Our Oddity in Deep Time

By Benjamin Cain

From the perspective of deep time, of which we can have only an inkling by stretching our minds to suit the world's monstrous scale, our social struggles and achievements must be queer blips. Much came before our history and much will come after it, but we shouldn't mistake those unfathomable quantities with a shared quality that unites us with animals and with the physicality of nonliving things. Human societies are anomalous in the context of animal life that stretches back billions of years in our past, although the emergence of organic life is anomalous, too, in the cosmic environment that's mostly lifeless. Our encultured, progressive, civilizational dynamics look like the quickening of that underlying strangeness, as though life's revolt against entropy were finally given its druthers in the evolution of personhood. In this anthology of social and political articles, I aim to chart our course while keeping in mind that long view, which must take that course to be either heroic or foolish--or perhaps somehow both at once.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0CVS3GF9Q
• ISBN13: 9798879725124
• Release Date: February 2024
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 531 Pages
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.2" x 6.0"