Entropic Philosophy by Shannon M. Mussett;

Author:Shannon M. Mussett;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786612472
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Published: 2021-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

He continues powerfully:

A society can live, act, and be transformed, and still avoid becoming intoxicated with the conviction that all the societies which preceded it during tens of millenniums did nothing more than prepare the ground for its advent, that all its contemporaries—even those at the antipodes—are diligently striving to overtake it, and that the societies which will succeed it until the end of time ought to be mainly concerned with following in its path.49

Lévi-Strauss likens such an unearned and unwarranted position of superiority to maintaining a geocentric vision of the universe with humanity as the greatest creation therein. Such a position assumes that the world and its riches exist only to be used by and for a certain kind of society, regardless of the billions of other living beings that must share finite resources.

Humans tend to find the most immediate as the truest, and the farthest in time and space less so. However, we are deeply embedded in history, and losing sight of that entrenchment thoughtlessly speeds our collapse. History provides an ethical demand: duty to fellow humans, duty to knowledge, and duty to the physical world itself. Nevertheless, given the human agential role in world inertia and destruction, this demand becomes difficult to hear in the cacophony of destruction. Echoing Freud’s melancholic poet, all fine accomplishments—from agriculture to urbanization, the greatest works of art, science, and literature, and the technology created to drive them all—will eventually be swallowed into general chaos. While it is tempting to see civilization as a kind of complex machine capable of providing salvation given time and diligence, such a view is mistaken. Ultimately, most (if not all) civilizations feed upon low-entropy fuel and spit out high-entropy waste. Continuing, Lévi-Strauss writes, “civilization, taken as a whole, can be described as an extraordinarily complex mechanism, which we might be tempted to see as offering an opportunity of survival for the human world, if its function were not to produce what physicists call entropy, that is inertia.”50 Such entropic effects call forth the inertial heaviness of the dilapidated buildings awaiting the future of Dick’s Martian landscape and its last indigenous inhabitants. This steamrolling tendency leads to Lévi-Strauss’ profound proclamation that anthropology “could with advantage be changed into ‘entropology,’ as the name of the discipline concerned with the study of the highest manifestations of this process of disintegration.”51

The conclusion of Triste Tropiques is depressing. Although Lévi-Strauss does his best to dissociate these astounding acts of destruction from individual persons, he yet notes that the “rainbow of human cultures” will eventually sink “into the void created by our frenzy.”52 This leaves only the brief reprieve of “arresting the process,” interrupting and “unhitching” from the mad whirl hurtling toward destruction. How is this possible amid the chaos? For Lévi-Strauss, perhaps only in those brief moments where we contemplate a mineral, smell a lily, or share a look with a cat. In the end, although lovely, this does not appear to offer any kind of enduring optimism or hope. The

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