Nathaniel Perrin

Photo by [Rana Obaid](https://www.behance.net/robaid).

Science fiction is a genre with a unique capacity to encompass the wide panorama of the highs and lows of human writing. The most elaborate and imaginative scenarios on the one and and some of the flattest, most contrived characters and dialogue on the other, often within the same book. *Dune* being a classic example of this.

I had a science fiction phase in younger times, primarily characterized by H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov.

It is a phase I have long since departed, and my reading journeys have taken me to many places since then. Only recently have I returned to this genre which so pricked my interest as a child. First through Houellebecq a few years ago then through Liu Cixin's *Remembrance of Earth's Past* trilogy, one of the most thoughtful blendings of Clarke and Asimov's imagingings of the distant future.

Now as I read through Jack Vance's tetralogy *Tales of the Dying Earth*, I am rediscovering a new aspect to the world of science fiction.

One expects early-mid century science fiction to be rather pulpy, so I was quite astounded by the masterful quality of Vance's work, particularly his firm grasp of human nature and the cycles of history in his sharply paced prose. His psychological analysis is fathoms deeper than the engineer-brain characters of Asimov and those who primarily write people to be the levers of their logic puzzle stories with near-zero interiority.

Vance's outlook carries a heavy weight of cosmic dread that few writers can properly convey. The feeling that the world, or at least the human race is old and dying, that there is no future, at least one worth speaking of.

When each layer of the cosmos has been tarnished from the home to the village to the city to the kingdom to the world to the fields to the trees to the waters to the very air itself. When the human organism itself is disintegrating either through mental decay or reproductive sterility. The world itself is tired and weary.

These physical, tangible displays being symptoms of a deeper spiritual, world-bound sterility and lifelessness. That we are are all bound on a ship destined for annihilation within the next generation or two. 

This is dying earth literature. One may call it melancholic romanticism. The Germans aptly call the root of its feeling *Weltschmerz*. And it is this subgenre and a foray into its history that has compelled me to gather these thoughts here.


## Le Dernier Homme

A genealogy of dying Earth literature can take many paths. Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson, and H.G. Wells's *Time Machine* were certainly definitive shapers of the genre. But if you trace the strands further and further back, you arrive at the very first modern work of dying earth literature with Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's *Le dernier homme* (1805).

De Grainville (1746 - 1805) was not a professional writer, nor in fact do we have any other writings from him except the manuscript for *Le Dernier Homme* which he wrote after leaving the priesthood during the French Revolution and was only published after he committed suicide.

*Le Dernier Homme* takes its cue from Milton's cosmic epic *Paradise Lost*. As Milton explored the mythology of the first human couple Adam and Eve, de Grainville regaled a prose romance of the adventures of Omegarus and Syderie, the last human couple. It is a fascinating universe that blends Greek tragedy, biblical apocalypticism, and environmental despair.

## The Frame Narrative

The narrative opens in the (18th century) present day as the French explorer narrative explores a cavern of the dead in Syria. These ruins belong to the Palmyrene Empire, a clever little nod for the reader.

The Palmyrene Empire was a short-lived breakaway state that emerged and fell during the Crisis of the Third Century (235-284 AD), a political crisis which almost permanently disintegrated the Roman Empire. A proper analogue to the chaos of the French Revolutionary era as well as to this end of world scenario where the greatest empires of the world are crumbling into seeming oblivion.

Inside this cavern, the narrator is enraptured in a vision of the style of Revelation including graphic imagery such as an old man whose shoulders are mutilated and bloodied wings lie at his feet.

In this vision, the narrator is told that the last man will have no posterity to honor his sufferings, to sing of his trouble, to commemorate his spirit. The language of epic is deeply concerned with rendering proper honor to its subjects so that all descendants may properly honor the deeds of Achilles, Odysseus, Beowulf et al.

The task of the epic's audience is to hear and remember these stories, and thus carry on the memory. But if there is no audience that lives after the hero, then who is there to remember his deeds?

Their deeds must be retrojected back into the past, through an apocalyptic vision of the future so that those in the past may remember what is to come. A vision in the style of Revelation.

And so as if speaking to a muse, the narrator invokes Omegarus and Syderie to inspire his spirit, so that he may sing of their lives.

## Punished Adam

The inner story begins with an extremely aged man head bowed low equally from age as from the suffering he endures. This ancient patriarch is none other than Adam himself who still lives. As punishment for his original sin, Adam is forced to stand and watch for millennia as every single one of his children enters the gaping mouth of Hell and witnesses the torment they must endure. 

Though Adam sings of the beauty of creation and the life of the world which after all these years has not grown lost on him, he simply cannot bear to witness the eternal torment of all his children.

It is a weight that has crushed his spirit so completely that he no longer even feels any desire, even for this punishment to end.

It is a punishment reminiscent of Prometheus or other Greek figures such as Sisyphus who must endure endless cycles of their particular torment through the end of time.

But at this moment the angel Ithuriel (an angel likely coined by Milton and only appears in Book IV of *Paradise Lost*) arrives and announces the end of Adam's punishment.

The Almighty Most High has ordained that the human race must be brought to an end, and as no more new humans can enter Hell, Adam will be released from his punishment, but so long as he can assist in God's mission to extinguish the human race.

Adam whose misery has been so great is grateful for the chance to assist in this annihilation as he has no wish to see any more of his children created only so that they may be bound to eternal torment, if this is the only way that both he and his race may be freed.

Ithuriel transports Adam to late France where Adam immediately observes how desolate the land has become. All greenery has been stripped to barren rock. The trees have degenerated into moribund, white bark. Though there are no clouds in sight, even the sun itself casts a pale, eerie light on the world as if it were a gloomy day. Though the season is summer, the landscapes looks worse than winter.

It is from this strikingly modern environmental despair that Adam receives interior inspiration (*lumière intérieure*) that he must start a global revolution that will annihilate the human race.

And so he sets off to visit Omegarus, as Ithuriel had directed him.

## The Tale of Omegarus

What Adam soon comes to learn is that the human race has already been bound toward destruction for many years now. He arrives at the palace of Omegarus and his young wife Syderie. Omegarus greets Adam lavishly and relates to him his own tale of the state of the world and how he found his own wife in these last years.

In this world, human fertility has dropped to zero and no one has been able to reproduce for decades now (the same scenario as in *Children of Men*). The earth grew deserted and depeopled. As Europe grew sterile, so too the climate degenerated, forcing people to live increasingly remote and separated as the land could only support a few in any given place.

Omegarus was born a miracle child to the king of France in this sterile world to the king of France. The first child in twenty years.

The whole realm celebrated Omegarus' birth with manic fervor, crowding the capital city, all hoping just to touch this messianic child. The Savior, the child who will be the father of a new race.

As Omegarus himself puts it, "I remained the only [unique] son in the agedness [vieillesse] of the Europeans."

France had reverted to a Greco-Roman style where classical temples had been erected to Yahweh and sacrifices made to restore the human race, to bring hope again. Some in these times were religiously seized by the hope that Omegarus would be God's instrument of this change, others had no hope or belief in God and wished merely to waste away in hedonism.

Still the faithful prayed.

But a young man cannot continue the race alone. Omegarus recounts his childhood, the training and education he received, how he had been prepared to lead and propagate a new human race.

But there was no woman for him.

"L’ennui me consumoit lentement, et ma jeunesse se fletrissoit". Ennui, that French term which cannot be reduced merely to boredom as it covers the feelings of isolation, dissatisfaction, loneliness, the sense that you simply do not belong, and there is nothing for you. This ennui slowly consumed Omegarus, and his youth withered. The seed slowly matured with no hope of fulfillment.

One day Omegarus is told he is must visit the sage Idamas who lives in the Rouen (the city where Joan of Arc died) who has had visions of the end of the world and where Omegarus may find a bride able to conceive.

Omegarus travels to Rouen, on the way hosted by Policlète et Céphise. Céphise is the second youngest human who remains, but who is now middle-aged. She recounts the birth of Omegarus when she herself was twenty years old, "You were to be, they said, the savior of the world". How all these years she has prayed for him How she holds on to a steadfast hope, even now as she herself enters the age of menopause, that Omegarus will save them all and found a new race.

The monologue is surprisingly touching and heartfelt, to see such genuine hope and tears for such a gripping world crisis. Especially for a generation such as ours so jaded and corroded by irony that it is unable to express itself as earnestly as we see here.

The sage Idamas himself lives in a "madness", gripped by a manic hope that the human race will be reborn, through his countless sleepless nights of prayer. He believes that God has spoken to him of the Earth's rejuvenation through his instrument Omegarus. 

He adjures Omegarus and his party to join him on a tour of the world, to find the chosen bride for God's mission.

They travel to the capital of Normandy where a great, golden airship awaits them for this voyage. A ship which can travel over any sea and trespass any mountain. An airships whose sides were painted with elaborate historical and apocalyptic scenes, so perfect "that all the characters seemed to live and breathe".

Image of earthquakes and abysses. Of the battles of legions of angels whose slaughter and carnage is so great that their blood has reddened the trees beneath this aeriel confrontation.

It is on this ship that Omegarus embarks to begin his journey.

To be continued...

Omegarus: The Last Man


Easter marks one of the two high points of the church calendar. As Christmas celebrates the advent and birth of the Messiah, so does Easter commemorate his death and resurrection. And yet Easter is one of those odd holidays that moves around each year seemingly by the arbitrary hand of some higher power.

What is not so commonly known today is that the date of Easter proved to be the subject of bitter, and sometimes violent debate in the history of the church, with implications both political and cultural.

## Etymology

But first an etymology.

As most know, Easter is the Christian reinvention of the Jewish holiday of Passover (פֶּסַח - Pesach). Passover was instituted in Exodus 12 at the culmination of the Ten Plagues in Egypt where the angel of death would pass over the households of Egypt and slaughter the firstborn of each household, except for those households of Israel who painted lamb's blood upon the doorway. This symbolizes not only the fulfillment of liberation of slavery but also protection from death through the blood of an innocent sacrifice.

The parallels with Christ's sacrifice are striking, and it is not without reason that it was ordained that Christ was tried and put to death on Passover weekend.

The Hebrew name of Pesach was thus used to refer to the celebration and for most Western languages continues to be used so today.

The Greeks transliterated it into Πάσχα and the Romans carried the name into Latin as *Pascha*.

This name for Easter is maintained in modern Romance languages as Pâques in French, Pascua in Spanish, and Pasqua in Italian.

Even many Germanic languages have maintained this name with Dutch using Pasen and Swedish using Påsk.

Strangely, English and German are the two outliers which do not use the same "Passover" name for Easter.

For English, we first see reference to this Easter name in the chronicler Bede's *De Temporum* (725) where Bede refers to the Saxon name for what we call April as "Eosturmonath". He claims that the name "Eostur" refers to the ancient Saxon goddess "Eostre". This seems plausible at first sight as so many of our months and day names come from Germanic pagan deities. However, there simply is no other reference to or mention of this goddess in any other literature or archeological sources. It is completely possible that Bede merely speculates on this.

Another possible explanation is that Easter occurs around the time of the spring equinox. Because spring equinox festivities generally focus on longer daylight hours and earlier sunrises, and the sun rises in the East, the name is merely a reference to this. Like how the date of Christmas is tied to winter solstice festivals. This idea can be corroborated with a comparison to German who call the holiday *Ostern* and East *Ost*, both from the High German word *ōstarun*. 

## The First Easter Controversy - Quartodecimanism

The first Easter controversy emerged very early on in the history of Christianity, during the apostolic generation, and was concerned with the question whether the celebration of Christ's death and resurrection should happen on the day of his death (the Passover) or on the Sunday of his resurrection. Those who pushed for the Passover date were referred to as Quartodecimanism, because Passover is celebrated on the fourteenth (*quarta decima*) of the Jewish month Nisan.

The very first mention of Easter as a holiday in fact comes from the 2nd century when Melito of Sardis wrote an essay "On the Pascha" arguing for this Passover celebration date. The Western tradition, the generation following the apostolic ministry of Peter and Paul tended toward the Sunday celebration while Eastern Christians following the Apostle John tended toward the Friday date.

It became such a tenuous issue that Eusebius attests (V.23-24) the early church father Polycarp traveled from Anatolia to Rome in part to hold discussions with his Western counterparts on this Easter date issue. However, at the time they decided to practice their customs separately but remain reconciled within a single faith.

At a high level, the issue boils down to questions of theme and identity.

The first few generations of Christianity struggled to establish itself as an independent faith not attached to Judaism. Many external writers of the time referred to Christianity as a Jewish sect (as there were many), and even within the first generation Christ-followers would attend synagogue in cities where there was no establish presence.

This led to an internal tension within Christian communities as to the degree to which Christianity should be a Jewish faith. This is a large theme in the Pauline epistles, as he strove to disconnect Christian practice from "Judaizing" influence which he argued re-introduced legalism that undermined the very core of Christian doctrine.

By celebrating Easter in the same way as the Jewish faith, Christianity seemed to merely be a subset of Judaism.

On the other hand, other Christians felt it extremely important to reclaim the theme of Passover and definitively state that Christ's death is a repetition of the original Jewish Passover tradition. To disconnect the holiday from this historic event was to undermine the definitive theological connection between the two and also to deny that Christ was reclaiming and reinventing the Passover tradition through the new covenant, as much of the Christian tradition frames itself as a new iteration against the old version of Judaism.

Eventually, this conflict came to a head by the close of the 2nd century as several synods were convened to rule on the question of the date of Easter. As Eusebius recounts, these synods ruled that Sunday would be the official day of Easter, placing greater emphasis on the resurrection of Christ and his triumph over death as the real essence of the holiday.

Those who remained stoutly in favor of Quartodecimanism such as Polycrates of Ephesus were briefly excommunicated by Pope Victor I until other Western bishops such as Irenaeus pressed the Pope to re-admit Quartodecimans. We have other testimonies of others like John Chrysostom simply denying Quartodecimans admittance to church at all. This was an issue not taken lightly.

What is not clear after is what point Christians all shifted to celebrating the Easter date on Sunday, though we do know this was very nearly universally adopted following the Council of Nicaea if not before then. However, Nicaea was itself concerned with another aspect of the Easter controversy.

## The Second Easter Controversy - Jewish or Roman Calendar

So it had been established by the end of the second century that doctrinally at least Easter should be celebrated on Sunday. But this did not quite settle the issue as there were different calendars at play here.

The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar, consisting of 29-30 days each month, with an extra lunar month added each year to average out the days.

By contrast, the Julian calendar introudced by Julius Caesar is a purely solar calendar of 365 days with a leap day every fourth year.

So while Christians were agreed that Easter would fall upon the "Sunday" following Passover, it was not definitively clear whether this meant adherence to the Jewish calendar for reckoning the date of Passover or if some corollary date in the Roman calendar should be used.

This again sparked dispute and debate depending on the apostolic heritage of various church communities.

In fact, it was of such significance that it was a primary point of discussion during the first ecumenical council of Nicaea which is known today for "writing the book" on core Christian doctrine across various branches and denominations, with regard to the divine and human nature of Christ, and other key theological questions.

Emperor Constantine I took more executive action in this decision and ruled that the date of Easter simply could not be celebrated according to the Jewish calendar because that meant that there would be some years in the Roman calendar where Easter would be celebrated twice.

It was determined that Easter should be celebrated **on the first Sunday after the first full moon following spring equinox** and that decision in 325 AD is how we still determine the date of Easter today. This was based on the Alexandrian method of measuring years, as Alexandria was one of the largest scientific centers of the period and was seen as most precise in calculating time. This ensured that Easter would follow a 19-year cycle before it was celebrated on the same day again, as it continues to this day.


## The Third Easter Controversy - Ireland versus Rome

However, this did not mark the end of Easter's controversies, as trouble reared its head again a few centuries later.

This third one originates with St. Patrick, whose own festival is just now behind us. While we generally picture the spread of Christianity across early medieval Europe as the emanation of concentric circles going from France to England and Germany and from there to Scandinavia and Poland, etc. there are exceptions to this rule.

Ireland is one such exception as one extremely early adopter of Christianity for the region, especially as it was never occupied or controlled by the Romans. St. Patrick is notable for establishing one of the only centers of Christianity north of Mediterranean that was so completely independent of Rome.

Because Ireland was such as an early adopter, Irish missionaries would cross the Irish Sea to evangelize peoples of England. We even have the Irish monk Columbanus traveling to modern-day Belgium as a missionary and founding one of the most popular centers of monastic learning and teaching on the European continent, Luxeuil Abbey in France and Bobbio Abbey in Italy being among them.

On the other hand, we have the famous missionary St. Augustine (no connection to *Confessions* Augustine, the bishop of Hippo) who was sent from Rome to evangelize England. Because of this there were two separate Christian influences in Saxon England, the Celtic and the Roman strain.

This was not problematic earlier on as they shared the common goal of converting pagans on the British Isles to Christianity. However as paganism began to disappear from English shores, the cultural tensions between the Celtic and Roman variants became more pronounced, as is only natural when two cultures come in contact with one another.

Ironically, the one single issue which was the breaking point between these two Christian elements was the date of Easter.

Because Ireland never had a Roman presence, it never had adopted the Roman calendar. Irish monks at the isle of Iona had adopted the practice of celebrating Easter on an 84-year cycle which had been the general practice in Celtic Gaul and even for some Romans prior to the Council of Nicaea. However, this clashed with the 19-year cycle ruling established by the Council of Nicaea.

This proved one of the most politically significant disputes in the episodes of Easter controversies as bishops, priests, and even political appointees were chosen, passed over, dismissed, and even exiled based on their positions on this issue in medieval English lands.

The most notable of these situations involves the kingdom of Northumbria, in Northern England today. While Roman Christianity had gained a strong foothold in Northumbria, a man named Oswald gained the throne in 633, and he was incidentally educated and raised in part by Irish monks. Oswald invited many Irish monks to positions of prestige and influence in his kingdom, and he was one of the most proactive rulers of Northumbria to promote a general conversion to Christinaity.

Following Oswald's death, Oswiu came to power in Northumbria which had grown very largely divided between Celtic and Roman Christianity. The issue of the date of Easter was coming to a head not only because it proved logistically challenging for lords to arrange feast days in mixed communities, but also because it was an indicator of which side possessed true hegemony, and neither side wished to back down.

To resolve this, Oswiu called the Synod of Whitby in 664 AD to rule once and for all on this date of Easter question. The other prime issue of this synod was whether monks were to shave their heads (tonsure) in the Irish or Roman style. After long and tenuous debate, it was ruled that Northumbria would align itself with Roman Catholicism on both issues. By all accounts, Oswiu merely attended and presided over the synod without intervening directly, but this was also politically convenient for him to align himself with Roman Christianity as it gave him more leverage to wage war against the Britons to the West and the Scottish peoples of the North who were more Celtic than Roman.

In either case, this synod incidentally spelled the beginning of the end for Celtic Christianity as a cultural hegemon as the major English kingdom of Northumbria swung to the side of Rome, and over time all of the British Isles would slowly align themselves to Roman Catholicism for the following centuries until the Reformation came nearly a millennium following the Synod of Whitby.

## The Date of Easter Today

One would think the matter definitively settled by this age, considering how many controversies have existed over the date of Easter.

However, many Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate Easter on a different day than Western churches. Again this boils down to the divergence of calendars.

The Julian calendar was the universal Christian calendar for quite some time, but it is not the calendar we use today.

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII, the central pope of the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent, also implemented a new reformed calendar that added precision to the Julian Calendar. This Gregorian Calendar added exceptions to leap years in order to keep the calendar better aligned with the solar cycle. For the Gregorian Calendar, leap years would be celebrated every four years except on a century year unless that century year was divisible by 400. So for example while 1600 and 2000 were leap years, the years 1800 and 1900 were not. 2100 will also not be a leap year.

The adoption of the Gregorian calendar was very gradual and unique to each country, but it was adopted across the British Empire in 1752 when a few days were "erased" from history. This also is one of the last British reforms to have taken root in colonial America before the American Revolution severed ties between the two states.

So while the Western world today celebrates Easter according to the Gregorian calendar, the Eastern Orthodox church uses the original Julian calendar and Alexandrian method as ruled by the Council of Nicaea. However, with the Western and Eastern churches already split by the time of this divergence, there was no need for further controversy.

--

One cannot help but reflect that this was certainly was one of Christ's chief concerns when he died on the cross and rose again, and one can only hope that Heaven is keeping its calendar in line with ours, lest there should prove to be a Fourth Easter Controversy when Christ returns and there is a calendar desync between the new heavens and new earth.

The Easter Controversy (x3)

[Photo by Sebastian Voortman.](https://www.pexels.com/photo/two-white-concrete-statues-covered-by-dust-566641/)

*I wrote this originally five years ago for a former iteration of this blog.*

> the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
> excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
> o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
> with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
> me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
> What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
> how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
> express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
> in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
> world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
> what is this quintessence of dust? - Hamlet

It is hard to write about a human condition. Single line platitudes invariably fall into some mixture of sentimental contrivance and egregious myopia. It just sounds repulsive to the modern ear. Perhaps this is due in part to advertising and its unrelenting recycling of banalities. Motivation taglines that reduce the universal human to a universal consumer.

But fortunately a phrase such as "quintessence of dust" has not yet been co-opted by the marketing machine. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

Quintessential is a term that has fallen out of usage. To be quintessential is to be classic in some sense. The diner, for example, is quintessentially American.

But let's pick apart this term etymologically. "Quintessence" derives from the scholastic concept of *quinta essentia* which is recognizably translatable as the "fifth essence". It is a Latinization of a Greek term we recognize as "element".

These elements are, for Greek science, what we remember as fire, earth, water, and air.

There is something we have lost with our modern periodic table ranging across 200 distinct entities.

When you say something is elemental, something is essential to the very thing, there is a lot more meaning when you liken the heart to fire than to carbon or nitrogen. Something more visceral when you have four elements to choose from.

The entire cosmos from droplets of dew to the burning of the stars to the sinewing of the flesh to the rock formations torturously sundered into the face of the earth, all these are derived from four base elements.

The world cannot exist apart from these four. Or so it was told.

Then Aristotle comes along as he does, and he theorizes that fire, water, earth, and air don't quite capture the totality of the universe. There must be a fifth element out there: aether.

So he coined it. And so aether entered scientific discourse for a very long time. So long in fact that it was tossed around as a hypothetical until Einstein definitively put it to bed in 1905.

Aether as a concept is significantly older than gravity, electricity, waves, particles, fluids, and planets.

So what is aether?

Though it had a long shelf life in the scientific world, there was never quite a firm agreement on what aether is. Is it the force of life? Some light-bearing invisible substance that passes through the vacuum? 

This fifth element aether became a mysterious silhouette that coul potentially answer many leading scientific questions across disciplines such as optics, biology, astronomy, chemistry, and others.

It was the theoretical missing link that could potentially unify all of natural science.

So, if you will permit some creative reading for the sport of it, what if Hamlet's idea is taht the fifth essence of the universe--something on the level of aether--is dust. Dust as the missing link.

And not dust as we typically imagine it. But what we are. Humans, transmogrified from the dust.

Dust itself is a primary theme throughout the Hebraic telling of things. The word "עָפָר֙" appears over a hundred times across the Old Testament: it refers to lowliness as in the case of *Job*, ephemerality as in the case of *Ecclesiastes*, or as a metaphor of innumerable abundance as in the promise made to Abraham of his descendants.

It first appears in the Creation myth when God forms man out of dust and breathes life into him. While the rest of creation is spoken into being, the human race is culled out a pre-existing material substance. Dust.

Hence the cliche "From dust you came and to dust you will return" coined either by Kansas or *Ecclesiastes*, take your pick.

This image should give us pause. What it is to be made of dust.

Consider the last person you held in your arms, how they could simply evaporate into a sooty, powdery pile of dust through your fingers. In fact they will invariably end up this way.

Consider how much of your past self lies as sheets of dust under bed. The more you cast off of yourself, the more there is to haunt you. Dust as a specter, your past self as a voyeur of the future.

Consider old houses abandoned by dead relatives or strangers. Shelves and furniture and books caked in the flesh of the dead.

This is what dust is. This what you were, and this is what you will become.

We forget how appalling such an image should be. To call ourselves dust.

But that is not the end of the story. This isn't some ode to rejoice in the meaninglessness of life.

We are not mere dust but the quintessence of it.

We are not derivations but elevations. Whether as the Hebraic says by the breath of God or as the Hellenic says by the possession of *logos*. Or as others in the West have gone on to name as the soul or free will or consciousness. All of these as some label to distinguish the animating force that exalts us from the dust.

These various terms do not capture such a quintessence in its entirety. There is something indeterminable, ineffable about the human being that these concepts can barely taste.

It is because of this unnamed thing that we are raised from brute materialism to pure determinism.

With the assiduous encroachment of sciences social and physical into all spheres of lief, there is a strong temptation to parse out every single occurrence into a predetermined cause-and-effect. Genetics, economics, sociology, psychology, among other disciplines whose langauge games we widely employ to rationalize the problems of our lives. It is the tool of identitarianism (a term whose meaning also is revealed in etymology) to cast blame on the forces of determinism.

Those whose personal conceptual space is determined by political ideology are often guilty of this. Concocting general patterns and statistics as pre-emptive authorities over their own lives. To explain the crumble or enfetterment. 

This all depends upon a logic of determinism that all has been decided already in the lot of one's own life. That there is no free will or fate to fight for or overturn. A whole retinue of externalities has totalistic control over our personal lives.

Unfortunately, the extent to which someone assigns an aspect of themselves to this mode of thinking is an extent that has been cordoned off to mental slavery. Enslavement to ideas and thought patterns that increase learned helplessness, anxiety, misery, despair, and those factors. To give the perceived enemy more control and power than they probably even have.

To reject determinism is to recognize this little ineffable, quintessential blip and what it does for us, whatever this blip is. It allows us to strive and to overcome the problems set before us. To contest the roll of the dice. To play the game.

The unpredictable choreography of time, uncountable as dust swirling in a sunlit hallway. Too intricate and random for any finitude to calculate. 

Even in this age, human beings still possess this glint of spontaneous vitality, no matter how insistently other forces have tried to suffocate it. For two millennia, aged scientists with baggy eyes and an aversion to the real world have hunched over lifeless texts to try to determine and control the fifth element ether. To put it into a closed off box.

But vitality can never be captured by science. All you get is an ossified shadow. The residual glow of its power.

And for as long as there is a sliver of the human essence in us. Soemthing that can escape the constricting noose of scientific causality, there is hope. Hope that we are not thoroughly enslaved to external forces. That we do not need to subject ourselves to the prisons of the mind.

That our quintessence, as humble dust, is that we can never be fully determinable.

The quintessence of dust

*Fast Antiates Maiores* reconstructed. [Source URL](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_del_Teatro_Romano_de_Caesaraugusta.43.jpg).

The calendar occupies a strange place between man and cosmos. On the one hand it is a technology for the organization and division of time in the human reckoning of things. On the other a system for mapping the cycles of the stars and planets onto our terrestrial plane.

Our English rendering *calendar* flows down to us from old Roman custom. 

The Romans counted their months by dividing them between three principal days of the lunar cycle: the calends, the nones, and the ides.

The calends was the first day of the month and occurred when the first sliver of the moon appeared in a new moon cycle. Unlike other calendar systems built upon decentralized mathematical and scientific calculations, the Roman calends could only be dictated by the priesthood. When the priests determined it was the first day of the month from their vantage point on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, a priest would stand and call out (*calo*) and herald the coming of the new month.

One must remember that Rome has a long heritage of centralized, pontifical authority. Where persons and offices determine what is true *ex cathedra*, more true than individual observation or conviction.

The calends was noteworthy in the Roman world not merely for the cosmic alignment of moon, sun, and earth to form a new moon but also because it was the day of debts. On the first day of the month, debts could be collected. 

Our word "calendar" derives from *calendarium* which was the name given to this book of debts, an accounting ledger both in a cosmic and fiscal sense which marked how much was owed and by whom.

In the world of modern accounting, we maintain some downstream variation of this in our governmental tax structures, reckoning debts to the state at the level of the year, aligned with the cosmic revolution of the earth around the sun.

But this modern rendering is decoupled from the religious significance of such accounting. And this marks what perhaps is the deepest guilt of modern society, an obligatory truth we have forgotten.

To be born is to exist in debt.

Debt in contemporary vernacular usage has been constrained greatly in scope, often only to refer to fiscal or material forms of obligation.

But debt exists in a much broader scope as its Latin origin indicates. For the original word functions much like an English helping verb indicating that one *ought* to do something, one *should* do something, one *must* do something.

Debt in this sense is deeply tied to concepts of duty, the ethics of obligation.

And the calendar in this light is not just a table for the division of days, weeks, months, and years according to the ways of the gods and the ways of men. It is a cosmic ledger of our debts. The debt of our time.

This is a chief insight of Protestantism, as Weber observes. That our time is not our own. Nothing at all is our own in an absolute sense. All we have and are and will gain is due to God. We are merely borrowers of the thousand talents. One of modern conservatism's fundamental errors is to elevate the notion of property above all else, failing to recognize that all which is owned is also owed.

In the world of finance, we have finite sums that we may can spend or use. In the world of life, we have finite time that me way spend or use until our allocation is extinguished in the embrace of death.

This finite sum is a gift. And it is not one to be squandered.

Richard Baxter treated this theme most exhaustively in his sermon "The Redemption of Time". Much like our life has been redeemed by Christ, so too must we redeem our time, to make it of good use in service to the God who has granted us such time.

In one section, Baxter points to the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus teaches that we shall all on the day of judgment have to explain *every* useless (ᾱ̓ργός) word we have ever spoken. The Greek here is the antonym of ἔργον which is used to indicate any work, labor, deed, or task. The Twelves Labors of Hercules, Hesiod's *Works and Days*, etc. What we do with our lives in the short time we have been granted.

One can get a sense for the Puritan interpretation of time here by his reading:

Now then if there be an account to be given, and a reckoning to be made for these rubbish speeches, judge, if it be not a want of redeeming the time, to lay it out in such a thing as will bring a sore and heavy burden afterwards without repentance to cast it off; and judge if he which makes much of time had not need take much heed of this ill-spent breath. Not alone then wicked speak∣ing when one bel•heth forth lewd and filthy words, not slanderous and backbiting talk, (when one whispers of his neighbour's faults behind his back, uttering (perhaps) also lying reports, and fathering that upon him which he never did or meant;) but even vain, needless, and unprofitable words..."

Biblical ethics places great emphasis on the sins of the tongue, the words spoken and the things said. But there is a sense in the Puritan reading where the sin is not just a matter of the motives or consequences of the words, but the fact that they misuse the time granted us.

This may seem rather extreme in a contemporary lens, but it does make one wonder the exactitude to which God would judge us for redeeming the time. For as history shows time and again, the extremeness of a belief has little to do with its usefulness. Extreme views quite easily become mainstream and former commonplace wisdom can become taboo even within the space of a generation.

This uneasiness we feel toward the use or misuse of our time can be seen as the wellspring of guilt. It is no coincidence that the Germans use the one word *Schuld* for both guilt and debt.

We feel guilt at the theological debt owed.

And this brings us back to Rome.

The *calendarium* appears twice in Seneca's "De Beneficiis", a Stoic treatise on gifts, charitable services, essentially giving something without anything ostensibly being required in return.

The gift has taken on a new level of significance in 20th century philosophy as a central theme in Derrida and other postmodern writers who write on how even a "free" gift introduces social or psychological obligations that consequently mean the gifter actually is receiving something in return.

In simple terms, it is why ancient kings would give away lavish gifts or Caesars would give bread and circuses for the poor. Not out of charitable selflessness but rather as ostentatious display or politicking. One can readily see this in modern philanthropy and the tax exemption structures built around the nonprofit industrial complex which fund lucrative or desirable outcomes. This is a primary mode of dark liberalism which leverages capital to the benefit of the giver but behind the safety net of sanctimonious platitudes.

This idea was brought back to the forefront by Marcel Mauss in his famous seminal essay "The Gift", but it should be noted that this essay is itself deeply indebted to Seneca's work "De Beneficiis".

Seneca refers to calendars twice. In the first instance he writes, "Nemo beneficia in calendario scribit" (*De Beneficiis* I.2). In translation this can be rendered as "No one records gifts in the book of debts (calendar)".
This highlights the spontaneity of the gift as something falling outside the exact, deterministic ordering of time. At the same time, one does not record or remember a gift because as a gift it is not a debt to be owed. One does not remind the recipient of a debt to be collected.

In a later passage, Seneca is characterizing gold, silver, and iron as evils the gods buried beneath the earth but which we have dug up to inflict evil upon one another to satiate our vindictive greed. And then he writes,

"Et tamen adhuc ista aliquam materiam habent; est, in quo errorem oculorum animus subsequi possit. Video istic diplomata et syngraphas et cautiones, vacua habendi simulacra, umbracula avaritiae quaedam laborantis, per quae decipiat animum inanium opinione gaudentem. Quid enim ista sunt, quid fenus et calendarium et usura, nisi humanae cupiditatis extra naturam quaesita nomina?" (Ibid. VII.10 )

To paraphrase in translation: And yet even these things have some substance; there is something for the mind's eye is able to follow. I see bonds and contracts, securities, empty symbols (*simulacra*) of possession, some kind of shelter for laboring greed, through which the mind is deceived, rejoicing in the illusion of ownership. For what are these very things, what are interest and ledgers (*calendarium*) and loans, but names for human desire sought beyond nature.

Again, Seneca introduces the calendar as a nefarious force. One that constricts and confines us as tools of human greed. Taken on its own, this quote shows remarkable applicability for a global financial market which recently crashed from collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and once again chokes the middle class out of home ownership through real estate investment trusts (REITs). 

For time immemorial, financial systems and institutions have concocted a panoply of wizardry and fancy terminology to camouflage the unending extraction of wealth.

But moralisms aside, one should consider this from the viewpoint of temporal debt.

If God has granted us time, is it as a gift or as a loan?

The concept of "redeeming the time" runs the risk of casting God as a greedy lender who is waiting to pounce on his returns. We must not forget that Jesus also parables God as a generous master who forgives debts. How Pauline theology underscores Christ as a liberator who grants us freedom.

The guilt of debt lends itself to legalism. That life must be crushed in the grindstone to extract every kernel of worth.

If grace is given to us as a gift, then in what ways could we say that time is also a gift to us. To enjoy without use or end goal. And in enjoying this gift to thereby redeem it, perhaps.

It is a difficult question and one that cannot be answered here. Only posed. How we can balance the obligation we owe to the divine versus the freedom we have in what we have been granted.

And there are much broader investigations we could make. A structural comparison of how calendars ranging from the Mesoamerican to the Mesopotamian to the Chinese illustrate cultural or universal characterizations of the relation between man and cosmos, debt and time. This is only one strand.

It is perhaps most fruitful to reflect in closing on Christmas, a calendar holiday most associated with gift giving. How in the Christian understanding, Christ is the gift God gave to the world.

We commemorate this holiday not because God instructs us too, but rather, as is good etiquette for any recipient of a particularly lavish gift, we make sure to remember and express our gratitude for what we have been given. 

The calendar implication of Christmas is that we are marking our own accounting books to remember the debt that we paid in our sin. But one that we have been redeemed of. A transaction that has been zeroed out on our behalf. And to be freed from debt is something to rejoice in. As we augur a new year, a new cycle of time that we have been granted. To use in grace, not just for ourselves as some idea of property, but as something for the larger whole.


A quick reflection on the Roman and Christian implications of the calendar

Calendratics: debt and time

[Image Credit](https://www.istockphoto.com/portfolio/style-photography?mediatype=photography)

Medicine is rooted in the notion of *vis medicatrix naturae*. Nature is the healer. We merely aid or inhibit its process.

An organism possesses an internal equilibrium which exists in relation to an external equilibrium of its environment. Given water of a suitable composition and temperature, a fish may survive with an internal equilibrium through metabolic, circulatory, and other physiological systems.

Disease is the disruption of such internal equilibrium, whether from internal or external causes.

Medicine is the corrective process which seeks to re-establish this homeostasis of the organism.

For the history of our species, humanity has existed with a relative homeostasis compatible with many different climates and biomes, often through the medicinal adjustments of clothing and shelter for more extreme weather conditions.

However this relative environmental stability has come under threat in recent centuries with the advent of industrial technologies and its ecological impacts.

Many attribute simple phenomena changes such as regional temperature fluctuations to this through the rhetoric of climate change. Perhaps a helpful phrase but unfortunately excessively reductionistic.

Consideration of ecological change should not be restricted to temperature or vague symbology of pollution. Prudence requires more targeted investigation of the causes and effects industrial civilization makes upon human ecology and consequently physiology.

One such pollutative phenomenon which is only beginning to gain widespread notice is the effect of plastics and its radical metabolic impacts on animal and human populations. There are others to be sure, but these are not to be documented here.

Humans now suffer internal disequilibrium as part of the fruits of industrialism and man's war on both God and nature. The external environment has been poisoned against us by our own machinations.

Unfortunately, the instruments of power do not lie with us to holistically and cohesively revert external ecologies to a more suitable equilibrium.

This means that medicine has acquired in our time an additional responsibility: to protect our internal equilibrium against the poisons invading us from industrial society.

We must counter-act the damages wrought upon our bodies by sedentary lifestyles, the screens, the pharmaceuticals, the various electrical and chemical alterations flooding through us, the stressors baked into modern life.

To return to pre-industrial cortisol baselines, we unfortunately do require the use of medication.

This I view as the first object of the science of nootropics. To correct and counteract the technological miasma pervading us and slowly corrupting and degenerating the human organism. Rather than a transhumanist project, it should fundamentally be a humanist one.

We cannot in total prevent industrial society from poisoning our bodies, but we can certainly mitigate it. That is where the fight begins. The fight for life, vitality.

Brief thoughts on self-medication

[Daniel Boone](https://www.istockphoto.com/vector/daniel-boone-american-pioneer-an-illustrated-scene-gm1286950756-383303148)

### Neural Sociology

One way to consider the current state of affairs is this. The average human being exists as a neuron within a larger cranial complex, one whose neural networks are the vehicle for the transfer of two fundamental entities: financial assets and political consent. Both could fall under umbrella labels such as capital or consumerism, but they are also irreducible to each other.

Just as electricity operates as the currency of exchange and communication within the physiology of the brain, so too do money and ideology operate as two corollary vehicles of flux in this parallel model of network exchange. Neurons respond to stimuli. With regard to consumerism, marketing and sales are the technical disciplines directed to stimulate the human node for the sake of eliciting very precise responses of the purchase, the upsell, and the product referral. Some marketing and sales teams are sophisticated enough that they have been able to remold some human nodes as self-stimulating (i.e. addicted) through phone brain and other means. This is how the consumerist sciences can optimize the human nodes. To minimize the financial stimulus (ad spend) required to produce the maximal amount of transferred financial assets. 

What must also be considered are the network effects of consumerism. How various nodes are better positioned to influence others into the same kind of consumerist responsiveness. Which is why the consumerist sciences place considerable weight on securing access to influencer nodes as they can have considerable, even exponential downstream effects.

The techniques and processes of the science of material consumerism have been applied with relative success to its sister phenomenon: political consumerism.

A pure democratic system could be said to also operate on this neural model where localized nodes receive ideological stimulus and secrete or effuse ideological output which manifests occasionally in votes but more often in the politics that lies outside the election cycle through discourse, leveraging, and other means. This is why centralized democracy in both monopolistic and oligopolistic flavors tends to instantiate and cultivate ideology factories that aim toward the near constant if not omnipresent informing of political neurons. 

Thus the procedure of political information depends on the twofold goal of (1) determining what the political neuron should think about this given here-and-now event as well as (2) cultivating the right kind of responsivity that the neuron will be able to produce the desired kind of opinion in response to future events without external stimulus. More so than even the case in material consumerism, the node should believe themselves the originator of these opinions, interpretations, and ideologies, or at the very least incapable of framing the situation in such a way so as to realize how their thoughts are merely the product of systems of mass consent manufacturing.

Both neural models may be decentralized in that no intent, will, or intelligence is attempting to guide the patterns of stimuli and response across the network.

There may also exist models in which certain agents may have directed ends or goals they wish to meet and possess the tools with which to slowly and gradually transform the stimuli-response patterns of material and political consumers toward certain aligned patterns. This may be called social engineering. To enact social engineering on entire human populations requires both considerable technological, financial, and political resources and is a painstakingly slow and often erroneous evolutionary progression. 

What further complicates understanding Intelligent Design in social engineering is that even if a few clusters of agents are pulling the levers so to speak, their goals are often at odds with one another so they may be engaged in tactical neural warfare, or they may simply be incompetent at influencing outcomes so the changes they gradually introduce into the social neural ecosystem is not aligned with their goals or objectives.

One could go on to consider how demography, jurisprudence, religion, and other factors influence the behavior of human nodes, but this is a general lay of the land.

The end result of a neural system where human intent is at play is that the human being is framed as a clinical subject to be completely and fully enclosed within a purely controlled environment. Each node's material and political choices are controlled by upstream factors and levers to produce the desired outcomes for whoever's jurisdiction they fall under. A covert feudalism where lords operate from shadows to leverage mass populations to enact the goals of the few.

It is a world where the masses are subject to the machinations of graph theory. Consensus is coaxed if not coerced. And much of this would have been impossible merely a century ago, but with the advent of many technologies of "colossalism", it is now possible to centrally manage or distribute control both over a wider range of human entities and at an exponentially deeper level than would have been possible before. 

Where before it would have required immense effort to track the geographic region and financial resources of even a few individuals, now even the eyeball movements of entire populations can be safely computed and tracked. Generative AI provides immense opportunities for enshrouding each individual within an abundance of custom-tailored content to meld and shape the clinical subject as desired.

---

### Responses to Totalistic Consumerism

This model is not novel. It can be described as post-human or anti-human. For it completely eschews human agency. But one should also wonder, if there are such systems of social engineering at play, would they not also be directed toward whittling down and reducing human agency as much as it can? Receptors are more useful than agents. The degree to which such machinery is able to modify the extent or grip of the human will is a question beyond consideration here.

One thing of material consideration here is the trajectory of such a reshaped neurology. What does it converge to?

This is perhaps best described as the hyperreal.

What in our lifetimes we have taken to be authoritative disbursers of knowledge may become so radically and pervasively (and clumsily) manipulated, that many register a certain degree of mistrust toward any of these instruments of media in both the material and political flavors of consumerism. And while many of us are used to being lied to through such instruments, there are few things as offputting as being lied to poorly. And when the lies upcrank in frequency, it certainly does not mend matters.

And one resoundingly common instrument in this supposed program of manipulation is the Internet.

There will always be many either without the sense or will to recognize the ideological zoos they have been born and bred in. Others may see the zoo for what it is but acquiesce for they understand that significant opportunities for advancement often accompany participating in the exhibition. A dolphin that dances for the masters will get more fish than the grump in the corner. These cynics buy in and do the circus show for the rewards it entails. If needed, forgetting what they give up in the process. They engage in the proxy wars of the hyperreal as the various conumerist-politico wings engage in their endless neural dance.

A third class may also exist of those who feel on some instinctive level the dissonance between the hyperreal of social engineering and the other real world which existed before the Internet. They may sense something is off, but their dopamine triggers are so deeply ensnared and entangled within a neural system, they lack the necessary wherewithal to do anything about it. They remain passive, despondent like animals consigned to experimentation. The roll of dice to decide how things turn out for them.

As often happens, people will not necessarily fall under one single class but have a certain mixture of the different ones to varying degree.

What is likely to happen is the continued growth and perhaps ascension of a fourth class: the offline.

The offline can be described as those who live primarily analog lifestyles that are disconnected the neural machinery of social engineering.

Their senses are not constantly bombarded with ads or digital content, so they have no need to resist or fight the urges and impulses a phone may implant in them.

They are not subscribed to the everyday cycle of news outrage, so their cortisol levels are not inflammed to the same extent the enplugged may be with the ongoing stream of news events.

What an offline lifestyle looks like may vary. Those old enough to be pre-boomer may still persist in this lifestyle (though even these are often subject to network television, even when they do not use the Internet). Those who live in the rural recesses of society often have a greater propensity to live in this degree of disconnection. We have always had the Amish, embedded within American jurisdiction but disconnected from it.

---

### The Offliner

Utopianism emerges in waves, ever since the foundings of America. Here we have a new wave. One digital symptom of this is the effusive growth in the DIY and homesteader genres across many regions and both genders. As digital cynicism deepens so too does a desire for an "off the grid" lifestyle.

But desire does not always produce change. Many dreams are craved for, and few are realized. And in fact pro-offliner content remains still an instrument of the digital. It can be a psychological facade by which the influencers of the genre broadcast how offline they are through online means. And those who spend hours reading DIY content or basking in homesteader images remain engaged in a form of digital consumerism rather than developing the habits by which they become offliners.

To be offline is not to be completely disconnected from the Internet in total. But rather to have one's agency unimpaired and unimpacted by the dual tweezers of smartphone and Internet. They do not subconsciously crave the tingle of haptic feedback or social media viewership. They use the tool without the tool using them.

This community will become more self-aware and well-defined as time goes on.

Perhaps it entails hamlets and communes disconnected from the Internet. Intertribal communication conducted through physical mail and private couriers. Encylopedias and manuals in physical rather than digital form. A return of artisanal apprenticeship for metallurgy, carpentry, etc. The boundary between analogue and digital is not firmly fixed (where does the fax reside?), and it will likely be up to each respective community to develop and ordain the proper restrictions on technology as the Amish do.

In the next decade or two, we will most likely see an upsurge in the popularity of the "offliner" as a concept in the digital sphere. Homestead literature will abound. New forms of courtship that are decidedly post-dating, a return perhaps to practical marriage in response to the current digital burnout. Starter kits and perhaps financing plans for those seeking to go offline. These are not trends that will take over society wholesale, but rather subgroups among the more conservative-minded who want to reject the digital politics of global Internet cosmopolitanism. Those enamored with recapturing the frontier aesthetic as it existed in the American grain. 

This of course presuming that regulatory or other action does not directly or indirectly block these neurons from cutting themselves out of the network equation.

There are aspects of this offliner future that reflect trends already underway across the West.

First, a disinterest in anything happening outside the physical community or region, much in the same way of a medieval peasant. Events happening halfway across the world will hold no interest for the offline. The more remote or vast an election, the more likely they are to say, "Who cares?"

This self-enclosure would also entail a greater distrust of the outsider. Not just in the physical presence of visitors but an epistemic xenophobia as we have already seen in the Covid era. Intense skepticism toward knowledge or expertise presented by centralized governmental or scientific bodies, and perhaps a general rejection of "scientific truths" that have been deemed valid for at least a century. Instead, the offliners may depend on local "clerics". Those who live with them who are deemed learned and have expressed their opinion on certain manners. Much in the way medieval ecclesiastical servants would have functioned, though without even a Rome to pay lip service to. Congregationally-approved experts then, and the politics that all entails.

And because these systems will invariably evolve into tribal political entities, federal and state governments may proactively block these developments, but that remains to be seen. There is only so much one can do to force consumer to be plugged in before there are compulsory pleasure pods.

Again, the offliner way of life will not predominate American society. This is merely the emergence of dual lifestyles. The hyperreal urbanite versus the post-digital offliner. The two will likely live in relative antagonism toward each other. The offliner will seek independence from a cosmopolitan system which depends in part on the comprehensive totality of its enforcement. In David Fischer's view, this was the fundamental ideological divide underneath the Civil War. But this all remains to be seen.

The offliner will be a new kind of person, a novel atavism. What more this could look like would need to be the subject of future investigation and speculation.




A future is offline

*Prometheus Chained* by Harold Parker, R.S.A. [Source URL](https://victorianweb.org/sculpture/parker/3.html).

It is a painful thing to grapple with the fixtures of our finitude.

To feel yourself bound in some body, perpetually condemned to wander a restricted zone of space and time. It seems brash foolishness to claim ourselves free when we are locked within temporal horizons of less than a century. How vast the corridors of history, and how small our permitted patrol.

Though the body itself is consigned to extensions of locality, the mind offers an escape through language and intuition.

The utterance of the lips breathes persistence into the past. Even as the spoken word wilts in the stilling and stilting of sound waves, the word enters the ear, and the mind. Here it is lost or stored with varying levels of alterations. But in this way does language slip the bonds of time through the communication of what was into the now. The oral tradition is the persistence of spoken pasts through the networks of minds who hold onto it. Myths, legends, and epics etched upon the ethnic scroll of a people's memory.

Writing too advances this form of historical transcendence. Transmission through sight from ledger to consciousness and back again. Writing is the means of not only conversing with the dead, but living their lives as well. A journey into the underworld.


But this prompts the question: what of the incongruity of temporal consciousness?

This paradigm of transmission and communication presupposes the equality of transmitting consciousness and the receptor consciousness. But time mutates all it touches. And those standing downstream from the original speaker will only hear the word through the reverbations of the Heraclitean river.

How then can we understand the original, standing where we are as we do?

Such is the problem of hermeneutics. Whether by Heidegger's pessimism or Gadamer's optimism, we must recognize our own positioning as beings of historicity. Not just in body, but in mind, and perhaps even in soul. We are historically effected consciousness.

Our minds are rendered partial and finite through their very nature. Our ideas and world will always be enclosed by the lack of what we do not know, and that layer surrounded by what we do not know that we do not know.

Those who stand a millennium, a century, or even one generation before us seem alien and strange to us. Why do they talk that way? What are their thought patterns that could give rise to such expressions? Miscommunication awakens us to the hermeneutic distance which gaps our understanding from theirs.

Our foundations, our innate prejudice, essentially prevents us from grasping them as they know themselves in their foundations. Thus, the impossibility of absolute or universal knowledge. Knowledge is built out of tribes. We only delude ourselves into the myth of universal, scientific knowledge through a tribe that has transformed itself into a world empire. We live under the tribal religion of Western science and culture, whose sprawl and ability to subsume all else allegedly gives warrant to its claim to be "universal". In our moment, one tribe rules over the rest, at least for now.


It is humbling to come to terms to these restrictions. That we may never know some things due to the nature of our birth. The technologies and cultures of our time limit the horizons of our understanding, as it does for all others.

Yet the sense that this limitation is tragic or negative in some sense is itself a presupposition, a prejudice of attitude. To think that knowledge can be formed *ex nihilo* without grounding. That a lever can exist without a fulcrum. It rests upon a mode of Western arrogance which believes that knowledge exists in itself without sociohistorical grounding or timing.

This is why Gadamer frames these limitations, restrictions, and horizons as positive markers. These are the building blocks of shared knowledge and understanding. Without our particularly instantiated language and culture, we would have no means or tools to build any knowledge at all. Gaps and absences, stripped of all positive historical content, cannot be used to build something enduring. A house of winds is no house at all.

His conclusion is that in some ways we can as historically effected consciousness transcend our particular time and place through transhistorical dialogue. As a classicist, Gadamer certainly had specific materials in mind for this. We cannot fully rise up out of our situation, so to speak. But one never could. But we can reach across the gap and thereby reach some shared understanding of the world, thus enriching ourselves and our knowledge while recognizing that we cannot become equal or identical to those on the other side of the gap.

It is a cheery image, but it is also a stark reminder of the cosmic inequality that we inhabit. For those on the quest for knowledge, we suffer such a profuse embarrassment of riches compared to those in pre-literate times, or even those scholars who spent countless years copying texts by hand or doing word counts. All labor that can be achieved digitally now within milliseconds. 

We must remember our fortune, even if we so rarely steward our fortune well. We do not know how long we will be able to keep it.

This is merely a first breath at wrestling with our historicity. Perhaps Gadamer's vision cracks under pressure and closer analysis. That we will have to see at some future time.

What it means to be human, bound in space and time

Wrestling with historicity


Self-improvement is the bread and butter of the American culture. A cultural strand that can be traced from our contemporary vloggers, through business executive self-help books, back through corny early twentieth century pamphlets, all the way to Ben Franklin's autobiography. To understand the American spirit, one must grapple with the entrepreneurial drive that underpins our culture, in both action and talk. The American mentality is tied up in a firm, concomitant belief that we are volitional selfs with both self-defining power as well as some capacity to will our destiny. This belief is not without its consequences, only one of which I will consider here.

To define self-improvement is difficult. It is an energy, a mindset. The onus is on you the individual to bring yourself forward, to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. By sufficient application of willpower, many things (if not all things) are possible.

There is much to laud in such an optimistic temperament. But it is not without its dangers.

And few writers name this danger better than Byung Chul-Han who writes frequently on the burnout and depression endemic to the systems of self-improvement culture. In *Psychopolitics* particularly, he articulates a rather illuminating point on this topic.

Traditional Marxist theory is built on what can loosely be described as the employer-employee dichotomy. How the employer oppresses the work through arduous, menial, alientating labor. A story many are familiar with.

Byung Chul-Han believes that this analysis has become obsolete in reference to contemporary office culture. For the source of motivation to be more productive is no longer rooted in the boss but in ourselves. It is no longer so universally the case that the taskmaster applies the whip to the workers in order to make them more productive, we apply the whip to ourselves. The professional class is one that has automated oppression and alientation by casting such conditions upon ourselves through cultural drives.

One dominant cultural narrative of our day, the "you can do it" rhetoric, has inculcated a new impetus, particularly in millennials on down, that the rat race can be won if you apply enough grit and elbow grease. And if you don't win, well it's your fault.

In this model, bosses don't need to be over-demanding to get more work out of their employees. Rather the employees, driven on by a urgent mixture of guilt and lust for opportunity, feel the need to put in overtime or become better "contributors" so that they can be noticed, move up the ladder, be successful, etc. Ask not what your company can do for you, ask what you can do for your company.

And for the guilt-ridden, there is no limit of what can be asked of yourself. So long as you live in the gap between where you are and where you want to be (which is almost the entirely of our lives), there is always more to be done.

Thus we burn ourselves out in a manic frenzy to do enough so that we can succeed. Because the sky's the limit. If you don't get what you want, after all, it's only you to blame.

And as cultural streams often go, this mindset is not limited to the career sphere. It bleeds downstream, into other pools of life.

Self-improvement culture has slowly percolated outward to become, in the minds of some, a universally applicable dictum to all spheres of life. Nothing should escape the optimization mindset. A lot of this I believe is a bequeathment of Web 2.0, a necessary development out of the envy and desire that the new glut of luxury imagery produces. There are other contributors to this development, to be sure, but this particular swathe of tooling has certainly accelerated this particular evolution in our collective psychology.

One of the most evident cases of the expansion of self-improvement culture is its application to the body. Bodybuilding is deeply tied in with the self-improvement ethos, so much so, that the vast majority of traditional self-improvement programs are almost anchored in gym-going as the necessary condition to improve one's life. The discourse is rooted in the gym.

Between 2000 and 2019, gym memberships nearly doubled in the US from 32.8 to 64.2 million. In the next five years, fitness industry spending is expected to increase 171.54%.

These are extreme growth numbers, especially as the United States population is an aging one, and 60% of gym membership holders are below the age of 35.

It is speculation to tie these two as correlation, but let us suppose they are related. How are they then interconnected?

One evident reason is body image. This is readily observable in the public gyms of the past few years. All the selfies, the self-filming, the live-streaming, etc. Attention and validation. Broadcasting the body and its subjection to improvement.

There is one direction of our culture that reduces your value to your visually-presented physical condition. Because that is one facet that is presentable and communicable through photography and videography. It is possible to get traction through Instagram or TikTok through the immediate impression of the visual condition of your body. Physical athletics is one the most highly valuated forms of achievement now because it is immediately verifiable. By contrast, the most accomplished writer or mathematician in the world could hardly gain any such traction through such media focal points by the presentation of their accomplishments. The media shapes the message. And in this case the message is the person, i.e. the body. The medium can only convey the physical, and so the motivations of most people become increasingly and more stringently materially driven.

Hence the irony of the prized abdominal six-pack for men. A meretricious moniker of athleticism and strength. Although its achievement depends on self-starvation and often abandonment of muscle mass, cultural aesthetics have deemed it a laurel of strength. It is strange because of how unnatural it is. One need only read the anorexic routines male celebrities undergo to reach this look. And contrast that to the masculinity of older stars such as Bert Reynolds or Sean Connery. Hairy chests, firm guts, and strong men. Bulk often accompanies strength, but bulk is inadmissible in Hollywood imagery for a strongman starting in the mid 90s. (An interesting contrast is Robert De Niro in *Taxi Driver*. His body fat certainly dips sub twelve percent for that role, but his emaciation is presented as freakish rather than as beautiful or glorifiable.)

What it comes down to is that fat and hair are visual deterrents that subtract from conventional photographic appeal. Rather, we are told the most masculine men are those with baby-smooth chests and washboard tummies. Even when those who possess these feature may unfortunately tend to act more like fops or dandies than true masculine types.

(There is of course the female half of the equation, but I feel the point on body image sufficiently made here, the dots are easy to connect.)

In any case, this self-improvement ethos, in its increasing urgency over the years, has extended its reach to fitness, education, finances, real-estate investment, etc. You aren't enough if you aren't constantly improving. How are you convincing the shareholders of your psyche that you will be better next quarter, how you will do more. Convince them of your growth and your earnings.

And nearly universally in these mantras, it is driven purely by material factors.

The purported end goal of self-improvement is greater accessibility to wealth, power, sex, attention, and the other usual suspects which populate the common motivators for a material life.

In fact, this is baked into the very etymology of improvement which stems from the Latin term *prode* which translates as useful or profitable.

Self-improvement is to render yourself more useful for yourself and your goals.

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That may sound all well and good to most.

But it is a fundamentally nihilist position.

More than just the egoism it entails, self-improvement is soulless.

Some may criticize the oppressive, hostile, enslaving nature of self-improvement culture. I will criticize it for its motives and results.

Self-improvement as a whole, because it is driven by material motives, is fundamentally boring. It produces boring people. Men and women, both.

The exclusive focus on externalities has also led to a neglect, if not outright abandonment, of the interior self.

Hence the general observation that some people use the gym as a replacement for having a personality. And it should not be too controversial to say the same goes for those chasing money, cars, bedroom delights, and other elements of the hedonistic package.

None of these self-improvement tips and tricks point to the cultivation of the soul. The reading of books, spiritual wonder, travel sans tourism, or anything that would make you a deeper, more interesting person. The kind of experinces which would make you capable of having complex emotions to wrestle through.

As a counterpoint, one may see transcendental meditation as a very popular practice which leads to internal cultivation. 

But frankly meditation is better proof of the exact opposite. In its consumerist forms, meditation is rooted in the ablution and destruction of thought. It is a denial of self, and this is not a good thing. By perverting important breathing habits to stifle and silence the thoughts that spark in the quiet stillness. 

Meditation becomes a crutch by which many seek to bypass internal development. To avoid thinking at all costs, even when such self-reflection may be beneficial. This is not internal cultivation, though it may be parried around as such.

Although it is boasted as a practice to root yourself, rid yourself of toxicity, or other slogans, meditation is a repeated practice to blot out and/or silence the inner self. It is directed toward an annihilation of the internal self.

That is not to say meditation cannot be helpful for those who spend too long wrestling in the interior corridors of their consciousness, but for those whose problems and thoughts are no more surreptitious than a child's, then there is an issue. We are meant to be more than blank mirrors, doing nothing more than reflecting what mass culture tells us to buy or look like.

The self-improvement package is based on the external aesthetics of consumerism, spoon-fed by marketing companies and other glitzy media. Tingling your dopamine with those fun sensations which keep you simple, and are purportedly supposed to keep you happy. Surface without depth. You become one of the Eloi.

But the truth is no amount of gym-time, work-time, bed-time, wealth, or even fame can ever stop you from being a thoroughly boring person.

What makes us distinctly human is our interior landscapes, where the mind and heart mesh in curious patterns, and we have thoughts and experiences that deviate from the monolithic norm handed down to us by centralized zeitgeists.

What self-improvement suffocates and leaves entirely untended are precisely these gardening tools of the soul: literature, philosophy, lepidopterology, and other quirky hobbies whether tactile or intellectual. The accumulation of experiences that can redeem your existence on the ledger of time.

The growth of the interior, that which is not reducible to material usefulness, that which is not presentable or communicable through social media, with the rare exception of those who have creatively subverted that medium.


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One should stand against self-improvement in the sense that is foisted on us as some one-size-fits-all *modus operandi* for encountering the world and ourselves.

Physical fitness, nutrition, and hard work all play their role. But they should never come at the cost of the cultivation of the soul. The increasing of wisdom and knowledge, and the development of true character. While our culture may eschew any sort of internal virtue in favor of all that which can be demonstrated externally, the truest people, and the most interesting ones, are those who hold internal convictions and values generated from within, rather than spoon-fed from without.

How boredom and leisure without a panoply of distractions can lead to true internal growth. How releasing the gas pedal of your career and going off into the wilderness by yourself may bring you to a spiritual epiphany that an over-optimized schedule could never otherwise experience?

Perhaps a new injunction is required to force people to be bored more often, to reject consumerist travel, to rejuvenate the life of the mind. A spiritual or intellectual diet as sparse and ascetic as the physical ones some nutritionists force on themselves.

That is one essential step to retrieving meaning in life and rejecting the nihilism that percolates in our cultural moment.

Admittedly, none of what has been said here clearly defines what are soul-cultivating habits versus those that are not. Aside from some blustery gestures to books. That ought be discussed elsewhere. This was merely to open the door, and to understand the ways in which self-improvement can lead to self-annihilation, and the dangers therein.


A new lens for the cultivation of the soul

Against self-improvement

Media supersaturation and a few effects on young folks

Tired before their time

Reflections after reading through the works of Dostoyevky