The Crisis of Modernity: Baseball, Technique, and the Flight from Nature (Lecture — Sep 26, 2026)

The Crisis of Modernity: Baseball, Technique, and the Flight from Nature

Lecture — Sep 26, 2026

The archive and the changing image of baseball

I’m sitting here doing my baseball archival work. So much of this work, to me, is about understanding technique: the changing face of the image of baseball. The game itself has remained essentially the same for more than 130 years, since the pitching distance was moved back to 60 feet, 6 inches. What has changed is the way the game appears through the technological media available to it: radio, television, photography.

The baseball photograph is my background. I’m very much a materialist archivist. I love baseball radio, and even some old television broadcasts, but those are things that are very hard to hold. The older knowledge of baseball, reaching back before the 1920s, survives mostly as newspaper clippings and industrial photojournalistic artifacts made in silver gelatin. Before that you have albumen prints, going back to the cabinet-card era of the late 1800s.

What I want to talk about, and I see this in myself all the time (if you’re listening, I’m sure you see it and hear it too), is the movement away from nature. It’s part of what draws me toward baseball, which I’ve elucidated in previous lectures, and it’s part of what allowed me to advance some, I think, important scientific, philosophical, and ontological concepts in the past. That’s in the “Jailbroken” lecture, which is in one of my channels and in my archive of documents, essays, and writings.

The movement I mean is the movement of the human being into digital space, which is an ontological move away from life and existence. We have to grapple with that practically.

The vast majority of my existence is now dedicated to cultivating work in the digital space. My material baseball archival work is the preservation of the history of a past paradigm that no longer really exists. Even physical documents, such as books, photographs, old baseballs in the archive, cabinet photographs, signs, or broadsides, are relics of a time we haven’t sufficiently grappled with as no longer existing, or no longer relevant at the cutting edge of the cultural paradigm now setting in during the 2020s. That shift is largely due to advances in artificial intelligence, and, some thirty years before that, the internet.

The move into digital space

The digital space is where we are increasingly moving away from the mediation of the body. You can see this physically in what is happening in culture: the profusion of digital media such as movies and film, the internet, social media, the cell phone, the personal computer, artificial intelligence.

What all of these do is remove the mediation of the body and of physical space. When we talk about innovation in a capitalist, civilizational sense, we mean convenience: removing the necessity of mediating the physical world in order to acquire the essential goods and services that sustain the physical body, the life form. Whether we’re talking about DoorDash or any other form, we’re looking at an ontological movement.

That’s the issue. So much of the discussion gets caught in semantics, in this form or that form: OnlyFans or DoorDash, the cell phone, artificial intelligence. It’s a case of missing the forest for the trees. What we’re not seeing is that the digital space is now primary.

In many ways, baseball, as an American form, anticipates this. It’s a kind of cultural theater in which the metabolism of the human body (you could say the human spirit) is dedicated to an artificial game. It’s made-up play, with fairly arbitrary rules that become institutional constructs, which in turn acquire the institutional archive of the Smithsonian or the Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s a massive cultural work of art.

That is what we’re looking at when we look at baseball history: the whole canvas, everyone who moves in and out of it, players, executives, founders, innovators, fans, the entire culture, including the stadium, stadium architecture, the geographic location of stadiums, even the ontology of the baseball temple as it relates to Greek theater. I’ve written about all of this already; it exists in my work.

What we witness there, I think, is the tension that has manifested in the technological paradigm shift. Its closest analog is the forebrain, as we’ve discussed: this channel-two architecture creating a leap, through the innovative capacity of the forebrain, into something that is effectively non-existence, pure absurdity. It is the harnessing of nature to create an entirely separate sphere, while the energetic principles of nature itself (Newtonian physics, stellar physics) remain active in the theater of culture, the theater of humanity, as we bootstrap toward the digital age.

Baseball, the baseball photograph, the mass-produced lithography of early baseball cards printed for the American Tobacco Company, even the light bulb: these are all early technological precedents moving the needle toward this paradigm shift and this transformation. You can’t isolate industrialization. You can’t isolate the printing press. You can’t isolate any of these phenomena.

Technique and the escape from nature

What I’m really moving toward here is that technique itself, everything from cave art and fire to artificial intelligence and DoorDash, is an articulation of the existential problem of humanity attempting, for lack of a better word, to leave or blast off from nature. This phenomenon of nature trying to escape itself is the phenomenon of beings within being: the masked or artificial identity I’ve already posited as the human limitation.

Much of my work on baseball, especially my literary work, is built around articulating my ontological operator, persistence against constraint, as it pertains to athletic performance and athletic excellence.

Within the container of being human, there is a persistent intuition that can be diagnosed as anything from cultural narcissism to egotism to the desire for freedom or liberation. You could call these forces conservatism and liberalism: the two forces pushing and pulling at the evolutionary paradigm of the human being. Mankind is reaching toward a fundamental existential liberation, which is the realization of the project of being itself.

These constraints are like chains on time and energy, bound to the location of the physical body in space and time. You can understand this even from the innovation of the horse and carriage, or the evolution of weaponry over time. We’re looking at humanity’s attempt to bootstrap itself toward an immanent articulation of being, which is the condensation of space-time.

This is why Hegel is so attached to singularity as a concept: a braided history of clashing dialectical forces moving toward a point of singularity, at which there is universality, a realization of space-time. You see this even in world spirituality and mysticism. It is the attempt of the human being to leap out of the coat of the leopard, so to speak: out of the limitation of the physical form, the animal body, toward a primary ontological realization.

I argue in my work, literarily, philosophically, and scientifically, that we experience this directly in the act of creative, playful immersion, whether on the baseball field or in writing literature, making music, or articulating a philosophical essay.

The primary issue is that the scaffolding of civilization is mission-critical to resolving that. So what you experience is a race toward the end of time: humanity, born relatively speaking into chains, reaching for an ontological dial it tries to turn toward a realization of being itself through the cask of beings.

Persistence against constraint

This is what we witness in the history of technology and civilization. It is the implicit ontological motivator, the prime mover, the driver of all of human history, and I would say the driver of all evolutionary life. We’re not talking about Darwinian evolution so much as cosmological evolution.

We see it incarnate in its most basic form: recombinative persistence at the level of the elements, at the level of even the single-celled organism. You’re looking at a universe that is solving two problems. The first is persistence against constraint, which I’ve articulated as the ontological operator. The second is what persistence against constraint implies at a deeper level, and in fact makes explicit, when you look at the phenomenological universe of beings and forms: discrete objects, and discrete subjects, in space-time, all attempting to solve the primary ontological problem of being in time, which is the limitation of constraint.

This works in a formal sense. What we really have in Plato’s theory of forms is the articulation of the problem of existence itself: the ideal form is always transcendental. You see this also in the ancient Hindu concept of Vishvarupa, the transcendental form, which is in reality formless because it is the primary articulator of all forms. And you have beings in space and time attempting to reach back up toward it, to grasp this transcendental object, which is timeless and spaceless yet manifest everywhere at all times.

So you understand the local problem of being human, the human condition, which we can extend cosmologically: being in time is necessarily persistence against constraint. That is the material world that has to be maintained. Think of it as fingernails, food, excrement, consumption, the existence of the body in space and time.

What the digital space offers is at least the appearance of a solution to that problem: the dissolution of the problem into digital space. It opens up a realm in which the body operates at an entirely different frequency of space-time. By frequency of space-time I mean that you are literally playing with a simulation of light, one able to move goods and services across space.

This is the great innovation of the internet. It gives humanity at least the appearance of a technological leap beyond the channel-one, bodily or genomic, revolution into a new paradigm, a new scaffolding. It works the same way the forebrain is a scaffolding that makes an entirely new dimension of the real accessible: the innovation of logic, rationality, and critical thought.

The internet is this external, wired (and so often wireless) global technology, a network through which humanity can act in a relatively disembodied fashion. With agentic architecture and artificial intelligence, you reach another leap forward: humanity no longer even has to act within this simulated digital sphere, which nonetheless has real effects on an already highly revolutionized nature of cities, metropolises, fossil-fuel exhaust, and so on.

The drive toward reunion

This is where it gets profound. At the deepest level, there is a death drive at the base of human evolution, revolution, and existence: the fundamental spiritual and existential drive to reunite beings with being itself. Heidegger understood this well as the basis and foundation of all religion, and I would say of spirituality itself.

Any inclination toward the transcendental is necessarily a desire for reunion with the transcendental object, alternatively called God, the cosmos, or the singularity: the dissolution of space-time. So when we witness so much religious destruction, for lack of a better word, occurring in nature, what we’re watching is the articulation of one of the deepest natural and existential desires, the desire for freedom from the cage or prison of the body’s form.

When Percy Shelley writes Prometheus Unbound , you hear an ontological bass note very close to Plato’s theory of forms; Shelley, of course, was a student of Plato. It is the primary existential condition of being in time, which is trans-species, universal, intergalactic so to speak: persistence against constraint. And beyond that, the desire to dissolve being in time back into the transcendental object, which means death, suicide, or transformation. In Greek terms that would be the Plutonic realm, the realm of the underworld; in Egypt, the Duat.

This is the primary driver at work within humanity. When we talk about innovation, progress, even sexual reproduction, there is the realization of this basic existential condition of persistence. Beyond that, even at the local level of the organism, there is a desperate attempt. This is Dostoevsky. It is not cultural and it is not political; it is existential, primary to the ontological ground of the experience of being in time.

That attempt could be anything: the immortality sought by Ponce de León, or whoever these figures were searching for some version of the Holy Grail or the Fountain of Youth; the colonization of the earth; the existential literary masterwork; reproduction.

All of these formal expressions in space and time, whether you call them civilization, human behavior, or the behavior of nature, are attempts to articulate persistence through the available technology. That is what’s critical. The available technology is the real, incarnate, embodied genetic architecture, transmitted across generations over vast stretches of space-time, hundreds of thousands and millions of years. Within the architectural problem, the architectural solution is attempted.

So when technological leaps arrive, such as industrialization or artificial intelligence, new ways of harnessing energy to recombine information and potentially resolve this fundamental ontological problem, you get a mad dash toward resolution. This is the critical revolution of Sartre and Camus in the middle of the twentieth century. It gets down to the ground of what we can really resolve about the human condition through technology. Is there some kind of breaking point? When we read Sartre’s No Exit , we’re reading a document of existential desperation.

Baseball is a way further in

Let me bring this back to baseball. Baseball isn’t a way out; it’s a way further in. I’ve discussed this in previous lectures in terms of somatic embodiment: mind, body, spirit, dedication to craft.

Baseball is a fully embodied discipline of attention. That is what lies at the root of science and philosophy, but here it is applied science and applied philosophy on the field of an architectural ground. Whether we mean the genomic architecture of the human being or the architecture of the stadium and the ballfield, these are technological rules. It is the field of play itself, and to play within the field is to accept those rules.

The issue at the foundation of technology is a fundamental denial of the rules of existence. This is where the paradox lies. Addiction to the screen, to the internet, to artificial intelligence, is an active attempt to escape to a higher plane of existence. The question is whether such a thing is possible within the real material, physical, technological constraints of being human.

This natural scaffolding turning away from nature in the early twenty-first century is a practical problem. It is the problem of maintaining the body in the face of an increasingly diverse, stimulating architecture of total immersion.

Turn back toward nature, and what you witness is the glacial evolution of organic life. Discontent with that pace is, in large part, the human project itself. I’ve already quoted Pascal on this: all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. But now that is what the vast majority of humanity experiences: sitting in a room alone, interfacing with an international network of light-speed technology. You can pull up any book, any system of ideas, any social network. It is a full stimulatory universe available through devices with screens and touchscreens.

On top of that sits artificial intelligence, which pulls that archive down into human conversational language, a human conversational code. I wrote an essay about this: the movement from hard code to literature as the coding architecture of the future. That is why the humanities and philosophy will become increasingly important. They always were, but human ignorance tends to keep things that were always important from appearing important.

This is the modern condition: humanity attempting to leap paradigmatically through the technological innovations of the past 150 years, from industrial into digital technology. Those innovations were driven by the thermodynamic revolution and the quantum-mechanical revolution, then the information-age revolutions of von Neumann and Shannon, which opened these domains to traversal. All of it was born out of the forebrain architecture.

So when I look at baseball (and this is why I’m so serious about it), I see a solution within the solution space of humanity. We’re looking at a very basic, grounded, physical form of play in space and time. As baseball evolves, you see analytical developments built on advanced data, AI in the dugout, iPads in the dugout, Jumbotrons, gambling ads, broadcasts on television and radio. But the game itself, and this is critical, has not been technologized beyond the first technological leap.

That first leap is, and always was, the creation within natural space of room for the expression of the full architecture of the human being. That is what’s so beautiful about baseball, and I would say about sporting life in general. It creates the basic foundational framework through which the human being can make a full-bodied expression (mind, body, spirit, strategy, action) within the synthetic domain of uniformed, costumed theater, and the play of experiment, attempt, and stepping into the unknown of the diamond.

You know the rules and regulations of the game, but you don’t know what any given day will produce out of the possible recombinations. It’s like a physical form of chess: infinite permutations of how the game can be played, within architectural rules you understand. It is stepping into a deeper ontological presence, a deeper perception of what it is to be in time.

What we witness with technique, which I’m suggesting means progressive steps beyond this fundamental technological revolution of culture, is everything that occurs in culture outside this theater of play. That theater is closest to Heraclitus, who doesn’t really see anything beyond play. Technology, especially extremely advanced digital-industrial technology, is itself a play: an attempt to articulate the fullest extent of being.

So you get a radical divergence. Baseball was founded near the beginning of what we understand as the primary industrial revolution, the mid-nineteenth century through the end of the Civil War in America. And then you have today’s modern life, surrounded by screens, video games, social media, artificial intelligence. These are different forms of play, and the hyper-accelerated digital-industrial form of play has become extremely prominent through the revolutions we’ve lived through.

Play

This is the dilemma. If we take Heraclitus seriously, the ontological ground of being is not only persistence against constraint, as I’ve been describing. Behind persistence against constraint, which is the appearance of forms and beings in space and time, lies the play of forms and beings in space and time.

I’ve called it the blind rat in the maze: the character of being itself experimenting with persistence against constraint, which is the reality of being in time, and trying to break that lock from within. Any form in space and time is subject to these rules.

If we take Heraclitus seriously that this is play, and I think it is clearly suggested phenomenologically across space and time that at the deepest level it is play, then you can see it in something like a lion or a jaguar being soothed by the human who raised it. Beneath the architecture of ferocity, beneath the thermodynamic attempt to persist, there is a nature of being that is curious, trying to understand what it is, trying to understand existence, trying to come into communion with itself at a deeper level. You witness all these attempts, many perhaps ill-advised or misunderstood.

That is really what we arrive at with technological advancement, and where baseball stands within that larger trajectory. We’re looking at the span from the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, in the mid-1800s, to 2026. Everything that has happened in that time is an extreme development of, and beyond, the first step of technique: human beings using the thermodynamic, metabolic, genomic sphere of existence that is the body, the human body at this stage of evolution, being in time in the age of the forebrain.

To express that in a jailbroken way, as I’ve articulated before, simply means using the architecture of the body in conscious play. You put on the baseball uniform, you step onto the diamond, you know the rules. None of that is directed toward survival.

That is what’s so powerful about the Negro Leagues and early Black baseball. Survival was increasingly difficult, yet these players kept playing baseball, because it was what they wanted to do. It was a conscious choice, made even though it simply wasn’t profitable and it created incredibly hard conditions for many of them.

What you’re watching is an existential turn toward the questions Sartre and Camus asked in the middle of the twentieth century. But those questions were being answered ontologically by baseball players across the entire arc of baseball history, a history that looks different technologically but remains the same ontologically.

Freedom and the symbolic chain

This choice is especially visible in players like Rogers Hornsby, who dedicated his entire life to the practice, pursuit, and craft of baseball. Dostoevsky keeps coming to mind, so I’ll invoke him here too: Dostoevsky’s life as a dedication to literature. This is the vertigo of freedom Sartre describes, when he says people retreat from freedom precisely because of how available it is.

When we watch technology take multiple steps beyond a primary cultural form like baseball, which is a very primitive architectural ground for the expression of being, we’re watching a cultural and civilizational symbolic chain grow hyper-complex. Fundamentally, it isn’t necessary. But we experience it as the acceleration of convenience, and as the acceleration of ability. This synthetic architecture makes possible what is not possible in the body. That is what I’m driving at.

We’ve touched on the idea that, under the current conditions of being human, there is a very firm locality, and it is pre-industrial: the agrarian match between channel-one and channel-two architectures that I discussed. Before industrialization, the architecture of the human genome was well matched to its environment, which ran on somatic time, seasonal time. Introduce industrial time, factory time, the light bulb, and then digital time, the rapid condensation of space-time into knowledge and information from the Library of Alexandria to artificial intelligence, and you create a synthetic ability that humanity does not actually have.

Even the photograph captures an image of space and time. Oscar Wilde articulates this phenomenon deeply in The Picture of Dorian Gray : human limits captured and transformed by a technological form, even something as simple as a painting. This has long been what culture and civilization are at their deepest technological root, all the way back to the Lascaux caves, even to fire. At the most primordial level, it is a transformation of our ability to experience conditions differently.

Digitally and technologically, even quantum-mechanically in the information age, the advance in what is possible, or appears possible, is so great that it becomes the basis of the Faustian bargain of human existence, so to speak: the attempt to expand capacity beyond natural limits.

Baseball has never allowed for that. That’s what’s so fascinating about baseball as a technology, and as the cultural backbone of so much of American history since its invention. It is stubbornly physical, stubbornly somatic. It persists stubbornly in the reality of persistence itself, neurologically and thermodynamically, within the architecture of the human body. It can’t become disembodied. It can’t become a math or a science, because it exists purely in the realm of somatic participation in being.

So what we witness across history, at the deepest level, is the attempt to transform the architecture of the human being into something with more expansive capacity and fewer limits. Watch a child experiment with physical limits, not knowing the stove is hot, or pushing past what is developmentally possible, and you’re watching an adolescent consciousness bumping up against the edges of its abilities. Much of the ecological and societal catastrophe of modernity comes from exactly this: a very fancy form of technological, digital-industrial play, trying to do all it can, in a very private and individual sense, within an existing universe of constraint.

This is not unnatural. I’d say it’s primary to human expression, and you see it even in baseball, as in the 26-inning game between Boston and Brooklyn in 1920. What is so valuable ontologically about something like that game is that it pushes human capacity to its furthest limit in order to know what that limit is, to know it within oneself, and so to know oneself.

But externalized channel-two architecture, meaning industrial and digital technology, is no longer contained within the individual. It is no longer the organism itself facing existence.

The instrument and mastery

This is very important for understanding oneself, the world, and existence: ontologically, there is very little room for technological advancement beyond creating the conditions for the fullness of human expression. That is the beauty of the novel or of musical instruments, these primary, physical, somatic forms of technology. They let the human being express itself as fully as its architecture allows. This is the project of self-realization.

When I talk about the existential philosophical novel, or the 26-inning game, or careers like Warren Spahn’s, Cy Young’s, or Satchel Paige’s, I’m talking about the fullest extent of the human being manifested in space and time, dedicated to the craft that will allow one to express oneself. This is the journey of the poet or the artist, the existential technician, who uses a primary instrument of ontological expression (a rudimentary guitar, a notebook, a canvas, or the ball, bat, and glove on the terrain of baseball) to step into being itself and cultivate the capacity to express oneself.

That first step is the step into the instrument, for lack of a better word; I use “instrument” because it has a somatic resonance. Beyond the step into the instrument, a profound symbolic chain of detachment follows: the attempt to extend instruments ever further from the physical body and the somatic existence of the being in time.

The tension in consciousness, in the sentient being, lies between what is possible within this very limited domain of human architecture (writing a masterwork, pitching the greatest game ever pitched, composing something of great sophistication on guitar) and what tantalizingly stands beyond its bounds. Beyond them lie, say, conquering the world, or a digital-technological architecture full of automated AI robots that let one acquire and accumulate property and capital.

I understand this as something of a binary, and it’s an important threshold to recognize. It marks a movement away from the fullest capacity of human expression through a rudimentary instrument, even just a set of basic oil paints, toward the creation of massive digital-industrial structures. Those structures churn out products for consumption and production, which become the ground of vast technological, digital, and economic civilizations. And what are those civilizations powering themselves toward? Their own reproduction.

So we’re talking about a survival architecture set against an existential, ontological architecture: an interrogation of being, which I’d say is fundamental to old baseball, as it is to the acoustic guitar, a set of simple paints, or a notebook. It is the attempt to express oneself.

This is where technology becomes critical: it is an existential failure to step into human life. Consider the masteries cultivated by Dostoevsky, by Cy Young the pitcher, by Van Gogh in painting. What is so hard for human culture, history, and civilization to understand about these achievements, however much they’re admired on the surface, is the scale of the self-cultivation behind them. It takes enormous time, practice, and dedication to the vocation of a craft to produce the ability to express oneself at the level of being itself.

At the deepest level, that is what mastery is. In the poetry of Hölderlin, we’re looking at a lifelong project in the craft of expressing being, which lives within beings. But that realm has to be accessed technologically, through the craft. It’s Perseus’s shield: the instrumental extension through which a being in time can articulate itself.

The promise of the shortcut

When you enter this high-speed industrial and technological recursion, what you witness, across the body of the human species as a whole, is a kind of fallen state. It has always been present, but technology amplifies it through the promises of various cultural and civilizational architectures: the promises of charlatanry, of religion, of industry, of Ozempic, of mass-produced consumer culture, of cinema.

In a pop-cultural, pop-civilizational sense, these are promises that the existential, ontological end goal, the articulation of being, can be reached by purchasing and consuming a product. This is what’s existentially critical about modernity and civilization. What is being promised en masse is a shortening of the solution. It says the existential masterwork, communion with oneself at the deepest level of being, does not require a lifetime of work through the ballgame, literature, philosophy, science, or art. It says it can ship to your door overnight via Amazon Prime.

Understand that this is all that is occurring in human history, all that is occurring among beings: the attempt to commune with being itself, to reunite with it. It is understood this way neo-Platonically, Gnostically, and very clearly by Plato. It runs clearly through the history of ancient philosophy, which is the primary philosophy. That restoration of communion is what ontology is.

So when you look at these rapid, desperate attempts to scale the machine digitally and industrially, you’re looking at the promise of capital, of profit, of consumer culture. The promise is that at the end of the road of accumulation, primal accumulation, the entrance to being will reveal itself to you, beyond the bare, raw reality of living in this physical, architectural body. What’s being promised is an escape route.

Without real dedication, cultivation, and persistence in a craft, which creates the conditions for articulating oneself at the deepest level (and thus for expressing and realizing oneself, none of which we can know until we step into the practice), what’s offered in its place are Ozempic solutions, for lack of a better word. They are consumer-culture solutions that promise a shortcut to the doorstep of that experience of communion. That’s the weaponization of sexuality you see in consumer culture, and of gambling, and of the addictive design of social media now being fought over in Congress and the courts.

This is the sad condition of most of culture and civilization. The work required to come into ontological communion, meaning mastery of an instrument of creative expression, a craft, is the proverbial 10,000 hours. It takes that much work to express oneself through an instrument, even through language: learning to speak by making small mouth noises, as Terence McKenna would say, or learning to write.

This possibility is available to all beings, and it has been available for hundreds of years. We see it in the logs of human history: the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the archetype of Orpheus, the music of John Coltrane. These are existential, ontological moments of breakthrough, reached through the primary foundational architecture of the forebrain, through critical reflection, and through basic instruments such as the pen, the pencil, the scribe’s tools, the clarinet, the guitar.

The level of craft, dedication, and discipline required to reach this communion is substantial. What you see culturally and civilizationally is that a large part of the species does not want to do that work. The excuse is that there isn’t enough time or energy. Beyond that is the belief that we’ll reach this communion through industrial or consumer culture, through money, through political power. All of these are poor, small shadows of what’s possible in a relationship to being itself.

The crisis of modernity

The vertigo and catastrophe of modernity, in the scope of the new digital epoch now being ushered in, is that it has nothing to do with the human condition. It has nothing, existentially, to do with the primary problem. We already have what we need.

The only thing this technology could solve is making the basic foundations of life available to more people. Beyond survival, those bare conditions, lies the sphere of ontological participation in one’s own humanity. That’s not to say the survival conditions are unimportant. It’s to say they must be established through technological mediation. That is the only purpose of technology, and the only purpose of government or civilization.

Then come the cultural outlets, everything from jazz to baseball to literature. These are the true ontological and existential purposes of human existence. They are the only reason to have culture and civilization, and the only reason to have technology: to create the scaffolding needed to step into this relationship to being at all times. That is a healthy existence.

Without it, you have nothing. You have the abyss of empty values, everything from profit to power, battling it out desperately on the global stage and producing nothing of meaning, worth, or value, existentially or ontologically. The basic condition hasn’t been reached; for many, there isn’t even the basic condition for survival. And even where there is, people aren’t prepared or willing to step into what’s absolutely required: the profound dedication to craft needed to produce this sphere of ontological reunion, which becomes available at all times through literature, art, music, and maybe the baseball game.

Ultimately, and unfortunately, this is an indictment of human history. The necessary technologies are very basic and primitive, and we’ve had them for centuries. The issue isn’t that they’re unavailable. The issue is that they’re available and not being chosen.

Most of industrial-technological civilization has been the story of creating increasingly desperate and distant mediating devices, meant to artificially produce the sensation of ontological reunion that comes through the dedication and discipline of somatic craft, which lies at the ground of nature. Now we live in an age of addiction, of our own brain chemistry bound to systems that artificially produce novelty, drawing us further and further from the true existential, ontological problem.

That is the crisis of modernity.