A Peculiar Absence of Bellybones | John Michael Greer

[Tace]

July 3, 2013 (Archdruid Report) -- The fixation on imaginary “perfect storms” critiqued in last week’s post is only one expression of a habit of thinking that pervades contemporary American culture and, to a lesser extent, most other industrial societies.

I’ve referred to this habit in a couple of posts in this series already, but it deserves closer attention, if only to help make sense of the way that individuals, institutions, and whole societies so often get blindsided these days by utterly predictable events.

Like several of the other themes already explored in this sequence, the habit of thinking I have in mind was explored by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West. His way of discussing it, though, relies on turns of phrase that don’t translate well into English, and philosophical concepts that were familiar to every reader in 1918 Germany and completely opaque to most readers in 2013 America. To make sense of it, I’ll need to reframe the discussion by way of an excursion into deep time, so we can talk about the difference between what can happen and what does happen.

Unlike the Marcellus shale, the Barnett shale, and some of its other distant geological cousins, the Burgess shale doesn’t contain any appreciable amounts of oil or natural gas. What it does contain is a vast number of delicate fossils from the Cambrian period. It’s been argued that your ancestors and mine are there in the Burgess shale, in the form of a tiny, wriggling whatsit called Pikaia with a little strip of cartilage running down its back, the first very rough draft of what eventually turned into your backbone. There are plenty of other critters there that are unlike anything else since that time, and it’s perfectly plausible to imagine that they, rather than Pikaia, might have left descendants who evolved into the readers of this blog, but that’s not what happened. Intelligent beings descended from five-eyed, single-tentacled Opabinia were possible; they could have happened, but they didn’t, and once that was settled, a whole world of possibilities went away forever. There was no rational reason for that exclusion; it just happened that way.

Let’s take a closer look at Pikaia, though. Study it closely, and you can just about see the fish that its distant descendants will become. The strip of cartilage runs along the upper edge of its body, where fish and all other vertebrates have their backbones. It didn’t have to be there; if Pikaia happened to have cartilage along its lower edge, then fish and all the other vertebrates to come would have done just as well with a bellybone in place of a backbone, and you and I would have the knobbly bumps of vertebrae running up our abdomens and chests. Once Pikaia came out ahead in the struggle for survival, that possibility went wherever might-have-beens spend their time. There’s no logical reason why we don’t have bellybones; it simply turned out that way, and the consequences of that event still constrain us today.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/a-peculiar-absence-of-bellybones-john-michael-greer

[Sentath]

1. So, an age of rapprochement,

of memory.

Maybe.

How do you feel about the modern mythmakers in this process? Telling new tales with old characters and bringing newer figures into a shared context?