Prologue

In which I am berated by an Italian entrepeneur while squatting in a Scottish bathroom, come very near to death (but am saved by a Russian surgeon opening an extra anus), find comfort in the words of dead Latin speakers, and start a blog.

The Sacrificing Animal emerged from an experience. There are four things in the tagline of this blog: Crohn’s Disease, History, Speculative Fiction, and the Way We Live Now. My real subjects are the latter three; they are the topics on which I will spill nearly all of my ink. But my obsession with these topics emerged from the experience of Crohn’s Disease. This being my introductory post, I feel obligated to tell that story, and try to explain how it produced my interests and my agenda. I won’t be making reference to my Crohn’s Disease or my philosophical agenda very often after this post. But I do feel the need to put all my cards on the table, and make this story available to you, the reader. Feel free to skip.

The story begins two years ago exactly, at ten o’clock in the morning, as I am running up the Salisbury Crags. The Salisbury Crags are a subaltern spur of Arthur’s Seat, a dormant volcano in the center of Holyrood Park (the crazy quilt of mountains, meadows, lakes, and Neolithic hill forts at the heart of Edinburgh.) From the ground, you should imagine an enormous lion swiping its paw along the upper surface of the crags, leaving a long angry gash just beneath the basalt crenellations that guard the bottomless blue of the Scottish sky.

In 1820, artisan weavers displaced or impoverished by industrialization led a series of strikes, marches, and insurrections that came to be known as the Radical War. Mounted hussars put down the uprising with shouts and sabers, and the leaders of the unrest were hanged and beheaded. The Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott suggested the unemployed weavers they had championed be applied to useful work—beautifying the capital by hewing a walking path across that enormous dimple in the Salisbury Crags. The track they paved is known to this day as the Radical Road.

The Radical Road is an intense and gorgeous run, and since arriving in Edinburgh on a study visa last September, I’ve jogged up the crags every morning to watch the city waking. But this morning is special. This morning is special because, halfway up the crags, I need to take a shit. Like I really need to take a shit. I abort my run and cut through the backyard of an apartment complex, merging onto a commercial boulevard just in time to spurt bloody crap into the toilet of an overpriced Italian takeaway. The proprietress shouts curses through the door as I contaminate her establishment. I buy a diet Pepsi as penance on the way out, and dash for my dorm. I’m not even halfway back before my guts assault me again. So I slip into Black Medicine—the coffee shop where J.K. Rowling did some early work—and gasp a cherry-garcia mudslide into their patron’s only porcelain, sweating like a blown horse. I hunch out through the side door, hoping no one will notice me and demand that I purchase an espresso.

That’s the story of every day that spring, until I stop running, and then stop eating. By the time I leave in June, my professors must think I’ve gone trainspotting. When I drag myself down the exit ramp into Newark airport, I weigh 114 pounds, (I’m about six foot). From the expressions of my family and fiancée, I could pass for a Dachau survivor (or the lich king.) A week later, a gastroenterologist diagnoses me with Ulcerative Colitis. He is wrong, and two weeks after that I am dying on my couch. I have Crohn’s Disease, not Ulcerative Colitis, and my colon has literally ripped me a new one. In medical terminology I have developed a Crohn’s-related fistula. Unfortunately it can’t get past the outer skin, so it creates an abscess—breeding a colony of bacteria that plunges me into fevered demon dreams and sets my joints alight. My mother drags me to the hospital at one o’clock in the morning while I moan incoherent protests and insane threats. A Russian surgeon drains the abscess, opening a new asshole and saving my life. (A few months thereafter, I develop a third.)

In the two years since that hot flash of urgency on the Salisbury Crags, my life has pretty much ground to halt. Crohn’s Disease is a chronic condition. I can hope for remission, but never a cure. After my first “hospital summer,” I managed to drag myself to the conclusion of a Bachelor’s Degree in Ancient History, but my health was back to square one by the time I was finished, and I had a second hospital summer. Now everything is on hold. Daily life is a surreal swim through a curious coral of needles, latex, sitz baths, setons, IVs, steroids, opiates and horrible smells. This blog is about the peculiar world where I live now, and the weird discoveries I’ve made while living in it. It’s not about the experience of Crohn’s—although I’ll be making reference to that experience once in a while—it’s about some things I’ve started to see through the experience of Crohn’s. As I said at the beginning of my story, I want to explain how my interests and my agenda emerged from this experience; but it’s not something I entirely understand myself, so please forgive me if this sometimes seems a bit opaque.

Let’s jump to the last part of the blog’s tag line: The Way We Live Now. This is my shorthand for what academics call Modernity, a historical period and/or human process beginning in Europe in about 1500 and extending into our own time. Its defining features include the rejection of traditional norms and methods in favor of rationally engineered social constructs, the rise of the nation state, the consolidation of capitalism, the ascendance of scientific inquiry and technological innovation, and the deification of the Idea of Progress. Different historians like to chop the process up into smaller bits, usually Early Modernity (1500-1789), Classical Modernity (1789-1914), and Late Modernity, (1914-——some much-contested point in the latter half of the 20^th century, when the Faceless God of “post-modernity” begins its hidden reign.)

But you don’t need to keep all that in your head, because when I say The Way We Live Now I really just mean contemporary affluence: the unprecedented state of high-tech mass consumption that prevails in the West and that the rest of the world (supposedly) aspires to. I mean cars and computers and vibrating massage beds and spaceships. I mean the lifestyle of the First World. I am obsessed with the Way We Live Now and how we got to live that way. I am obsessed with affluence—its glories and its ghouls. Why? Because Crohn’s is an affluent affliction. It’s as much a product of the First World as Dr. Scholl’s Gel Insoles, the Green Revolution, nuclear weapons, and twizzlers.

Let me explain what I mean by an “affluent affliction.” Crohn’s is a uniquely Western, essentially modern disease. It does not occur outside of the post-industrial Western and Westernized nations: Europe, Australia, South Africa, and the United States. Moreover, widespread incidence is a post-WWII phenomenon. Dr. Crohn described the first case in 1932. Decades later he remarked: “From this small beginning, we have witnessed the evolution of a Frankenstein monster.” The only long-running study on the incidence of Crohn’s Disease, conducted in Wales beginning in the 1930s, witnessed a 4000% increase in reported cases. Crohn’s Disease is thus almost certainly produced by some aspect of the First World lifestyle.

Two of the likelier theories indict the First World food supply. The first links Crohn’s Disease with the spread of microbial paraTB in factory-farmed dairy. The second theorizes a failure of the immune system to develop its proper relationship with the intestines in the absence of parasites that humans evolved to accommodate in their gut: an absence linked to the unnatural cleanliness of the food you find in the supermarket. Whatever the causal constellation might be, something is causing the immune systems of genetically predisposed individuals in the post-industrial West to attack the lining of our own intestines, tearing enormous bleeding ulcers across the inside of our guts in a creepy cobblestone pattern, and making every digestive event the internal equivalent of rubbing habanero-lime tortilla chips over the surface of a scraped knee. And the modern apparatus of ingenuity has not yet figured out how to make it stop.

As one colorectal surgeon explained:

"Crohn's is a surgical disease. We wait until the patient can no longer withstand the pain anymore, and then we perform surgery and repeated surgeries over time ultimately, as recurrences happen and intestinal damage occurs, we just cut and cut, in some cases, until there is no more intestine that can be cut out." 

We’ve made some progress in ameliorating symptoms since the time of that quote. The biggest advance has been “immuno-modulating” protein composites that can sometimes induce remission. But these are a very limited fix, since all they really amount to is bitch-slapping the immune system and telling it to keep its big mouth shut, which comes with a few unpleasant risks for your exposure to other invasive agents. At this point, I’ve explained why Crohn’s Disease is intimately linked to the industrial lifestyles of late modernity and post modernity, but I haven’t explained why that’s the part of this experience I chose to focus on. Let me try and explain that as well, as best I can anyways. I think the explanation lies in the middle terms of my tag line: history and speculative fiction.

We process our experiences using the tools that we have, and the tools that we have are stories. I brought a weird set of stories to Crohn’s Disease. I raised myself on books, primarily war memoirs, history, and speculative fiction. When I was twelve I read David Robinson’s War of the Rats, a novelization of the battle of Stalingrad. My sexual awakening took place while reading a scene in which the teenaged partisan Tania Chernova makes love to the renowned sniper Vasily Zaitsev in an underground bunker after a night raid on a Wehrmacht barracks—their hands still covered in blood and reeking of cordite. When I was fourteen I read Robert Heinlen’s Starship Troopers while visiting Stockholm with my sister and father. I don’t remember much of the architecture because I was too buried in the book. I followed my dad’s feet across the top of pages, so I wouldn’t get hit by a bus or something. I imagine it’s no surprise that I chose to major in history.

Histories and speculative fiction—these were the stories I found ready-to-hand when I came to Crohn’s Disease. Both history and speculative fiction demand that you pull yourself out of the headspace of the Way We Live Now, and consider a different way of conducting the business of being human—in the distant past, the far future, or an alternate reality. Which inevitably leads you to reflect on the things that don’t change: the continuities and universals that pull the many strands of human experience into a coherent web. Swimming in this strange new coral of Crohn’s, this affluent affliction, looking for any way to escape the hospital headspace, I found myself trying to situate my experiences next to those of people dead or not yet born or purely fictional. I became fascinated by the variables in human experience, and I started taking comfort in its constants.

I’m going to give you three of the core intuitions that surfaced and sustained me during the course of my Crohn’s Disease. My purpose with these is, first, to let you sample the sort of nonsense I will be talking, and second, to outline my philosophical agenda. This is as close as I get to a manifesto.

Intuition One: We Are Very Special

I am completely in awe of the scientific and technological apparatus of Modernity. Its power to diagnose my afflictions and ameliorate my pains is supernatural. Doctors investigate my insides by running me down long loud tubes instead of peeling off my flesh; anesthesiologists knock me out clean while surgeons excavate my ass; I’m achieving remission through the infusion of a human-mouse protein composite called Remicade: A Frankenstein drug to subdue a Frankenstein monster. That’s the kind of poetry that seems to saturate the Way We Live Now. 

It’s impossible to express the transformative impact of recent technology on our lives, for good and for ill. The revolution in human affairs that produced them started only five hundred years ago, and its full flower is a product of the last century. Yet we’ve been anatomically and behaviorally “modern” for at least 50,000 years. The Way We Live Now is very special.

Intuition Two: We Are Not So Very Special

We are pervaded by this sense that we are living in a unique time, that humanity is on the march, that our past is being erased, that all the old rules—at last and after all—do not really apply to us any longer, that human progress and perfectibility are sponging out our ancient foibles and abiding sins once and for all. This sense is strongest in the United States, where it seems to underlie all our core assumptions and guiding aspirations, establishing our foundations and painting our horizons. I am a child of Imperial America in its halcyon decades—the 1990s and 2000s—and I got as large a dose of this conviction as anyone else. I wish I hadn’t, because I no longer believe that it is true. 

For me, the assumptions and aspirations of Post-Modern American Living made the experience of Crohn’s Disease almost impossible to deal with. The narrative bandolier my society equipped me with was full of blanks: impotent in this kind of work. I had to scramble to find stories that worked better for what I was feeling. I found them in my books. It is not enough for me to say this by itself, so let me give you a list of “for instances.”

For instance: I was accustomed to thinking of myself as extraordinarily special, marvelously unique, and completely individual. The great value of this fundamentally modern and characteristically American idea is its empowering function: it frees you up to pursue your own loves, talents, and virtues. But it’s also an idea that cuts you off from other people if you allow it to proceed to its logical conclusion. Specialness comes at a price in sympathy. Partitioned off by the fluorescent lights and cubicle walls of your imperial isolation—your univocal uniqueness—your spectacular individuality—you are bound to assume that no-body, no-where, no-how, could possibly know how you are feeling.

And this belief makes sympathy impossible. You can’t “suffer with” when no one could possibly understand your suffering. Which is bad, because sympathy is all you really want when you are suffering. All you want is someone telling you they’ve felt the same way. It took me a long time to learn this, but as it turns out, people do feel the same way. They do understand me. This was the grand new gift of old and well-thumbed books. Marcus Aurelius exhorting himself through the discomforts of a winter campaign in the German forest, veterans of the Pacific Theater recounting the details of dysentery, Robert Heinlen’s space marines, Crohn’s patients swapping stories in an online forum: they all felt the same way that I do. Like exactly. Which is nice, actually.

For Instance: I was accustomed to thinking of the universe as comprehensible and fair, or at least well on the way to being so. By which I mean this: I thought you could measure a person’s value with confidence, that the universe would more or less agree with your evaluation, and that cosmic rewards would then be distributed in accordance with merit. As it happens, this is not true, and I’m no longer sure I would ever want it to be true.

An unfair universe—or at least a universe that isn’t fair in any sense we can immediately comprehend—creates the space in which it’s possible to pursue the good life as its own reward. I realize that this idea—so beloved of Stoics and Romans and monks oh my!—is unbelievably out of fashion, but I’m helpless to let it go, because it helped me. When the shit hit the fan, Marcus Aurelius was there for me in a way my doctors weren’t. I hesitate to say it, but I’m sort of grateful things turned out the way they did. I like myself better than I did before. I wouldn’t give that up just to erase an injustice I may have suffered at the hands of the universe. I don’t mean that I’m glad the universe is unjust and did this horrible thing to me, I just mean (not that I really know what I mean) I just mean, all the stories that I love happen in an unjust universe: that’s why they are good stories.

For Instance: I was accustomed to thinking of pain and negative emotions as absolute evils. Suffering was a birthmark on the face of life, without use, without purpose, without value. Suffering was something to be ultimately expunged. I’m not so sure anymore. I can’t understand the things I value most in a world that fails to include fear, anger and anxiety. Pleasure makes no sense to me apart from its smoldering tango with pain. I’m not saying this because I have some privileged access to pain. It’s more that a good strong dose of the stuff forced me to square with the fact that there is no life without pain. It’s not like it wasn’t there all along. It’s just that Crohn’s Disease mashed my nose in it, and made me to stop pretending that life could go on without it. Which is nice, actually, because that acknowledgment let me accommodate pain and negative emotions as necessary guests at the table of life. Never my favorite guests. But not half so terrible as they used to be, because I no longer waste energy driving them out the door when they will only come in at the window. Life is rather like a meal with the family. You don’t choose your family either, and some of its members will always annoy you, and yet, in the end, you’re glad of it. The family, I mean. Life, I mean.

It’s about the stories. For me, great stories and good people happen in an unfair universe populated by recognizable humans who experience pain and negative emotions. Meaningful life happens in the twilight space where we fire loaded weapons and bullets have real consequences. Every good history and war memoir I’ve ever read turns on their presence, and even in the world of speculative fiction, no imaginative variation or hypothesized innovation can banish suffering without killing the story. All the really good stories will always make sense to us, and this is why: The way we live now is really special, but we ourselves—we are not so very special. Which is nice, actually.

Intuition Three: Stop Waiting for The Eschaton

Humans will always prefer solutions that arrive from outside of us and solve our problems for us. That’s nothing new. But this seems to be especially true of the last five hundred years: We are obsessed with the arrival of the eschaton, that singular event which will end the world as we know it, sweep all the little scraps of what is petty and mundane off the board and into the grass, divide the sheep from the goats, transform us into beings of perfect light or creatures of absolute contempt—vindicating those who chose wisely and obliterating those who chose poorly. Most of the pioneers of Modernity—Luther, Bacon, Newton—worked in the shadow of the Second Coming, and sought to hasten its end. The secular turn ushered in by the European Enlightenment altered the note but did not change the key; henceforth our hopes were not directed towards the Second Coming of Christ, but our own completion of the Kingdom of God on earth. We worship The Future, we reverence Posterity. In the words of Diderot—that philosophe par excellence:

“Posterity, is for the philosopher what the other world is for the religious man… O Posterity, holy and sacred! Support of the oppressed and unhappy, thou who art just, thou who art incorruptible, thou who wilt revenge the good man and unmask the hypocrite, consoling and certain idea, do not abandon me!”

The nationalists, the ideologues, the utopians—Adolf Hitler and Ho Chi Minh, Adam Smith and Josef Stalin, Karl Marx and Marvin Minskey—they’ve all inherited the dream. I have a hard road to hoe in this blog, because I think they’re all full of shit.  

I’m most familiar with my own environment: late-stage high-tech consumer capitalism, where rather than waiting for the arrival of the worker’s paradise in clouds of glory, we subsist on a serial variant of the deus ex machina, whereby grace arrives in the form of a gadget and the act of purchase is the event of salvation. It lends itself naturally to techno-utopianism, which seems to be ascendant on the eschatological horizon as the 20^th century Age of Ideology recedes behind us. But I don’t want an eschatological horizon. I think we’d be happier without it. Let me give you a list of “here’s my problems” with our obsession with the eschaton.

Here’s my problem: Solutions that come from outside of you don’t work. Tools can help, but only if you learn how to use them, not if you expect them to do the work for you. And the problems that are truly worth working on exist in the space of You and Your Relationships, and there is no technological or spiritual magic that can penetrate that space and carry your burdens for you. You can bring tools into the space, but it’s ultimately a private world, and the responsibility for its health is your own. You can’t hire a Mexican or build a robot to pull the weeds in that garden, as much as Imperial America wishes you could.

Here’s my problem: I think that people can be pretty awesome and very wrong at the same time. I’m not interested in a world where your biggest decision is which religious confession or political ideology or futurist prediction you choose to sign on the dotted line—and everything thereafter is waiting for utopia to arrive and vindicate your choice. I’m more interested in how people navigate their religious, political, and predictive commitments with integrity and charity. I’m more interested in the care with which people cultivate their own gardens, less in whether the flowers they grow are the same as my own.

Here’s my problem: I think obsession with the eschaton makes you incapable of spending time on unsexy problems and stepwise solutions; I think it makes you a bad listener and a sloppy thinker. I can’t stand the idea that Jesus is coming and all we need to do is look busy. Even Martin Luther said that if he knew the Last Judgment was coming tomorrow, he’d plant an apple tree today. I think we all should stop looking at the sky so much. We need dreams to orient us, but life itself takes place in the planting of an apple tree.

Here’s my problem: I don’t think that Jesus, or the Worker’s Paradise, or the Invisible Hand, or the Technological Singularity, or a Grand Shift in Human Consciousness is ever going to sweep over us and wipe away the messy and meaningful space defined by pleasures and pains, problems and solutions, frustrations and joys. I think life will always be full of sticky choices and conflicted relationships, and if there is a heaven or a hell they will have to be discovered in that space. I don’t want to simmer in a dopamine womb where I only surface to get bio-lip blowjobs, and I don’t want to sit on the justified lap of Jesus eating grapes. I want to live in a mixed up world where life isn’t fair, actions have consequences and choices have meaning. I want to live in the world of war memoirs, history, and speculative fiction, the world where good stories and great people become possible. 

I can’t really explain why having Crohn’s Disease made me feel this way. Maybe a chronic diagnosis forced me to find meaning in a life that’s full of shit instead of waiting for one that isn’t. Maybe not. At any rate, there it is. Like I said at the beginning, I’ll be discussing a specific set of topics, but I wanted to disclose my experience and outline my agenda. I don’t know how the experience explains all this, but it does. Somehow it does. So now I’m back at the blog’s tag line: “History, Speculative Fiction, Crohn’s Disease, and the Way We Live Now.”

Let me summarize.

Crohn’s Disease was the experience, a post-modern disease for a post-modern age, a window into the glory and the ghoulishness of the Way We Live Now. History and speculative fiction were my tools for interpreting it. I wound up with a set of core insights:

We Are Very Special

We Are Not So Very Special

Stop Waiting for the Eschaton

These ideas are very important to me now, and I want to use my training as a historian and my passion for speculative fiction to explore and advance them. From this point on, I will be using historical narrative to highlight what makes us very special, speculative fiction to investigate what makes us not so very special, and consistently critiquing the competing eschatons that aspire to flatten out this tension and make life inhospitable to the Human Story: a moral drama where actions have consequences and the outcome is never assured.

It’s a peculiar project, but it seems to be what I have to offer. My hope is that someone might find it interesting, useful, or maybe even healing. We’ll see how it goes.