The Boulevards of Extinction. Andrew Benson Brown

by the limits of fanaticism’s response to randomness. It is not natural disasters we have to fear most, but the anxiety of causal connections these events induce, the post-traumatic stress arising from our modes of divine representation. It would be prudent of us, therefore, to take as an axiom the nonexistence of higher beings and from there infer the necessity of inventing them (to multiply Voltaire’s statement), extrapolating different possible manifestations in the minds of madmen and equating each creed with an exclusive god. Intelligent design has the same form as the description of intelligent design—and we will not discriminate between them. As a matter of plausibility we will restrict our imagination to what has been institutionalized. A run on the bank or a supermarket riot will not be initiated by fringe cults or bygone myths; the popular imagination grasps only at the pregiven and readily available. To estimate our range of ends, we need only take orthodox religious traditions and vary them slightly—the evolution of deranged charisma is only a hop away from spirituality’s present customs. The range of our beginnings, too, should be taken into account, since our final condition may closely resemble an initial one. As far as the content of our thought experiments in mass destruction, certain traditions will be more reasonable to draw on than others. The eastern religions are too benign, peaceful worldviews that direct all violence inwards—Buddhist monks only set themselves on fire, never others. Moving westward, polytheism is found to be another unlikely candidate for collective irrational dread, given its limited adherents and minimizing nature—its practice of placing a few on the altar to avoid a universal apocalypse. A heap of gods are more suited to our planetary persistence: they need something to sport with. Monotheism, by elimination, is the most credible aspirant to our downfall, and our surest guides to ascertaining God’s strategies of creation and destruction are his scribes and theologians. The tradeoff between impotence and malevolence is shored up with transcripted guarantees.

      Prosaic Regression

      Within flux there are always unnecessary constants. In every period and place one finds variations on the same things which one feels should never have been there, but are. It indicates the process for everything that recurs but shouldn’t, things for which there is no good reason or purpose. Across time the same types of objects stagnate, repeatedly playing little to no vital role in events. They constitute the refuse of every epoch. Behind these things, similar but never quite the same, lies a common force of irrelevance, mundaneness, vulgarity—an elan trivial. It is the rule of continuity in change, an essence of rubbish imminent in everything. The process of the original void, it flows through all the world’s temporal parts. In each stage of the world’s degeneracy, in any given society, it manifests its trash, slowly but surely piling up, imperceptibly rolling forward and unfolding its genealogy of decay. Against the current of existence is the current of nonexistence. Running opposite the stream of life, the stream of languishing pours from the other mouth of spacetime, part here, part there. The river of slime gurgles forth, decomposing every leaf blown onto its banks and rusting every city caught in its path.

      Beginning in germs, passing through generations of protoplasm, the imprint of the germ is ever present down through the most advanced organisms—especially in the most advanced organisms. As life “advances,” its diverse inclinations conflict more and more across individual creatures, each of whom wants life for itself. Of the bifurcations of the trivial impetus in creatures, only its human highway has been wide enough to allow the full breadth of its waste. This original inertia each individual retains and uses to further personal contentment—listlessness and apathy.

      Under it, life is means without an end. There is only a beginning, an impulsion that perpetuates itself through biology. Looking back, we can’t say it was all “for” something, but neither are we at liberty to look forward to our own futures. The impulse is an instinct towards deceleration, the future destined to be simply a constriction of the present state of affairs.

      Among the most developed lines of evolution, those rare, highly structured organic systems with everything to lose, there is one that can choose to lose it.

      Civilization: confluence of the streams of life and languishing, paragon and nadir of consciousness, spacetime’s most advanced manifestation and a microcosm of the universe’s red shift. In ascending periods—Vico’s Ages of Gods and Heroes—where organization is the rule of procession, the trivial impetus is latent, present but on the margins. But organization peaks in the Age of Men, at which point decomposition takes over and initiates a descending period, where the trivial impetus proceeds through division and strife. It splits up ever more, with life scattering in manifestations increasingly antagonistic, less and less complimentary. The discord within the civilized species goes on increasing in proportion as it extinguishes the lesser ones and confines their last descendants to zoos. The machine churns out pop art, expressing generic desires in found junk, consecrating the trivial impetus on the aesthetic level.

      The conscious intellect: from its reawakening in the renaissance through its optimization in the enlightenment, to its numb sluggishness today, the sedated thoughts of twenty-first century man are tied together by life’s Lethe, trickling onward in ever-renewing deterioration, every contemplation fading into a moment’s amnesia.

      The very freedom which allowed men to create and achieve will, when life has been made safe enough, sets in motion an automatism of the inconsequential: behaviors that begin as coping mechanisms for surplus leisure and gradually congeal into sloth until the last freedom—the freedom to move—is taken away. In a late civilization the evolution of the vegetable indicates the fundamental direction of life.

      Towards the Age of Plants: starting off by feeding on others, people end by feeding on themselves. Desperate to stave off boredom, they flutter about through a haphazard and directionless kinesis, a hubbub of syncopated accents. Fatigue setting in, their actions decrescendo, stored up energy accumulating and converting into mass. Without the need to expend themselves obtaining food, the creatures bend towards the lampshade, consuming starch in order to produce the sunlight their curtains obstruct. Perfecting the method of growing without moving, their consciousness dims in proportion to dispelled locomotion, the habit of breathing all that distinguishes them from their furniture.

      Our separation from the lower organisms is regrettable but not insurmountable. The path to man having been staked out by evolutionists, the path from him can be left to the priests. Gradually deemphasizing our traits in the order of our most sinful tendencies, starting with the spine. Flopping on our bellies, degraded to invertebrates, a species stripped of its pride is ready to be firmly rooted in the soil, then reduced to ashes—reunion of animal and vegetable inclinations. Science and religion are not so incompatible after all; perhaps God intended to enter the world only to smash man into nothing, leaving Creation to gravity, heat, and slime. The Father insinuates himself into planetary influence as the finality which nature forgot to incorporate into her original impulse. His good works, far from being evidenced everywhere, leave their mark only on paleontology.

      The memory of humanity’s former verdure lingering in a few restless species, they make a last ditch attempt to reestablish freedom. The inquisitive, like ivy vines, inch their way up the fence towards the sun, snaking tendrils into the past to guide them; while the enraged, like Venus fly traps, close their lobes on the last remaining flies buzzing about. Climbers and insectivores, self-actualizers and revolutionaries—the last remnants of sensible, conscious life swaying in the wind.

      Perfect Fit

      Man no longer works at what isn’t already abbreviated. The cotton shirt rack packed to go, he throws his suitcase into a hot wash cycle, dries it on high, and slips it into his pocket. The button-ups will look cute on his abridged girlfriend. Anatomy and female liberation: two embellishments that make his Barbie doll the superior other half to his own reduced existence.

      Revising the Combat Myth

      A single god has no great rival to combat in the beginning; even snapping his fingers to turn on the light is an overexertion. A thought and it is done—no great challenge. This is why we were created, to have someone to fight. We are a compensation for the boredom of the first five days. Rigged struggle between a force of nature and the insects, God weighed the dice and loaded his boxing gloves. With the dual gifts of free will and the tree of knowledge, the Father invites us to become like him only to slap