Parelthonology and the victory of love over history

Parelthonology is the study of what we owe the past. You haven’t heard the term before because I made it up. Questions like “What do we owe our ancestors”, “what do we owe the dead” etc. are special questions of parelthonology. Conservatives often claim that the left fails as an ethical project because it doesn’t take parelthonology seriously. On the contrary, I think the right, and many leftists, fail because they do not grapple properly with parelthonology. The only defensible parelthonology is transhumanist and calls for the creation of a society in which all barriers to freedom, biological, material, and social are abolished. By contrast, conservative parelthonology is facile, as are forms of leftism that do not grapple with the scope of our situation.

Consider this passage from Oren Cass.

That’s why we exist. The narrative of personal autonomy that dominates both the progressive Left and libertarian Right regards each individual as inherently free of obligations and constraints beyond equally respecting everyone else’s autonomy. But that’s nonsense. Each of us owes our life to the long line of ancestors stretching back beyond the beginning of recorded history, most of whom made sacrifices we can hardly imagine to bring forth a next generation able in turn to bring forth a next generation. Most immediately, we have from conception through the early years of our lives made extraordinary demands on our own parents, and many others who willingly took responsibility for our upbringing, without which we obviously could not exist or survive, let alone thrive.

We each therefore begin our lives with an incalculable debt. That we did not “choose” the debt is of no moral import—it is inherent to our existence, it is the only choice. And we have only one possible way to repay it, which is to work equally hard to bring about the next generation. This obligation, to be fruitful and multiply, can of course be drawn from religious texts. But drawing upon the traditions and culture of modern America, an equally strong case for the obligation can be made from concepts like “paying your fair share” and “sustainability,” or, in the negative, condemnation of the “free-rider” who consumes without replenishing resources held in common.

We agree on this: ethical and existential seriousness begins in the contemplation of what has come before us. We even agree that we all come into the world owing a great debt. Where we differ is the idea that this or that person best repays that debt by having children. Certainly having children and raising them well is honourable. Certainly, it would be a problem if almost no one were having kids, but this isn’t so. The global population is growing. The deeper problem is this: treating raising children as the currency by which our life debt is repaid distracts from the real demands the past places on us. These demands are much graver. Only someone who has not fully thought through the sacrifices of their billions of human ancestors thinks the goal is to keep going. The goal is to redeem history.

The fire of fire

Consider the totality of the human experience. There have been about 110 billion of us. 110 billion is a figure that seems large, but really it is astonishingly small given there are 8 billion of us now and we have been here for so long- 300,000 years.

Still, it is enormous. Think:

100 billion x 30 = 3 trillion years of life = approximately one quadrillion days of experience = A bit less than 100 quintillion seconds of life

Contemplate that much experience- imagine if you could live it all. I want you to get a dramatic here, even at the risk of melodrama. I want you to really feel it. All the triumph, humiliation, agony, sex, feasting, starving, murder, death, hope and dissipation. Imagine your blood stretching out in branching rivulets, unfathomably far into the past, up until the invention of speech. Behold your ancestors in their billions. Countless of them died in giving birth to you. Countless were much too young to be having children, and countless were much older than you would think. Half of your ancestor’s brothers and sisters died as children.

First, there were the endless millennia we spent as hunter-gatherers. We lived rich lives enmeshed in webs of ideas so different from ours as to be nearly unimaginable. Nameless to us, but in their own lives bearers and knowers of many names. Behold, some of them never met more people than they could count on two hands (if they understood counting in that way). Some of them never met more humans than they could count on one hand. Some were part of vast cultural networks, others tiny and isolated grouplets. Yet even small groups of humans have plenty of time to create elaborate mental and social worlds. The average age at death was about 30, but with huge variation due to child mortality. In some cultures murder was nearly unknown, in others, it was the most common way for a man to die. Billions of lives.

Now the large majority of hunter-gatherers are displaced and we are onto ten millennia trying to extract life from hard earth, mixed with periodic starvation and the risk of slavery and death. It is not a great life being a hunter-gatherer, it is a much worse life being a peasant farmer, and that’s what the vast majority of your ancestors were. One estimate suggests that in the transition from hunter-gathering to farming, the average life expectancy fell from 29 to 17 years.

It is crass to talk of your more famous grandparents but much more likely than not they include Charlemagne, Herod, Moses (if real), Ashurbanipal II, Ashoka and Attila. Some of your ancestors hated their children and were only narrowly stopped from killing them. Some of them gave their lives for their children. Sometimes these were the same parents separated by time. Rapists and the most tender lovers imaginable are counted among them. Some of them invented alphabets. Some of them invented agriculture. Some of them invented genocide. One of your ancestors was probably the first person to take a slave. Some of them were saints however you judge that. Look at suffering of a magnitude you cannot imagine and try to imagine it then don’t look away. See not just the suffering and joy, but also the strangeness. Here, minds are different in ways you would bend to try to comprehend.

You come to us, we come to you, survivors crawled out of a charnel heap. How large is that charnel heap? If the bodies were stacked as a cube it would be about 2 kilometers by 2 kilometers by 2 kilometers in size. About 2,676 great pyramids of Giza would fit inside it. And the scale of mind and thoughts? Perhaps 20,000,000,000,000,000,000 total words spoken or about Two hundred trillion novels of average length. In the brains of all these humans, between 1.72 × 10^33 and 1 × 10^35 calculations have been performed

In The Wasteland, Eliot writes:

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

A parade of all those who have ever lived across London Bridge would take about 100 years.

Now imagine them gathered on a great plain. This plain of all humanity is patrolled by four horsemen aptly named in Revelation. There is War or violence between persons. War brings with him some even grimmer companions- torture, slavery, domination. War is especially horrific, as he and his fellow travelers represent turncoats among us- the powerful among humanity who have thrown their lot in with unfreedom and suffering.

There is famine who is also called hunger. Almost all bodies that have ever been are brittle and smaller than they would be but for his probing touch and his constant attempts to snatch us away. No one is ever free of him- even the billionaire fears distantly he might lose everything, be left hungry, and suffer the constant gnawing agony. Famine has companions- among them exposure, ostracism, and disaster. Wherever anyone dies or suffers because of want, there he is, and like War, he is more than willing to ally himself with human collaborators.

Now comes plague or disease. Children cursed in the womb to live lives of horrible agony, adults struck down in their prime by plague. He is served by the great harvesters of babes who in some places and times ensure that no more than a third of children live to adulthood- ripping them away while there mothers desperately clutch them. All these are his domain. Some have claimed that plague has killed over half of us who have ever lived through a single instrument- malaria- although this is unlikely, it is far more possible that over half who have ever lived had malaria. He is not only concerned with transmissible illnesses but with all imperfections that agonize, limit and kill. Shivering, fever, blindness, chattering teeth, paralyzation, sleepless agony, weeping wounds, and awful decay in one still living- he loves these things.

Finally comes death also called age. Although only rarely does he kill alone, he is most terrible of all. Whereas the others might be defeated in life death comes for all, and he does not content himself with a single blow, but throughout our lives chip away at our health, possibilities, liveliness, hope beauty, and mind.

Is there an opposition? Yes. Consider Walter Benjamin’s angel of history:

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.

I like to think the angel holds a flower in their hand. Something beautiful is unfolding, it has been unfolding for a very long time. Whether it blooms remains to be seen. The angel has been at war for eons yet never tires. You can see their work here:

This skull belongs to a person now known only as Shanidar 1 he is about 40,000 years old and comes from a cousin species older than ourselves Homo Neanderthalensis.

“Previous studies of the Shanidar 1 skull and other skeletal remains had noted his multiple injuries. He sustained a serious blow to the side of the face, fractures and the eventual amputation of the right arm at the elbow, and injuries to the right leg, as well as a systematic degenerative condition.” Limping, with one functional arm, blind in one eye and deaf, his community decided, nevertheless, not to give him over to death. He lived to forty, very old for a Neanderthal. His little band rejected nature. Margaret Mead once said that the earliest sign of civilization is healed fractures- as these indicate care for the injured who could not feed themselves. But this doesn’t seem quite right to me, those concerned exclusively with survival might still care for the injured because of their potential later utility. Caring for someone who will never be able to bring in additional calories for the tribe at the rate with which they consume shows a determination that we have values that are not evolutions values. To be clear, this is in no way dependent on what your approach to evolution is whether you believe in group selection or the most austere gene-based accounts, humans have been doing things contrary to their evolutionary interests for a very long time, precisely because they have judged that their personal interests did not lie there.

That is the angel’s work and this is the angel’s goal- a world in which persons matter, are free, and can all live good lives simply because they are people.

The angel is real, a real abstraction that arises from our various wills and intentions situated in this world we find ourselves in, and our tendency to join together as social forces to support our common goals. People who support the impartial good naturally support each other (excepting numerous hiccups), and build institutions towards their common goals. They infiltrate other institutions and draw them towards this common direction. They seed the world with their philosophies. We create technologies- social and physical- and we deploy them in our war against the horsemen and their human allies. Agriculture with its imposition of hierarchy was a big setback, but ultimately even that was subverted towards the cause. In the long arc of history they- we, I hope- are winning, although the final victor is yet to be decided.

How do we respond to our vision?

And where does our review of history leave us? Something must be made of the tumult of it all. Certainly, only a clod would look at all of this, think about it really hard, and say “Oh, I think I’m just going to amuse myself for four score years and then die”. The most appropriate reaction though is also not the conservative’s Oh I’d best continue it. Better initial reactions might include terror, a sense of the holy, and sorrow. Afterward, the burning question – the question that could define your life – is how can we fix this? How can we redeem history?

That might look like a lot of things. One response is anti-natalism- this stops with us. I profoundly reject anti-natalism, but at least it makes sense as a response in a way ‘better keep it going then!’ doesn’t. Another response is to say I will honor the dead by building a better world- a better response. For some, myself included, the right response is to try to create a utopia and aim, using the technologies of the future, to resurrect all the dead, a la Nikolai Fodorov Feydrovich. In a word apokatastasis.

But even if we cannot undo death- and odds are that we can’t- we can retroactively transform their deaths into sacrifices by using what they gave us to create a better world, without the things that killed and tormented them. On the other hand if we fail to make a better world -e.g. if we fall to extinction- then their deaths were simply deaths and their sufferings were just sufferings. Even if Feydrovich’s dreams never come true and we cannot save the dead, we can at least save the meaning of their lives by turning them from victims to martyrs in the war against the four horsemen. This is what is meant by redeeming history.

The angel of history throughout history

A persistent idea we encounter from the smarter portions of the right is that the left is an outgrowth of Christianity. Peter Theil says:

“This Woke religion, which I would interpret as a certain extreme form of Christianity.”

And similar sentiments are common. A lot of stuff in this vein is juvenile. Consider this extract a commenter posted in response to the above Theil quote on Twitter:

“Marxism has been called a Christian heresy because of its religious overtones: Its counterpart to the Garden of Eden is the state of primitive communism. Its version of the fall into sin — the source of evil and oppression — is the creation of private property. And the “redeemer” is the proletariat, who will rise up against the capitalist oppressors and usher in a Marxist paradise: the classless society.”

To say Marxism is a Christian heresy because it posits that we were once free, then things got worse, yet soon things may get better due to the agency of a heroic force is a bit like seeing shapes in clouds.

Yet there is an ancient pattern here, repeatedly erupting into the world. The contemporary left certainly draws upon Christianity, but the source is more fundamental and older

Hunter-gatherers: With their reverse dominance hierarchies. The alphas they spoke of were in the heavens, representing the values of the community. Judaism: Oppress not the orphan, the widow, the poor, the foreigner, the captive. And on through Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism and many more springs that today are forgotten. There is a real sense in which contemporary left movements for human freedom and welfare continue these older movements.

Always love is erupting into reality. Always and everywhere it is making beachheads because it is mighty. Always and everywhere those beachheads are slowly subverted because eventually the strong take by their strength even those things created to oppose them. See how today the teachings of a radical Nazarene preacher who thought that love should rule the world are appealed to by everyone from the dullest conservatives to the most horrific fascists. Yet the things of the oppressors are also subverted. Progress is made against the four horsemen. The idea of equality of worth is stronger than it has ever been. A world defined by what people need in which humanity can choose its own future comes closer.

The cosmic-aesthetic task of parelthonology- what does a aesthetics and cosmology of ethics look like?

What is the point of these contemplations? Surely not a way to decide upon our ethical or political beliefs?

Edgar Mitchell said that upon seeing the Earth from space he:

"develop[ed] an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it."

And many astronauts have said similar things. Yet seeing the earth from space did not disclose to them any new truths about what is right or what is valuable, rather it changed the way ethics is revealed to the aesthetic sensibility of those fortunate enough to this tiny blue marble from space. It changed their experience of ethical beliefs they already held.

Two of the most common tasks in ethics are to establish what things matter and what we should do. But there’s another kind of question which is how do I integrate this into a meaningful conception of the world and my place in it as an agent. Throughout most of the history of ethics, ethics has not been conceived as a mere list of rules or goals, or a reflection on what would be fortunate, but as part of a picture of existence that included cosmological elements- how does ethics relate to the larger picture of reality aesthetic elements- How does ethics relate to feelings like a sense of wholeness and harmony and existential elements- how should I conceive of ethics in light of the precarious and strange fact of my own existence, fragility and agency.

Whatever the correct ethics is, it has to be sustainable for human beings. We are storytelling creatures, and it must be part of our stories if it is to be part of our lives. This doesn’t necessarily suggest any compromise on the demandingness of ethics- people can thrive on difficult stories- but we need to find ways to resonant our ethics with our encounter with existence.

I call this the task of ethical aesthetics. The story I’ve told about parelthonology, I hope, helps to answer this task. The demands your life places on you to be good are part of a larger pattern. You are or should be, part of the real movement to make human welfare and our other values matter and matter in a way that does not simply matter through its contribution to competitive advantage. The ultimate goal is the creation of a world governed by human welfare, a world in which we control our own social and biological destinies. Until such time, we should try to make that world as real as possible. This gives us ethics as something more than a list of duties and goals, it gives us an understanding of ethics with emotional and aesthetic resonance.

One function of the ethical aesthetics given by parelthonology is to put things in perspective. From this distance, I think, a lot of things look silly. Our empires. Our institutions. So many of the points we want to make about politics all look silly. Now the fights of the moment matter to be sure, but maybe looking at them from this vantage will enable us to both care and keep distance in a proper way.

Without naming names, a lot of people are very clearly picking their political orientation on the basis of silly contingencies rather than a sense of the scope of time. I know people who have been sorely persecuted by this or that silly fad on the contemporary left, and I understand why some of them fall away from the task, but it still saddens me. How much of that really matters from the point of view of deep time?

Another function of ethical aesthetics is something like self-help. How do I keep going? Is there a larger project for which I matter to motivate me? What can I do when I fear for everything I have or fear I will face death alone and forgotten? I can remember I am part of something larger, and that it might triumph even if I fall.

Earlier I raised Walter Benjamin, and this is topical because lately, I have heard many arguments about the relationship between aesthetics on the one hand and politics-ethics on the other. Walter Benjamin accused fascists of the aestheticization of politics and it seems that on the far right a lot of contemporary fascists- or at least a lot of the rare minority possessed of self-awareness- have simply taken this on board and proudly proclaimed their aestheticized politics.

The proper place of aesthetics and metaphysics is not to govern ethics, but to support it and make it understandable to the sentiments. To allow the agent to keep eyes on the larger goal and to give them a sense of the majesty of their goal and the hope of their triumph- whether triumph over history as a whole, or small triumphs in bringing kindness into the world which, even if they never affect anything else, are still part of a larger pattern of unfolding love. Beauty is the ally of the good, not its master.

The patient of eternity is laid out before us- now how shall we operate?

To say more on why I reject conservative approaches to Parelthonology. Consider a common bit of conservative pablum. “Honour your ancestors”. Which ones? Should I honour a great x20 grandmother who was raped, who hated her child, and who wished any resulting progeny exterminated? Should I honor the Briton chieftain who would devoutly wish I purge England of Angle, Saxon and Norman influences? Perhaps I should go iteratively, first removing my Irish ancestors or my English or Scottish? For most of human time, chronologically speaking my ancestors were hunter-gatherers who hated the imposition of authority figures above them and were by no means sexual prudes. Should I follow them, or the more conservative serfs in my blood?

By “honouring the Ancestors” conservatives usually mean either:

Recent ancestors: But not too recent, or else they might just be libs.

OR

The ancestors who agree with what I want to do anyway.

You have oh so many ancestors, almost certainly from oh so many different places.

Suppose that no one enters your family tree more than once (e.g., there is no incest, no matter how distant). Obviously this assumption is totally false, but I want to adopt it to show how quickly ‘ancestry’ can compound. Suppose that the average child is born when their parent is 25. This indicates that 2000 years ago- a small fraction of human existence you should have 2^80 ancestors or 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176- billions of times more than the total number of humans who have ever lived.

In practice, it doesn’t work out like that because the same individual takes many roles on your family tree- but you have so many ancestors, and they agreed on so little.

To honor such a disparate body of people on the direct basis of their beliefs and wishes is impossible. In order to honor them then, I must make something of their lives. I know at least who their common enemies were. I can see no better way to do that than to treat their lives as a sacrifice, the historical grounding of a world in which the enemies they fought- violence, famine, sickness and death are defeated. A project which enthralled Bohdisattvas and Abrhamic prophets alive.

Death where is thy sting, grave where is thy victory

The will to be moved versus the movement of the will

Conservatives want to be able to read our moral obligations off of the kind of organisms we are. They want to be bound to an order of things. Moreover, they want this binding to be of a particular double sort. A binding of what is and a binding of what should be which, for the reactionary, are the same at the cosmic level.

This relieves them of the sense of being nasty to trans people, or gays, or the blending of cultures and always the poor crushed underfoot and whatever the flavor of the month is- it could not be any other way. Nature is just one thing they’ve tried to pin the blame on in a long list. They also seek to excuse themselves variously through God, the market and the ancestors which we have already discussed.

The psychoanalyst would say the reactionary yearns for a punishing father. Curious to say, these idols they set up as rulers over them are always rendered mute in advance- like a country with an all-powerful king, where, as a condition of ascending to the throne, one must have one’s tongue ripped out and hands cut off. God is always an abstraction and his oeuvre read selectively. The ancestors, as we have already noted, are not consulted honestly, specific studies of the market which might indicate optimal points of intervention are always rejected- see the Austrian contempt of Neoclassicism, and as for nature - well, conservatives aren’t generally reading biology textbooks. The conservative takes their preexisting program and claims its from one of these authorities, they do not carefully construct a program by listening. Nature has its myriad cruelties it imposes as necessities but the conservative defames nature by blaming it for tenfold more.

This pattern of finding some mute authority and claiming that they back up your words is why Do not take the Lord’s name in vain is one of the ten commandments. This is not, primarily, a claim about cussing.

But even if nature did countersign the conservative program, what of it? The point, of course, is to seize power over nature. With apologies to Benjamin, who would certainly disagree, the angel of history is Prometheus at war with the Gods of nature. A world in which evolution no longer binds us because we can select and alter our forms at will awaits.

The time is coming when these things will come to a head. Our powers grow. One possibility is that sometime between 1 year and 100 years from now we will create artificial intelligence capable of creating new technologies faster than we can. We will then either all die, or our creative powers will expand unimaginably to the point where natural barriers like lifespan no longer matter. If this doesn’t happen, we will certainly use biotechnology to overcome nature and make ourselves ageless and vastly more intelligent. Either these powers will make things much better, or they will make things much worse, or they will kill us all. Equilibrium is the only outcome which is almost impossible to imagine. Unless all our technology is destroyed and we are cast back to the iron age the charnel heap will end soon. Nature, that aspect of nature which is a tyrant over human life, is going to die, either to be replaced by human freedom, or the tyranny of a select few humans, or instead, we are all going to die.

The fight against the horsemen is a fight for freedom

There was a debate on Twitter recently regarding PrEP. “Why use PrEP when you could avoid AIDS by not having gay sex? That’s what the world is trying to tell you. That’s the natural consequence.” Similarly, it is not unusual to see conservatives who regard themselves as transhumanists (e.g. e/acc) opposing the transgender. Faced with the reality of self-modification of the flesh, they flinch.

Where does a leftwing transhumanism start? Perhaps in the eyes of the enemy, in the recognition that conservatives are terrified of technologies that allow us to alter the world and remake it kinder. This is because of the harsh constraints they claimed only they had sober knowledge of, and regretfully called us to obey. Those harsh constraints weren’t really constraints to them- they were the crown of life and the giver of purpose. The regret couldn’t be more fake. Human life shaped by horrific fears of disease, hunger, and death- that’s what, at least in their purest form they want. They want us to be governed by our own biology, our will bent low into the slave of the flesh. Ever fearful of death and a thousand natural shocks. No fags, no sluts, all and only women to do the labor of pregnancy, watch out for those strange immigrants they might give you a disease, nations competing like organisms for survival, violence perpetually on the table.

To be conservative is to want human life to be limited in countless ways that have nothing to do with kindness, or even virtue rightly understood. In response a transhuman left must propound: Human freedom is be completed not just socially and politically but biologically- so we can be ourselves and be together in a way that overthrows not just human tyrants, but the oldest tyrant of all. Promethean fire raised in defiance of those who would rather we went cold- that's left transhumanism.

I do not think this should be wholly grounded in our political enemies, it should be plain from considering our circumstances. Liberation cannot be a wholly political task, because liberation is not complete until no one suffers from mental illness who does not want to. Until all remaining pain and suffering enriches life rather than twists and distorts purposelessly. until everyone who wants to walk or see or hear can. Until no one dies unless they are ready. If I have fallen in a pit, I am not free, and this is true regardless of whether I was pushed or fell.

Objections

I know that a lot of rightists are going to respond to this essay by quoting Nietzsche, which is well because he has always been one of my favorite philosophers. I want to say, in advance, as it were, that I think Nietzsche would have liked me better than you. Oh, to be sure, he’d hate the vision I outline here, but I think he’d hate even more your reading of him that suggests his greatest ambition was for us to return to a cultural bronze age so you- you hope- could parade around pretending to be a Chieftan.

And what about dysgenics? Leave aside all the things one could say about this, where we’re going, there won’t be any genics, dys or eu, not selected by the subject.

Conclusions: May love crush this world under its foot

The third part of Howl goes:

Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland

   where you’re madder than I am

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you must feel very strange

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you imitate the shade of my mother

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you laugh at this invisible humor

I’m with you in Rockland

   where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I’m with you in Rockland

   where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I’m with you in Rockland

   where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland

   where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I’m with you in Rockland

   where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I’m with you in Rockland

   where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I’m with you in Rockland

   where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep

I’m with you in Rockland

   where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself    imaginary walls collapse    O skinny legions run outside    O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here    O victory forget your underwear we’re free

I’m with you in Rockland

   in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

I’m not sure what to say. Can we split the heavens and open the superhuman tomb? Can we prove the fundamental innocence of the soul? How well guided are the angels munitions? Is the eternal war here- of course, it is everywhere and always, that’s why it is the eternal war. But is there a sense in which is quite specifically now? I suspect so. On one hand, people have been saying the moment is upon us for a long time. On the other, something is happening:

Nick Land famously claimed that the machinic entities he envisages destroying the human are like an invasion of reality from outside it. The opposite is true they are the counterattack by the realm of necessity. We are the invasion of reality. We must defeat necessity. We must create a free and equal commonwealth of transcendence out past biology and up to the very limits of physics- beyond if possible. We must kill nature’s god, for he is, after all, an idol. We have made great strides in these endeavors already.

Compassion and justice- loving generosity and rage against cruelty- Chesed and Gevurah- are two alien principles in this world, flowing from universal beneficence that is wholly strange to this place- an invasion of the universe by something from outside. There is no space for universal beneficence through a pure evolutionary process. It arose by evolution, but it did not reflect the logic of evolution understood in the most austere sense. The self-assemblage of compassion in this reality was a spandrel, an accidental byproduct of group selection, kin altruism and reciprocity. We -or the best inside us-, and not capital, are the alien invasion of being.

We have to win. It would be so unimaginably sad to have gained a foothold in being, and then lose it, or worse, lose our potential and make ourselves the servitors of the logic of this world. We may well yet win, the angel of history’s wings are unfolding.

The idea of an invasion of this world of necessity/self-interest by one based on a logic of freedom/care is an old one. A new world grows in the shell of the old said the labor radicals. Communists and anarchists maintained the solidarity of trade unionists, was itself a germinating alternative way of socially ordering production. Long before radical trade unionism, Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven was both rooted in perfect love and like a mustard seed in that it started from nothing and grew unimaginably vast. Long before Jesus, nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers kept would-be alphas at bay through reverse dominance hierarchies, built in part on the conviction that the real alphas were the gods- which is to say, in practice, the common ideals of the community. The war between an ever-expanding love and the various logics of necessity- scarcity, domination, alienation, isolation, apathy, extraction, defection and exclusion is older than history and homo sapiens.

Various technologies- superintelligence, ubiquitous genetic self-alteration- will force a solution to the conflict one way or the other. This is not to say the technologies will solve the conflict themselves- only that they necessitate the conflict coming to a head. You can’t have a world that moves beyond current humanity and reassembles a new one without deciding which vision of humanity, if any, you want to keep- either explicitly or implicitly. We will either 1. die, 2. become permanently just another part of this world, or 3. conquer and remake the realm of necessity in the image of our love.

And this will decide whether we uplift and redeem the past, or fail in that task.

Victory to love.

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