PCAPPC

When in history, which has really just begun, have we ever, as a global civilization, despaired of its trajectory? Civilization, which we define as the domestication of nature, has only in the last 50 years or so became global. There had been, until recently, perfectly well-adapted cultures occupying worlds of their own and operating without the "benefits" of financial markets, industrialization, corporate agriculture, and private property. Increasingly efficient means of subjugation and control, in transportation, communication, and weaponry, provided the State's missionaries, in the form of blundering tourists, anthropologists, misguided NGOs, and paid scientists scouting for exploitable natural (and human) resources, with the means to domesticate the planet. So, the answer is no; there has never been a period in history when the steady march of civilization was paused so we could consider our options. There were certainly individuals who, as history was unconsciously...

Might and Right have always been on the same side. Like professional wrestlers, like any sporting contest, its exhibitions and competitions are arenas where our heroes act out the fantasy that we are the agents of our fate. We matter in the opposition, and "right" is defined by might's relent. The sides have always been manufactured, whether the artifice is obvious or subtle. Football teams can arouse our patriotic and religious passions, just as nativism and racial identity can. Ideologies can be as simple as a flag, an icon, or a football jersey, and any of them can be as complicated as the statisticians, theologians, or political pundits care to make them. We are right, or we are powerful, but we're spectators and participants in the same game. Power's real opposition are those who walk away, who simply dodge the iron fist and doubt the orthodoxies of every true believer. Power's real opposition is invisible and ostensibly harmless. Gandhi and MLK unde...

In kindergarten I painted with my fingers. I painted the sky as a blue stripe across the top, even though I knew it was wrong. Mingling the sky with all things under it just seemed impractical, and messy. I was deliberately abstract, even then. I suppose most kids knew the difference, that their stick figures with over-sized heads weren't literal representations of themselves. I suppose that many might even have known that their artistic choices reflected something more personal and private: their feelings about the world rather than the world itself. Self-expression at that age didn't require any special effort. Art was spontaneous and natural. We didn't know there was a difference. Everything was happening inside our heads. and reality, the reality that adults insisted on our knowing, occupied only a small corner of our imaginations. For most of us, I suppose, the corner where we once kept all things corrupted by convention would come to define the boundaries of o...

Worth is a word worthy of more study. It's the Germanic synonym for the Latin "value," and both were pulled reluctantly from their original contexts to suit a new world order of privilege and drudgery. The original metaphor for worth was the tropism of plants and the winding of vines toward sunlight. The tending toward and the twisting were conflated so that any deviation from a straight line was an example, or a result, of worth. When we "ward" things off, we change their linear trajectory. Things move inward and converge , or outward and diverge . Verge is a phonetic variation of ward , and "verse" comes from both. Poems turn, while prose marches in a straight line. Worship is derived from worth, and in its earliest usage was probably synonymous with obedience and submission. And so, from ward also came wrangle , wrath , writhe , worry , and wrong . The conflation of worth with value must have come much later. Value has its deep origins i...