Professor MacCormack’s main idea seems to be that the only way to save the planet from destruction is for humanity not to reproduce itself and thereby to die out within a generation or two. She wants to make the world safe for the worms and the wasps, though her scheme would be hard luck on those species that parasitize only Man. They would have to die out too. But, as the Reverend Charles Caleb Colton put it in 1821, “Let no man presume to think that he can devise any plan of extensive good, unalloyed with evil.” If Man dies out, so too will Wuchereria bancrofti, one of the filarial parasites that cause elephantiasis, along with other such species, but I suppose that this is but a small price to pay for the immense benefit overall wrought by the extinction of Mankind.
Naturally, I sent for her latest book, The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene. Thanks to the epidemic all the libraries were shut, though in other respects the virus’ efforts to end the Anthropocene were, from the professor’s rather special point of view, feeble or pathetic, with only 2,000,000 deaths so far and 6,998,000,000 to go. If I wanted to read the book, I would have to buy it.
I am an obsessional reader; that is to say, when I start a book I feel obliged to read it through from cover to cover. Moreover, I would rather read anything than nothing at all. Once in Los Angeles I was stuck in a hotel bedroom with nothing to read but the yellow pages (there were still telephone directories in those days), from which I learned a humiliating lesson. Books have long been at the center of my life, but I discovered how unimportant they are in the lives of most people. There was about half a page devoted in the yellow pages to bookshops, but scores to private detectives. No wonder Philip Marlowe chose Los Angeles as his place of work.
But Professor MacCormack’s book defeated me, not only sapping my will to read further but inducing a state almost of catatonia. It certainly cured me, at least temporarily, of my obsessional desire to finish any book that I have started. Her style made The Critique of Pure Reason seem as light and witty as The Importance of Being Earnest. She appears to think that the English plural of manifesto is manifesti rather than manifestos; I admit that it conjured up in my mind a new Italian dish, gnocchi manifesti.
Open the book at any page and you will find passages that startle by their polysyllabic meaninglessness combined with the utmost crudity. By chance, I opened the book to page 144 and my eye fell on the following:
The multiplicity of becoming-cunt as an assemblage reassembles the tensors upon which it expresses force and by which force is expressed upon its various planes and dimensions.
I have known deteriorated schizophrenic patients to speak more sensibly and coherently than this.
