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The War on the Universe’s Strangeness
Cultural strategies for avoiding our inhuman, natural foundations
Each of us grows up from childhood, not just physically but psychologically, as we lose our naïve sense that the world is enchanted. Similarly, our sedentary societies outgrew the collective childhood of our animistic immersion in personified nature.
Strangeness, though, as in that which differs profoundly from what we’re most familiar with, namely the inner life of our conscious self, is everywhere. Nature is impersonal and inhuman, and our body’s atomic constituents share that strict physicality. The earthly wilderness beyond civilization is strange, as is the universe beyond our planet. The fact that there’s something rather than nothing is the primordial strangeness that sets the paradigm for the many oddities that evolved and emerged.
We’re averse to existential strangeness because we’re preoccupied with our egoistic conceits and social antics. The more we take our struggles, loves, jobs, and hobbies for granted, the more we must demonize whatever lies beyond them because the impermanence and flexibility of our pastimes mean their rules are optional and often arbitrary. Our ways of life evolve in that they adapt to changing circumstances. We might have chosen to adopt different pursuits, and any role in which we…
