The Boulevards of Extinction. Andrew Benson Brown

      If I ever have children I want them to be beautiful little fools. This way there will be no byproducts of an overly-developed consciousness to cause me embarrassment—whispers of therapy sessions, madhouse holidays, poetry readings. My children will simply want to have fun looking good, and they will bring me pride from the envy others feel for them. For what reason would a man want to have children, if not to reinforce a lifetime of intentional failure with a few successful accidents? Failure must not be undone, but augmented by its juxtaposition with success . . .

      “Given the way your father is, it’s amazing how normal you turned out!”

      Translation: “Why do great creative minds so often pour all their imagination into their work and leave none for the fruit of their loins?”—Could it be because they need to achieve some sort of conventional recognition in their own lifetime to give them the freedom to keep failing? One cannot push originality into a realm of elite incomprehension without the emotional support of ignorant and oblivious relatives. The remorselessness of condemnation—from connoisseurs as well as the general populace—needs its parallel in a close circumference of pity for the incompetence in which one has lived. Every offensive personality trait and repulsive feature of physiognomy that can be presented as evidence of being cursed by the gods is, so long as one has sired a few beautiful little fools, one more lump of dust under the carpet.

      The Ground

      Unlike Kafka, Joyce, or Pessoa, I have no native city to transfigure into literature. Nor, like Thoreau, will I assimilate the wilderness into picturesque descriptions. My only alternative is to channel my experiences of the in-between life, and only provincial writers do that—artists whose souls have shrunk to the size of a town census or sprawled out in pointless suburban languishing.

      It has been said Pessoa is the “writer of Lisbon,” but it is a trivial thing to encapsulate metropolitan minds and manners. His was a much greater achievement: he is the flâneur of the sky. No one has ever captured its changeable oblivion as he did, how the strolling of storm clouds reflect his inner being. He looked without any intention of consuming the rain they had to offer—without any concern whether there really was any rain at all. He did not merely describe the sky, his inner being created it.

      But where is the poet of the ground? The bottom half of Tiamat—that is something we are more familiar with. We were never intended to soar through the air; the sky is not high enough for our dreams. Our natural environment is the soil that ties us to one place even as we imagine others, the desolate beaches that tease us with their horizons, rocks that jut high into the air and, once scaled, make us want to fly. The poet of the ground would not describe personal dreams, but the trances and delusions of others as contrasted with their pitiful realities; he would not use the earth as a symbol for himself as such, but for the composition and granularity of his people. What is humanity, after all, but a rock at one extreme and sand at the other? The unbreakable exception is eroded by a lapping tide while the rest pour through God’s fingers.

      Human Languishing

      Of all life forms, only the plant possesses negative liberty in the fullest degree possible. Free from the hunt for nourishment and mates, liberated from work, desire, and friendship, it has all the time in the world to do exactly what it is incapable of—to contemplate. The counterpart of the plant in the animal world is the philosopher. Worse than the voluptuary—who through thoughtless pleasure descends to the animal life—the philosopher does not seem on the surface to be a depraved creature. He is free enough from the menial tasks of life to seek exactly what he can never achieve—vegetation. The first man to shirk off his labor onto the back of another, solving the problem of having to work, was faced with the new problem of what to do. The result was the synaptic tremoring of our vexations, thought thinking itself, the frustration of every action. This in itself involves no depravity of character: one is absorbed into an ideal of beauty or truth, with the form of the object becoming identical to the form of consciousness. But an exclusive focus on the task can only be maintained for so long until awareness divorces itself from the activity and creeps back in, time speeds up, and anxiety returns. Heightened consciousness impedes effortlessness. One can only be happy when not thinking of oneself. The philosopher’s contemplation—which he trumpets as the ultimate instrument of positive liberty, the crown of evolution which overcomes all obstacles—far from fostering tranquility (let alone eudaemonia, or even happiness), drives him into a frenzy of restlessness, discontent, and burnout. Thus does a total, unified freedom mock transcendence and become its own prison. It rockets one to the fullest actualization of his purpose and reveals it to be not only a limitation of life, but the very antithesis of his dream. Only when philosophers can grow into acorns, when their good spirit overcomes humanity to attain floral flourishing, will personality overcome destiny. The “man of character” is realized in one who relies on the weather alone. In the first stage of evolution we climbed; in the second, we slide.

      If philosophy in it pure form is unable to address eudaemonia, as Williams concludes, what is it these thinkers are capturing when they advise us on values? Might such a willed negligence towards the lower affairs necessitate, not a “good spirit,” but a display of cacodaemonia?

      Anderesis

      Be a monster of imbalance. Deformity of mind makes up for even bodily deformity by hoarding the world’s ugliness. Amoral sense is the court of passion, the framework of daring. The earth’s consolation prize, it turns dismal failure into a badge of success. It woos evil obliquely, though evil is too confused to acknowledge the signs; with some knowledge, it simulates unknowing. Its lack is never noticed, while its opposite is praised with empty words and never followed. Its influence on life is seldom acknowledged, through everything good is a side effect of it.

      Rise of the Anti-Villain

      Most people are basically good. I speak not of Rousseau’s man in nature, but the modern goodness that thrives in a complex affluent society—one stemming not from willpower but likelihood. The goodness of non-interference, of deference to law and the division of labor. “Leave it be,” these good people say, “the firefighters will put it out when they get here. Everything will probably be fine.” But nothing is ever simply allowed to run its course, let alone flourish. Those who live and let live are vulnerable to the hunter in the shadows. A restrained Epicureanism, a “going with the flow”: it is this mildness of character, this apathy disguised by pleasure, which makes these advocates of peacetime morality basically good. Those who grow up among the Sybarites, their sympathies dulled by specialization and suffering at a distance, are quickest to revert to the survival instinct when available resources become scarce; at bottom both inclinations are governed by a radical selfishness. Whichever one happens to be dominant is simply a matter of macroeconomics.

      No classical hero was ever selfless. Saving the life of another was a sideshow of his glory, confirmation of an antecedent arête. Chivalry is killed when laurels are handed out for small acts of altruism. Heroes are a psychological privation in a society that rebukes merit; the hole needing to be filled, it is covered with a rug. Replacing bravery with common sense, the statistical savior exploits a moment of rescue time during a red stoplight and wins the glory of an evening news spot.

      To be superlatively evil: to have all the most civilized vices and all the most dangerous virtues—characterization too customarily human to be stranger than fiction today. From this breach the anti-villain emerges as a balance to the emergency-rescue citizen. His opposition is as much a product of randomness as the champion’s—casual irresponsibility of littering an underfoot banana peel to thwart the daring bystander rushing towards the crosswalk target. Cast in a supporting role without auditioning, the anti-villain is an antagonist whose only villainous qualities are neglect and incompetence. Not Darth Vader, but a storm trooper with a jammed blaster. His only threats are mordant remarks delivered to amuse a world without steadfast malice. With irony in his soul he commits feats of misdemeanors, deflating a murder mystery into manslaughter. Evil by default, he is the most fascinating character in the absence of a candid and upright protagonist. A bungling villain is always more interesting than an accidental hero.

      An International Allegory

      The foreign vices obtained passports to countries that