. The pain that we feel when we really come to know this is but the cruel sting in the tail of our temporally myopic narcissism. If it’s all about you, little ego, in this lifetime, nothing will ever be enough.
We are supposed to die with unfinished business.
Remember the unfinished business of your incomprehensibly vast ancestry. Remember the diligently maintained bridge that the renewed dead may cross. Remember the womb that swells with the unfamiliar priorities of the departed.
One day you too will be dead. When you are an ancestor of the next civilisation, what will your unfamiliar priorities be then, when they swell up in the symbolic womb of your descendants, literal or otherwise? When your unfinished business emerges as a thought, a feeling, an idea or a complex, and some corporeal being an indefinite number of centuries in the future stumbles into desperately confusing relationship with it, what then?
This is how change occurs. This is how progress happens. Not through our crude broadcasts of partial and fragmentary understandings that we try to hammer into the minds of our fellow disoriented travellers. What you experience, what you learn, what you practice and become devoted to, these do not end when you die. They are to go with you.
And even if you prefer not to bother with any grand metaphysical claims, and you want to think of all this as “only” symbolic, notice that you do not own your causes, your pursuits, your endeavours. They are processes which you participate in and your life is not their beginning and neither is your death their end. Just as your gut bacteria, once they are done eating you, disperse into the surrounding matter, so your intentions, your priorities, your urges and your ambitions seep out of you and into the world.
So eat well, you parasites, you corpse dwellers, you blinkered microbes. Bacteria live for a time even when the host is dead, so live. Stop trying to save this civilisation. It is dead, so eat it up. Just try to eat such that you may digest well. Try to eat such that when you are the food, you might be well digested. Perhaps try to prevent a buildup of gasses in the body so that we might avoid the explosive endgame. But if it is too late for that, so be it.
Obviously there is no reason at all for you to take any of this seriously. In fact, I realised about halfway through that I have really been writing a letter to myself this whole time. I have no idea who, if anybody, could understand this or would be willing to. Maybe I have convinced you that civilisation is dead. Maybe not. Either way, you have my sincere apologies, my condolences, and my thanks. Bon appétit.
