Burning the Archive

If western culture leads to psychosis, homelessness, mass starvation, enslavement, genocide, nuclear war and the collapse of the biosphere, of what value is the culture? In other words, if the stories we have been telling ourselves (European, Christian, white and male) lead inevitably to our own destruction, what good are the stories? This is a thought experiment—while I am always game to burn shit down-literally-I have no immediate plans to do so. There are many persons who, when asked what a human is, point to the archive: Homer, Plato, Aristotle, The Gospels, Aquinas, The Pieta, Botticeli, Monteverdi, the Duomo, Dante; the renascent seat of western culture as the supreme glory of Man. The “human” in this humanism is custom made to exclude the vast majority of humankind. He is justified then to colonize Africa and the Americas, enslave entire people groups, and destroy whole ecosystems, all in the name of Christ, the guarantor of his supremacy. He remains in power to this day maintained by the Christian dogma of us vs them now enshrined in American imperialism: one nation under the god of war. Do Amazonian tribes (or modern Iraqis, for that matter) have the wherewithal to build the Duomo or write Dante? No they do not. So much better to destroy their world and condemn them to perdition. If our apocalypse is Christian, capitalist, and male, then the archive of western civilization—these art-objects and this literature—is not venerable at all whatsoever, but is, in fact, cursed; made up of necro-objects of the first order, depicting a narrative that propels a global trajectory towards annihilation. Struck with ambient cataclysm the choice is urgent, simple and real: do we save the future or the past?