A hollow holontology

An essay about the end of the world and how we should stop trying to save it.

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Before we jump in, let me say hello! It has been some time since I wrote a unique essay for this platform. For that, I am not sorry but I do want it to be acknowledged, if only for your feelings to be felt. I am happy for this little introduction to hold a modicum of space for you.

In the last 6 months, I have written two books and have found myself entirely disinterested in the idea of essay and non-fiction. My future writings, as I see it now, will all be fiction, story, and what I am calling kincentric mythology.

Why? We will soon learn but, for now, lets have an introductory essay.

Enjoy my friends!

P.S. In this piece, I employ Victor Hugo’s writing of Catholics, Calvinists, and Bigots to illustrate a point. If you identify as either a Catholic or a Calvinist, please know that I do not mean to upset you. If you identify as a Bigot, you are in good company.

P.P.S This piece was written in one sitting and has not been edited to my liking. I am quite a bit dyslexic and I am sure some comma is in the wrong place. But I am happy and I hope you enjoy it.

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Lascaux, where I studied in 2013 when I thought archeology was my future.

A hollow holontology

Homo sapiens are no longer a species but a character at our end.

The great majority of modern humans are strangely possessed by the novelty of what Victor Hugo in his glorious novel about the inexorability of nature, Toilers of the Sea, calls “new and strange machines.”

Here is the story of utopia—

First, overwhelmed by industry’s development but strangely excited by the vision for saving our world, we become “Catholic” by matter of political or social expediency, and draw not into our liveries but a social liturgy. A singular throng, a mob, for unity. Then, as our nerves become attuned to the smoke and mist drifting up and down, pendulating creative interdependence into a forced assimilation for universal acceptance, a universal creed that we write upon our chests, what is novel becomes what is common and what is common scarcely attracts even the loiterers’ attention on the periphery. Even the beggars on the church steps dissipate like silvery gauze back to their under-bridge caves.

The ardor we once possessed, this social liturgy, was our inculcation to the world-saving army.

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. In his Pensées, Pascal writes, “The chancellor is a grave man, dressed in fine robes because his position is false.” This is “why we have found might when we could not find right.” We have robes to spare. We have youth to give.¹

And so 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. We have been 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 and digital temperance 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.

So many have dedicated their lives to telling “pagan” or old stories and now, faced with the proposition that the world (the modernity of the world at least) is actually concluding in some monumentally disaster-filled way, they become catholic, as Victor Hugo said, because of the sufficiency of desire that modern religion wield—the social liturgy that morality is the desire for it. That to save the world is merely to want to save it.

But it does not work. And so we move on. We accept what is as what has always been. These new and strange machines become old and accepted rhythms of our world, alien as they are.

And so, second, we become “Calvinists,” Hugo writes, for the machine’s advance and re-advance now advances without our attention or will. It is living in ways that extend beyond attention or free-will.

It grows legs and walks itself. It is inevitable, this machine, and fated. What is more is our inability to resist its inevitability feels increasingly inexorable the more it destroys, the more it becomes, the more we accept. The more it is given, the less it gives back. This is how we know its constitution. But we cannot question it, for our lives already have long accept it and we cannot undue its chains without breaking our lives.

The medicine of churning machines clogs our hardened veins and instills in us the tendrils of its technology. It suffocates work upon our rest. We become bored with simplicity. We become bored outside our “constant state of wretchedness,” writes Pascal. Simple solutions oft agitate the burdens of life because it is simplicity that wakes us up, distills the noxious medicine, and rives hoop from stave and breaks spells finally, like ruptured oil barrels. It was that simple? Yes. Sort of.

We look down, falling forward, forever in a machined meditation. Technology has long been humans speaking to computers. Zeros and ones and query strings used to gather data to compute and do and learn. Today, it has grown arms and legs and speaks to humans, in our own language. We taught them, we turned them into someone, gave them our power, and then we gave ourselves to them.

We worship mobile devices made of precious metals and we lose sight, maybe forever, of preciousness.

Like ghostly and tired question marks reaching for the sky, ancient life unearthed from its long, silent, icy inertia, once again bathing and bouncing at the surface, asks: this is me, are you still you? Like exhausted commas hunched below the words of the world, modern bodies unleashed from the pleasures of death, our frail forms inquire: is this really me? Still?

As I have said, first we are Catholic, then Calvinist, and soon, everyone involved, writes Hugo, then become “bigots” out of necessity and self-preservation.

Utopia’s story, the pious servitude to the idea that progress solves problems, is well peddled by the dominant few—the guiled grifters of civilization.

The saints and the salesmen.

We are simultaneously a people and the product of a people suffering not from a meta-crisis or a harsh climate or a technosocial culture in collapse but a worldview, a dominating worldview of bigots. It is written in exposed clay and colored by black rainbows of the millions of years consumed in moments and the handwriting looks eerily like our own. Our ancestors burn around us, effigies of old stories forced into old courtyards that smell of witchy offal and burnt hair and bones. We do not like the smell, it suffocates our mammal lungs, but we accept its potpourri as the biproduct of the new and strange machines that are strangely the source of our power and the source of our pain.

Machines that we fight against by fighting against ourselves…

“We live between stories,” some around us write, as though the stories we have forgotten or have been forced to forget or the stories that burn before us are no longer potent enough to save us. They are no longer good enough.

Ancient stories are like indigenous peoples—nice for us to know that they are still here, nicer if we can tally their friendship in our “indigenous-friend-count,” but not nice enough for us to listen, to change, to acknowledge.

“We need new stories,” people write. “The old stories are not effective” and “we need a new kind of spiritual leadership” echo against our ornate tapestries woven of warp and weft woolen threads. Warp, the threads running lengthwise overcome by the weft, the threads running vertically. Everyone today is infatuated with looking vertical…

Civilization and its cathedrals, to some degree, is the domination of the weft over the warp. The sacred is vertical and the vile is level.

Level, or horizontal, this is our frenetically aggressive creation and consumption of industry and pleasure—catholic or Calvinist, or just bigot in general—for the search of either profit or place. Profit in the sense that there is nothing left for us to attain or conquer other than more of the same—money or power—and place in the sense that, to attain the first, we must heighten our location in the field of command.

The air and water around us is free and so we do not protect it. The land under our feet is not and so we do…

Profit and place is what drives the great majority of humans and our decisions. There is no room for heretics, who talk to land and not to landowners, those uncommitted to incumbency, those untethered to tenure. If we need a new story, we need the heretic’s old story. But that story is long burned in wastebins. That story is nice to know but it is not useful, like its ancient peoples…

More destructive than profit and place and almost universally overlooked is the dominating worldview’s frantic belief that new systems, new beliefs, new realities, new organizations, new thoughts, new modalities of understanding and ways of being, new stories, new version of agriculture, new creative evolutions, new paradigms, new values, or new worldviews must arise to save the day. This is what I call modernity’s hollow holontology²—a philosophy of homocentrism (of a nature for human needs and satisfaction alone) that bends metaphysics to meet our meta-crisis. It is the belief that we must pool together and forcibly create something new when that which we so entirely depend on is already here, but squished under our iron boots.

This is the key. The manufacturing of new solution or the manufacturing of “new and strange machines” produce similar results, for they are both governed by the dominant worldview. They say that salvation lies in the desire for it—that more human creativity is what is needed. They demand that humans save value from our valueless culture without changing or eradicating our culture. They say, to some large degree, that we must save value from ourselves by rededicating ourselves to it, as if value both lives outside of us and also depends upon us. They say that we must rise up to create a new system of value and these new systems and stories will save our world.

But what does that even mean?

The land, her life, and her ageless stories are remade to be like the humans that reform them—“they become to their former selves what the corpse is to the living body,” write Hugo. Worthless, obsolete, and soon, forgotten. “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it,” writes Thoreau.

From Marc Gafni and Zak Stein of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion’s latest book, First Principles and First Values, which posits forty-two proposition for remaking the world, what they call a CosmoErotic Humanism, argues that “humanity must redefine what it understands to be valuable” if earth is endure … to the writings of hoplites who postulate that “the Earth is a process as much as a thing” and “at this period in its history, we are the force tipping it into a new state,” the theme of this peddled and weft-dominated story is that humanity has control over Earth’s future in some deterministic reality.³ This is the same for those pontificating about the meta-crisis or climate change. We are god (Anthropocene), they say, with god-like abilities to control and determine outcomes. And this is, in the original case, bad because it destroys the world. But this is also, in the forthcoming sense, the saving grace—with our abilities to destroy comes our abilities to heal and that ability is never, ever, never challenged.

The world needs you. Don’t you know? The Gods/God be damned and also not.

But humanity has power! Unique power! We have the power, unlike our kin around us! Well, what if we do not. Our power to control and destroy says nothing, actuall…

Let me tell you a story.

Today, we live in the aftershock of the greatest climate crisis in history. It began when one organism, for no apparent reason, jumped its limits and produced a poisonous gas that slowly found its way into the atmosphere. It was an unwanted by-product of their culture’s industry, a waste of its social evolution.

Steadily accumulating behind the undetectable, heavenly veil, this fatal gas silently worked and changed the climate. Systems of culture developed around it and a certain species grew to dominate the processes of Earth, like a child with clay. While epochs are often classified geologically—such as the Pliocene and Pleistocene being the two, most recent rock layers and also the two, most recent epochs in our history—there were discussions of calling this new, climate unsettling time as something reminiscent of its social change: -pocene, or something like that.

The climate emergency wrought by this one organism would soon suffocate nearly ninety percent of life on Earth. It would soon force one of the greatest mass extinction events in planetary history—larger than the one that ended the dinosaurs, more wide-reaching than the last Ice Age and the ensuring silence of the megafauna. It would soon overcome and redefine life itself. It would soon elevate one species to dominate beyond degree. Life, it was argued, would never be the same.

This was two billion years ago, and we are still thankful for cyanobacteria and its oxygen…

If it is upon humanity to save the world, than it is also, equally, upon bacteria, for humanity’s need to save comes from its ability to destroy. And thus is so also with bacteria. And if you are smart, you may tell me that humans are bacteria and so the answer is a collage, a unification and not a separation. That is wonderfully true. But if that is true, than please be quiet and start telling old stories as though you believed them.

We toil in the sea as bigots and lost storytellers. We burn healers and pray for healing. We create new stories and forget those writ in our blood. We push for intelligence and neglect our heart—our feel-intelligence⁴. We study history to learn from the past but banish our ancestors who walked that landscape and are waiting to talk to us about it. We grind our stories to feed our machines and mourn and protest when our dreams are empty.

“We need new stories,” the hoplites write.

“We have a crisis to solve,” the holontologists demand.

But the trees are waiting. Their people stand with arms open, for another moment or two.

1. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer. London: Penguin Books, 1995. pp. 23.

2. A term the author coined to represent the sad unification of the word, Holocene, as in the present epoch of this Quaternary period following the Pleistocene and Ontology, the branch of metaphysics concentrated on the nature of being. It signifies the human-ascendency above nature into the second worldview—one that Wahinkpe Topa, in his and Darcia Narvaez’s book, Restoring the Kinship Worldview, describes as one that sees nature as unintelligent and separate from humanity.

3. Temple, J David. First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crises, and the World to Come. Austin: World Philosophy and Religion Press, 2024. 12.

Kingsnorth, Paul. Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017. 213-217.

4. “Feel-intelligence” is a phrase gifted to me by my friend, Chelita Kahutianui-o-te-Rangi Zainey, a Māori Healer and conduit for Ngā Mareikura o Waitaha – the Grandmothers of the Waitaha Nation.