A Gentle Warning from the Editor:
Translation is always a problem. When staffer Robert Lonoke brought this piece in, I resisted. His argument was that to be accurate, he had to keep the convoluted sentences and the overwrought vocabulary in order to be faithful to the German original. My response was that only scholars would be willing to wade through such bad writing. His reponse was that the basic idea behind the piece was intriguing and he knew that readers of Magellan's Log were suckers for intriguing ideas... So here's the piece. Before you start, you may want to warm up on a page or two of John Stuart Mill at the Gutenberg Project, or some Immanual Kant paragraphs if you have any lying around.
                                                                  --Doc Cuddy.

Given the asperity of the continuing, devastating analyses of first European and then American culture over the last two centuries (including but not limited to those of Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Norman O. Brown, Foucault, and Laccan, Vrana Hempstead, et al.), it ill becomes us if we falter in our still-incomplete quest for the root-cause of this well-identified and accurately diagnosed ""sickness unto death," whose fearsome, cancerous reality at this point only the most blindered and religiously challenged among us can deny. Indeed, many of those very diagnosticians have, bravely, persisted beyond diagnosis and trod most treacherous etiological ground in seeking to root out the root-cause(s) of this "disease called Man," yet, for all the rewards awaiting such a one who does finally understand and share that understanding with the infected world, none has gained the vaunted victor’s laurel wreath.

My own decades-long immersion in the fecund speculative shelves surrounding this most pressing of human questions, after years of lean and sere research and hours of self-alienating weltgeschichtlich- centered contemplation, have finally, it seems, yielded an important insight into the puzzling origins of this polluted, yea, dangerous accumulation of human misbehavior so accurately and succinctly described by the late actor George Sanders in his otherwise lamentable suicide note as, simply, a "cesspool." One must of course forgive the bluntness of his language (he was after all neither German nor an academic, and at the same time silently applaud the fetid conciseness with which he identified and labeled the problem. What took Freud 60 years and 80 volumes, this talented actor in the last moments of his epicurean life got down to one word.

That notwithstanding, we are still left with the undeniable daily humdrumness of diurnal reality that we face every morning when we get up (pace, Schopenhauer). Here I have no wish to belabor the ultimate superficiality of the various analyses that have come before me; nor do I have any inclination to borrow the inflated discursive jargon so beloved of late by our brothers and sisters across the Rhein as they have woven their entangling skeins of sui generis transgendered meta-dissonances. Rather, I would burrow beneath, deep, deep beneath those troubled and troublingly shallowly deceptive "explanations" (which of course explain nothing except the usefulness of empty obfuscation in attaining tenure and media attention). My own breakthrough research operates at the very fundament of human reality and chthonically reveals, at last, whither springs the bloodiest discontents of this alleged civilization.

Consider please two pictures. The first shows what the North European child experiences much of the time when he or she looks out the window or goes outside:

The second shows what the South Asian child experiences much of the time when he or she looks out the window or goes outside:

So unpleasant, so cold, so ill-lit, so barren is that first world that for 2,000 years the tribes of northern Europe stayed indoors most of the time. This residential internalization had a bi-pronged effect: 1) What was to do but retreat even further within and think, think, think. The European became a symbol-manipulator supreme, with, to be sure, sometimes wondrous results, which we call "culture," but also with the far less admirable result which we call "history." To state the glaringly obvious: I think, therefore I am. But that was only one effect.

The other, and here lies my discovery, my contribution to the great chain of incisive cultural dissection, was far more devastating. 2) The thinking European was also cut off physically eight or nine months of the year from direct physical contact with nature. Oh, to be sure, he or she could look out at nature through ice-covered windows, and would even venture out into the snow to acquire the necessities for survival. But that contact with nature was painful and short.

If as a thought experiment, we suppose that, given the nature of our evolution in the millennia before culture and history began, prolonged, mostly pleasurable direct contact (visual, tactile, olfactory, auditory, gustatory, emotional) with nature is a primary source of human equilibrium—and autotherapy!—then we are left with two unavoidable conclusions:

1. The source of Euro-American culture, with its alternating, conflicting throes of creativity and destruction suddenly becomes clear: Trennungsangst [separation anxiety]. Like the asthmatic child, in spasm, struggling for air, we, torn from nature, thrash about wildly, not even knowing what it is we’re missing, what it is we need.

2. Blinded and deaf, with the momentum of destructive millennia shaped by Trennungsangst driving us on, we now seek only more of the same: more words, more theories, more machines, more lovely toys, more deadly toys. If you want a "scientific" graphing of the level of Trennungsangst, there are many at hand. Use any plot of our "progress": the stock market, the number of patents issued, the number of cars in the world, the number of AIDS deaths.

END