The Boulevards of Extinction. Andrew Benson Brown

to satisfy our need for anatomical novelty: pterodactyl wings, tyrannosaurus jaws, hair plugs taken from the Cladophlebis fern. We regress back through geological history to satisfy our craving for trendy new forms and reverse evolutionary functions. Eliminating back pain with trilobite exoskeletons; taking spoonfuls of primordial soup to treat chickenpox. In the act of absorbing Earth’s biological saga, future peoples will read its diary from our fossil remains.

      Usurping Half of Zoroastrianism

      Ahriman: evil spirit flowing through all other gods, god beyond gods, driving their ambition to create and rule. He is the Loneliness before the creation of the world, the egomania that craves something small to stroke it. The cruelty of Greek anthropomorphism, the better half of Ahuramazda. Yahweh’s irrational vengeance: going beyond repaying kind for kind to surpass the original affront; the original golden rule—the leaden rule. Backbone of Hammurabi’s code, founding concept of the social contract, guarantor of justice, precursor of lawsuits. And the god of the New Testament? Ahriman is in him too, killing with kindness.

      What is Aristotle’s god but a cacodaemon? The unmoved mover—modern man’s goal, his ideal, a misplaced value resulting from insufficient contemplation. Aristotle’s god cannot make anything. He knows but cannot do, the possessor of a worthless knowledge. Longing to be a god of action, he envies the hands of man. Spending all his time contemplating us, he wants more than the same in return. That he does not receive more than this, that we merely contemplate him as he does us, signals the unwitting blasphemy of imitation. A life devoted to the worship of god—this is what he desires, our celebration. He is as jealous of Yahweh as Yahweh is jealous of him.

      The life of creativity and the worship of a god—things on which Aristotle is silent but Ahriman embodies. The enjoyment of music requires a total lack of concern with the world, and Ahriman is always listening to nature for any out of tune notes, conducting his symphony of indifference. Capable of all the same feelings as Ahuramazda, he simply experiences them more intensely, in the extreme—but in regard only to himself, without sympathy. Wouldn’t flattery of this god be enough to ensure his favors? Not bound by moral imperatives, he is free to bestow his services lavishly on whom he likes.

      Why did not Darius and Xerxes invoke Ahriman before their invasions? Would he not have helped them more than Ahuramazda, who could see their ill-will and punished them for bad judgment? Would he not have overrun the more limited allegorical qualities of the Greek gods with his all-encompassing one? If it had been a battle of deities rather than men, the advantage was with the Persians.

      Why does Ahriman need Ahuramazda? If only he could have remained in his original condition—but then he would not have the opportunity to vent bad will. His weakness is that he, like us, needs first to Be so he can revel in negation, to suckle the supreme deity and throw a temper tantrum at the same time. So, for the sake of entertainment, he relegated himself to second-rate status.

      Evil’s virtue: its prevention of the surfeit of “the good,” the banality of comfort, happiness, freedom—those highest incompatible ideals. The achievement of any one crowding out the attainment of the others, there arises disappointment and regret in not pursuing an alternative. To gain happiness without freedom is the complacency of the thoughtless and the misery of the conscientious. We feel we were meant for a wholesome existence, that the world was made for our advantage; instead we are constantly at tension with it, misaligned with its indifference to our hopes, attaining only pieces of our goal. Man is a bag of whims corked by the limits of his paycheck and the fruitlessness of his prayers; only in wine, in the ablution of the liver and fogging of the brain, can he exaggerate his powers and dream everything is within his reach—awakening unto a headache that fills him with a regret for dreaming. The grasper at ideals is a weaver of patchwork absences he never intended or desired. Embracing his disappointments, he casts off any expectation of self-betterment. Confronted by the absence of eudaemonia, he experiences the side effects of the moral lifeworld; twitching and nauseous, he regurgitates his former longings and bloats himself on air. Flatulating the heavens and belching greenhouse gases, the fantasies and opportunism of the sky become a matter of abdominal distension.

      The Means Justify No End

      Like drunken archers, people always find ways to keep the bulls-eye intact by making a potential target of everything else in sight. There are certain means which determine their distinctive character by frustrating their goals. The sheer pleasure of loosing arrows, making archery an activity-for-itself that it wasn’t before, a game of collateral damage. Frustrating the end by wallowing in present satisfactions. We in fact act like drunken archers all the time—what is left to hit after the bulls-eye? The peak of skill reached, the accomplishment gained, there is no further choice but to languish in the shadow of glory’s anticlimax or to die. In such a state, pleasure comes upon those with a large quiver: merging of arrow and man in vandalism, loss of self-consciousness in sabotage and defacement. Accidentally killing a bystander produces no regret in the most inexperienced archer so long as the wine flows—even an expert can renounce his aim and plead manslaughter.

      And when the end is the activity itself, the means frustrate even that. Stepping correctly in the waltz, it becomes not a waltz, but a new dance entirely; one preempts the waltz, flies over the goal through the superior implementation of one’s own craft knowledge—a method that, designed to reach the end, establishes value for itself by conflicting with it.

      Equality of Wisdom

      People seldom meet a mathematician without baring their uvulas to him. They see his head in a halo of light, floating in a world far above their own limited comprehension. That they too, on a basic level, know some math, seems to escape them. Like all experts who have harnessed their talent, a great mathematician has simply, through long struggle, advanced beyond the basic level to a plane where they cannot follow: this winged creature has shodden hooves.

      An ethical thinker, by contrast, receives only blank stares. Everyone believes they have full access to “The Good” simply by virtue of existing. The moralist’s liability is that he cannot fall into technical language without becoming absurd. Value, like knowledge, erects walls; but this labor being done by informed experience and not high learning, the average man has leverage over the professor. If people could read Greek letters they wouldn’t hesitate to dismiss the mathematician as a mailboy trolleying symbols into a row of cubbyholes.

      But as long as only the moralist’s occupation is in doubt, he has not yet fallen as far as he can—as he inevitably will. In the realm of ethics one always holds its thinkers to a higher standard than in other fields: one expects them to live their ideas. Studying man from a plurality of angles, taking into account factors fugitive from naïve experience, bending logic to his use to the same extent that a mathematician draws on his intuition, he is expected to be his own case study. With intellect consolidating and rigorizing judgment, and judgment second-guessing intellect where it seems fallible, all the faculties of the moralist’s mind are focused on weighing his charitable donations against his volunteer work—and even then we are still suspicious of his good will. It would be absurd to demand of a logician, an epistemologist, a metaphysician, or an aesthetician that their lives be the litmus test of their theories. Nor does one think to measure the political thinker by this standard—the reader merely assumes the author votes on the side of his theory. One might weigh a religious thinker by prayers and almsgiving, if the mystic were not read chiefly because of his example—one has to have visions before he can gather a literate following of aspiring ecstatics to preach to.

      Spinoza was the only ethical thinker to ever be judged good enough for his books. The others so often turn out to be inconsiderate (Schopenhauer), noncommittal (Kant), or, in the hypocritical case of the immoralist, a good man (Nietzsche). Not that readers don’t often lose respect for other specialists when learning of controversial aspects of their biographies—Heidegger’s Nazism, Wittgenstein’s cruelty, Leibniz’s cowardice and ambition. In these cases, however, one does not feel that their ideas are undermined as a result; the astute critic never goes so far as to make an ad hominem judgment. But when the ethical thinker is not a saint his thoughts crumble to pieces. This injustice is understandable: readers of ethics, unable to rely on any fundamental advances in the formulation of proofs since the Socratic dialogues, can only corroborate