I published The Bridge, my one science-fiction novel, 15 years ago last spring. It was set in some inhospitable future New York—after a totalitarian, theocratic government, proclaiming environmentalist doctrine, had subdued the world. By law vegetation grew wild: food was an inorganic chemical regimen: competition, even the most innocuous, had been forbidden. As my central narrative section opens, all human civilization, under Big Brother pressure, has pledged to commit suicide—a logical, if absurd, extension of radical environmentalism and the leftist death wish. Breathing, you see, caused death in certain innocent microbes. No life form is inherently superior, of course, but men and women, given their rational free will, could at least choose not to murder. My simple protagonist, Dominick Priest, through one horrid adventure or another, develops another position. And at last—in epilogue retrospect—we learn that Priest has established a culture dependent on cannibalism and blood sacrifice. So, I was saying (if I remember correctly), the human cycles go.
I suppose, as Lionel Trilling might have said, it is all a matter of authenticity. Bacteria and plants do their unpretentious thing: that is, they are true to their nature, authentic (not sincere —sincere means true to a specific belief system). By definition, because of his devious and manipulative mind, man can never be authentic. Our skyscrapers are intrusive and vulgar— whereas, say, the gross, two-foot-long wasp nest that once hung from my house eave was natural and full of integritas. When men clear land, even for subsistence agriculture, it is all wreckage. When a locust swarm attacks, they call it, oh, genuine—which animal status has also been accorded the Third World primitive whose detritus is thought to be either so naive or so incompetent that it cannot even pollute.
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