The Boulevards of Extinction. Andrew Benson Brown

man, when he travels into the country, is always looking up into the sky and marveling. But seldom does he look at the ground and wonder at its hidden layers. The stars are bright and distant, safer to contemplate than the opaque mystery beneath our feet. It takes a cataclysmic event to draw attention to our place in Earth’s history. A river dries up and shrivels a town, a city is consumed by mass wasting or falls through a crevice—these things demonstrate us to be only the most recent sedimentary strata.

      But we have yet to glean from nature’s hyperboles anything other than scientific theories and tourist attractions—hypotheses and hyperborean gawks of a summertime people. If we paved our highways with Precambrian layers of rock, we may be able to fool archeologists of a later age into thinking our strata of collapsed overpasses spanned a supereon, instead of representing the brief cross section of civilization it does—rush hour pileup of road rage and intoxication, the slow-motion perception before the sediment deposition. More likely, though, our layer of societies will be eroded into a hiatus of geologic time, leaving only an unconformity comprising igneous prehistory and a metamorphic future.

      Approaches to Misanthropy

      A certain amount of silliness is indispensable to affirming life while defying its guidelines. The silly person resists the reverences of social engagement with an extravagant cheerfulness, a spontaneous misanthropy, a sardonicism too engaged to be resentful. With the comedian domesticated in the world of entertainment (the place everyone goes after clocking out from life), the silly person—a comedian who has not been housetrained, a jester without a legitimate outlet thrown into the world of the everyday—threatens the order of things by conflating life with entertainment.

      Others do not forgive the lack of solemnity for customs that silliness implies, its inference that to disregard the rules of society is to disregard “the social animal” as a whole. Above all they resent the silly person’s lack of bitterness, the blithe approach to his dismissiveness. Not in a position to accuse the silly person of cynicism, they take revenge on him by withdrawing their respect, even trying to persuade him that simply by being silly, by lacking sufficient respect for the world, the silly person therefore lacks self-respect. The variety of mistreatment that silliness invites throughout the stages of life, from adolescent bullying to denunciations of unprofessionalism, is all aimed at encouraging the silly person to believe in his own self-denigration.

      Different in behavior and mood, but not fundamental attitude, is the curmudgeon. The curmudgeon protects himself from others by being overly serious, but at the cost of affirming nothing. His is a noble misanthropy. Dignified, responsible, dependable, it is a misanthropy that refuses to spurn the beneficial effects of pride. Ripened by reclusiveness, refusing to let the crowd eat away at him, the curmudgeon is in the end consumed by his own vanity, fattened on the very qualities he most despises in his fellow men and served up with hibachi-style slapstick.

      The affinity of silliness and curmudgeonry goes unrecognized. Observers are surprised to see them getting together for drinks; they ridicule the two sitting there, the one catching his laughter in his cups, the other watching his ice melt all night. No one would expect them to complement one another so well, each offering the other just what he needs to flourish. Silliness cures curmudgeonry of solitude, while curmudgeonry treats silliness with respect. Silliness has a free ride home, while curmudgeonry has more entertaining company than the radio. In the end they are the same person, the silly young man and the old curmudgeon defeated by the world. In anticipation and memorandum, they raise their drinks and toast to misanthropy’s principal coping skill—drinking.

      How do silliness and curmudgeonry meet? In middle age. Impatient of sobering up enough to drive home, a drowsy silliness takes the bus and finds the only available seat sticky with dried soda. Overriding his desire to close his eyes, he stands all the way home. This is the awakening of his dignity, of his need for segregation from all sitters front and back. From now on there would not be enough common humanity to tie him to the bus stop.

      Zeitgeist Mimesis

      When the spirit of an age is corrupt, one’s only option is to embody the memory of a great one—to be an old soul. But then, men do this in great ages as well; it is only the attention of their contemporaries that motivates them to go beyond the past. The oldest souls are freshest, but when eyes are closed to tradition they stagnate in bygone glories, transmitting what goes ignored. In both style and content they are relegated to the necessary but invisible status of cultural reproducers.

      The Age of the Old Souls extends even through the twentieth century. “Antiquity” now includes any cultural artifact older than six months—mass consumerism has so sped up the maturation process of society’s products that they become ancient while still in the limelight.

      The Cowboy and the Matador

      Approaching their target, one branded while the other waved his cape. When the dust settled the matador was tender, the cowboy was tourniqueted, and the bull was nowhere to be seen. After coming home each claimed victory—this culture war propaganda was the most success they could have hoped to accomplish. When two traditions lay hands on a common object their practices rip it in half, like contending mothers without a Solomon.

      Conceding to Truisms

      “People are all different.”—Yes, in three ways: they are bats, peacocks, or falcons. Some have no eyes, others appear to have a thousand, and a few have two good ones.

      “We must respect each other’s differences.”—Yes, and we do . . . after they are branded.

      Vanity, Urbanity

      Cosmopolitanism is exclusive. It leaves out the land, even geography itself. With the world contained in every major city, the sphere shrinks to a series of points. The City: coalition of egotists, fallen angels working together towards private ends. Always wanting more, each ends up with nothing. Every metropolis is a conspiracy of Nonbeing, and cosmopolitan man, as the most cultured beneficiary of this aggregate of toil and whims, is its prophet.

      What if the pluralism of our age could be condensed into a single individual embodying all of our progressive values and directions? What would this representative man be like, this distiller of many essences? Would we finally have a mediator to unite us?

      Philanthropic in desire, so is the Cosmopolitan in belief. Ashamed not to have an opinion, to be ignorant of any possibly relevant question, he goes beyond his knowledge of the world to persuade himself of beliefs regarding everyone’s place within it. That the pluralist is an inept Sherlock regarding many clues to his environment is no prevention of it from conforming perfectly to his theories of motive. Releasing his suspects before questioning with a shower of golden doxologies, he turns away from any potentially conflicting truths; if pointed out he forms an alibi from events far flung in place and time—bringing knowledge into the pluricentric realm. The important thing is to construct beliefs in conformity with his benevolence—to make himself into a solar system of unverified ideas. His ideal image is a maximal-opinionated self, an individual with all the most relevant beliefs possible. For every question put, every new choice and topic presented to him, every new hope raised, there is a state of mind to correspond to it. His states follow his minefield of wishes and justify any behavior in others, while confining his own to the caricature tropes of violin-scratching and choking on snuff. On every issue he is a multithinker, filling a high-minded view into every shoe put in front of him, denouncing the naysayers—all the while not renouncing the absent beliefs that would fit a behavior just as well, remaining concurrently inclined towards all of them. The thread between convictions and obligations becomes tangled into a knot as every stumpy-fingered Boy Scout dreams of being an Alexander with a pocket knife. So does the skeptic—hushed name of the pluralist—half-heartedly yield to all erratic dispositions, thrusting desires into situations to posit as principles, forming a bumper carousel of dogmas, an inquisition of concussive hugs. He keeps his ears raised to the media, listens to small talk for the first chance of infiltrating a conversation: an opinion is his means of espousing the good of all—himself among them. “For the sake of confidence,” he tells himself, ordering his life so that all his acts are public works. When human possibilities are woven into an infrastructure every project falls into disrepair.

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