Children of Apes and The Pleistocene

Section 3, Chapter 2 from my latest book, Stagtine

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Stagtine, 29. Summer Drumlins & Nancy

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Image from The United States Foundation for the Commemoration of the World Wars.

Children of Apes

“Give me a wilderness no civilization can endure,” writes Thoreau. But we have put wilderness in a box. The same, slamming velvet box that once housed our diamond and gold rings.

We set wilderness over there, behind that fence. Like a local, used bookshop, wilderness draws nostalgia on the passerby but we keep walking on, for used bookshops contain poor lighting and poor lighting struggles to make anything glitter. There is nothing of value there, inside those old, papered walls. Those pallid words of forgotten worlds.

But our own walls are now closing in. They are pallid in their own ways. The privilege of modernity is beginning to crumble as we realize that the glittering technological age that garishly ushers us into a migraine infused blindness that is really just the age of human ascendency is not compatible with a finite world, a living world of limits. We are told that we are on the front lines of the Anthropocene, that our work helps The Cause, that we are saving the world, that the chancellor needs our blood.¹ We open our eyes, just above a squint, and find that we are not unlike the unlucky youth of old, those barely molding under mounds of rusty Earth, standing in aisles of death, trenches good for nothing but trench foot. We see a world on the edge. We see a world that we do not want. We see an end, a death seeping and streaming like a toxic, green ghost into our cratered Earth, our piss-stained trenches, the shit welling up around us, our western front.

Not unlike the soldiers of the first World War, we are discouraged by the popular travesty of green movements without purpose and purpose without any movement. Today’s movements are the conscripted youth of another war. We have returned to the unimpeachable industry of amassing conferences that inspire, papers that conflict, truculence against the machine but not defiance against its source. We have largely given up the attempt to ground this work, once amassed in theory, into any larger, more solid, living, or complete reality. We say Earth needs saving, that her climate is in a state of emergency, beckoning the end of the world as we know it. Billions will soon be homeless, refugees of climate disasters. We say holistic agriculture will save the day and then we complain when it does not adequately fill our pocketbooks, as if five-hundred-year- old white oaks or million-year-old meadows care for our capitalism, our papered profits.

We created this: not the climate but capitalism. And now it destroys us: not the climate but capitalism. Like Ilúvatar spoke to Melkor as he led him into the Void in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, “And thou, Melkor, wilt discover all the secret thoughts of thy mind, and wilt perceive that they are but a part of the whole and tributary to its glory.” Like Melkor, we will never meet this glory because we have long missed the tributary. Like Melkor, our minds are dark. Our existence as moral beings seems dependent, like oceans on moons, upon the existence of an order of things. Trees grow up and out to touch the light; grasses wave when the wind blows; acorns fall in their time. Nature’s order forms our own. This is reflected, like light on moons, in what wells up within us, what Charles Taylor calls in his great work, Sources of the Self, “desires, sentiments, and affinities.”² Earth is the source of truth but knowable only through the individual self’s experience of kinship—community. It is not self-expression that creates self-understanding, but self-understanding through a community’s expression, interbeing, and communion with Creation that all is created. The self understands itself through nature because nature is the self. But this can only be true when the interbeing of Creator and Creation are well joined and celebrated—the divine vocation is order’s foundation—but industrialism and its capitalism is the monistic materialism of separation and it is ravaging Earth, separating her people.