Grand. Apostrophic. Searingly bleak. Infectious and parasitic in a way that has prevented me from thinking about much else for weeks.

I’m glad I stopped myself right at the thoracic drop when reading the first time. My surface-level reading wouldn’t have had me ready for the horrors that lie at our geotraumatic sacral core.

I need to collect my thoughts here so that when people ask me what this book is about I can answer without being put in a psych ward. Ultimately I think the methods for this book are what it’s about as much as what is actually said by the author using those methods.

Thomas Kuhn talks about there being essentially two different phases that scientific history can be in: periods of puzzle solving and periods of revolution. Puzzle solving periods entail working within an established framework or mental model of the world that has been largely unchanged for a long time. Revolution periods entail the restructuring of what we think we know and creating a completely new framework/mental model which will serve as a base for the next puzzle solving period. Periods of scientific revolution rarely come about from rote puzzle solving. Instead they almost always come from tracing our steps back like Danny Torrence in the hedge maze of thought or reason and finding a new place to branch off from somewhere we’ve already been.

My confidence in mentioning Kuhn so extensively to capture this book’s methods comes from the author citing him twice in the glossary of persons: once within the first chapter of the book, and again listing him at the final page /after/ the indices where no actual footnote exists (this is one of those books where even reading the indices and bibliography is kind of fun, for example SpongeBob is cited at one point as Robert Sponge). Kuhn is the cited footnote for the entire book and you can feel while reading that the author is attempting something like a seance to reformat our philoso-scientific world. He desperately begs history for a retreading of our scientific refuse so that he or someone else can hold up a garbage-covered diamond.

This book is a beautiful recapitulation of Western thought in the form of pseudoscience, science fiction, and philosophy. Almost every Wikipedia article I had to read to keep things in context in this book ends its first paragraph with the phrase, “their ideas have been largely discredited and are widely acknowledged as [pseudoscience](link to my recently most read article).” Moynihan uses the history of thought related to the spine and nervous system as his scaffolding to try to bring about some revolutionary thought, and it’s mostly a blast to descend with him along the way down our backbones. And who knew that basically every philosopher in western history has written pretty extensively and specifically about the spine?

Some cool thought experiments along the way are: nervous systems as simulation machinery (then are we perhaps contained within the nervous system of some encompassing greater being whose ganglia simulate our entire experience of reality?), the human genome as exo-archeological artifact (did aliens exist and leave behind our own genome as an attempt to communicate? [shoutout Prometheus for, I think, being centered around a very similar idea]), and upright human posture resulting from pre-existing rationality in an obscene act of universal defiance (are we enmeshed in a cybernetic self-correcting and rational feedback loop holding our heads upright similar to a rocket tuning thrusters so that it can fly accurately?).

I won’t spoil the ultimate thrust of the book’s argument and it’s final “so what” just in case at this point anyone is either still reading or is still interested in reading this CCRU-sprouted manic metadocument. However I do feel impelled to give my only possible protozoic rebuttal thought that stands minuscule in front of the terminal thesis of Spinal Catastrophism.

It comes from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning:

“When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place”

Ironically I wrote most of this on a plane so my spine is suffering quite a bit.

Spinal Catastrophism

Loading Description

Tags

Bookshelves

Threads

Quotes

Reviews

Lists

Purchasable Editions

You May Also Like