Currently, the atomic Doomsday clock is set at 3 minutes to midnight. Noam Chomsky points this out every now and again, as he uses the metaphor of Minerva’s owl to describe his current reconnaissance over the soon-to-be-ruined world. Midnight is death. We are nearly there.
Every wide-eyed loon hack of a prophet from Malachi to Terence McKenna has told us that we are living at the end of history, the final hours before apocalypse, the moments and the motions preceding revelation.
Let me tell you now that I too think I am at the end of history, and David Brooks is the last man! “Cling to stability” he writes pathetically, lip quivering, receding into his NYT column. “Hillary or Jeb, Hillary or Jeb, statesmanship, leadership, stability,” a pale tongue swipes the cracked lips of the faithless observer, the man without wisdom, without prescience, without a conception of the big picture.
Noam Chomsky is an atheist and for this reason he has endorsed Hillary Clinton. Noam Chomsky believes in free will. He believes in human action. Indeed, he has said in an interview with Jacobin magazine: “By now, there’s a pretty strong consensus among scientists who say that a large majority of the remaining fossil fuels, maybe 80 percent, have to be left in the ground if we hope to avoid a temperature rise which would be pretty lethal. And it is not happening. Humans may be destroying their chances for decent survival. It won’t kill everybody, but it would change the world dramatically.”
Let me mince no words – climate change is a completely natural phenomena. In the world of modern science, human hands are natural, human actions are natural – the moon landing was a natural development of the mathematics behind matter. How could it be anything but? Unless you believe in angels and archangels, human ‘free will’ is an extension of the same principles that guide all matter, all the universe. Even if you are not a determinist, how can you possibly argue that human beings are defying the will of nature? That climate change, industrial society, environmental exploitation, is in any way contradictory to the natural development of history? Explain to me in what theology apes would have the power to defy the stars that made them.
We do not possess such power. In fact all history is a tale of death and resurrection, and the industrial evolution, the Pax America, the age of climate change, is the apex of the development of human hands. We have made our own ruin with this fuel we have burned, the fuel given to us by the dirt that made us and in our meat brains we have decided to use, to bring down the tower we have made, to poison the seas and sink Manhattan and destroy our empire from the inside out. So be it. It is a necessary development of history. Noam Chomsky would only support the incrementalist stance of Hillary Clinton over the ‘fuck it all over prepare for the fall’ stance of the Republicans because he is an atheist, and because he has no faith in nature. I am Manichean to the core. I have faith in death as an answer to excess. And in their hearts so are all the climate change deniers. Deep down, they know they are fulfilling the will of their Christ, these Republicans, to crucify all the world in climate disaster and the next Wall Street collapse. The collapse of the global economy will be the natural extension of the industrial era, of the Anthropocene period. The collapse of the global economy will be the capstone to inspire the next stage of human history.
Act I, dust and stars. Act II, slime and primordial ooze. Act III, human hands, the rise and fall. Act IV? Spirit unbound.
Thoughts are not created by brains. I am no dualist – thoughts live within the material universe – but they are not made by apes. They fall into our heads as signals and we merely choose the channel, the stream. All humans are directed by a series of interlocking celestial streams that take the form of language. A mad hypothesis? So is a moon landing. From a scientific perspective we are ground-dwelling mammals that have inexplicably risen to challenge the surface of the Earth with nuclear weaponry and ecological disaster. We are preparing for the end of the dinosaur age, again, but on a smaller timescale, because as history evolves it moves faster and faster.
The thoughts that have guided us to this point will not abandon us. Incrementalism and reform will not work because the end of one era is in sight. As Terence McKenna wrote, “we are a species preparing to burn its bridges and soar into the stars”. Cripple the Earth, leave it behind. Leave David Brooks behind, and his insistence upon his ape ‘stability’, as if he cannot see the end before his eyes.
The police, the poor, the global economy, nuclear warheads and the shifting acid in the seas are the answer to the 21st century.
The end will be a new beginning, as the Christians foresee, as Ted Cruz in his unconscious knows, as he pushes toward the end.
What happens to us all on an individual level, death, is about to happen to the entire human world. But I do not think death is the end. And neither is this. A collective death, the death of an era, the consummation of a resurrection, the spirit of the Christ, the crucifixion of Wall Street and with it all it has made. Its ethic, its ethos – spiritual regression in the name of material power.
It is this spirit that is doomed and it is human hands that are dooming it. The undoing of our current civilization will bring the powerful to their knees and they will see in their own hearts a mad emperor. In the ruin, true inner change will set in. Only after death can the whole world be ‘born-again’, in a moral sense, in a spiritual sense.
David Brooks has already spat out his coffee and closed the tab. I am a madman. But someday he will look out his window and see the city burn, by human hands, as natural phenomena. He will see his own flesh waste away and he will wonder if all he ever was, all he ever had, was a pathetic grasp at something still, something that would not move.
But everything moves, and it moves us toward its end. The end of the thoughts that guide these words, that guide the death of the planet. Even in the wake of apocalypse, at the end of the dinosaur days, one mouse still survived, and one mouse gave way to the whole world of words and skyscrapers.
Let us not forget what death is, what it does.
Let us not be so narcissistic as to think we can prevent the flow of time. Noam Chomsky has no faith in nature. I do not blame him. But human beings are not archangels, as he would tell you. So we truly have no control, as he would also tell you, over what gets pulled from the Earth. In theory we do, but nobody is giving up their iPhones, their flights, their global economy.
I don’t expect them to.
Curtain call, let’s bring it home Donald.
Taking the ovweivre, this post hits the spot