This book is not yet finished. The first twelve completed chapters will be posted here in the next month or so, to be followed soon after by the remaining chapters which are in the process of completion.  Each chapter is part of the whole but stands as an essay in its own right.

When studying English Civil War tracts years ago as a young research student in the British Museum reading-room in London, where Marx wrote Das Kapital, I used to marvel at the extent of the library’s vast collection of books. But I would also often think about its destruction - and all the knowledge it embodied - in the event of a nuclear holocaust. At that time the Cold War dominated international affairs and nuclear war, we knew, was tantamount to “omnicide” - the annihilation of all life. How did one make sense of this, I wondered: that the several millennia of human history mirrored on the Library’s shelves - the apparent pinnacle, as I then saw it, of four and a half billion years of the Earth’s evolution - could be obliterated in a matter of hours. It was beyond comprehension - though to the millenarian movements I was studying it might have been no surprise.

We have lived with the possibility of annihilation by nuclear war for half a century. The development of the atom bomb was no accident but a logical consequence of our atomising scientific culture. A nuclear holocaust, the spectre of which points to the disintegration at the heart of our Western civilisation, would spell our instant, rather than our gradual, extinction, but, apart from drawing back from such a holocaust, it is debatable whether we have learnt what we need to from it. Perhaps this is because the “end of history”, whether it comes from nuclear war or environmental collapse, defies our ability to give it any meaning other than annihilation. The “nothingness” of the modern age is simply an empty nothingness, beyond our comprehension or imagination.

The Sixth Extinction is the title of a book published in 1995 by the paleo- anthropologist, Richard Leakey and the award-winning science writer, Roger Lewin. They subtitled their book, Biodiversity and its Survival. They pointed out that over the last 530 million years there have been five mass extinctions of species, the fourth 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs disappeared. Their book was at once a celebration of the biodiversity of animal and plant life on our planet – Darwin’s “endless forms most beautiful” – and a severe warning, backed up by analysis of the science, that we may now be on the verge of a sixth extinction, caused this time, not by an asteroid collision, but by ourselves. Human beings, they contended – “with their relentless expansion and limitless appetites” – are now able to exert as much influence on life around the world as the calamity that caused the last great extinction.

Eschatology is the study of last things. It is where myth and history intersect. At a mythical level the tension is between cosmic order and chaos. Chaos has come to be interpreted by us as disorder but, as “the primeval void”, it is thought to be the very ground of being, the formlessness out of which form emerges, the primordial source of order rather than its opposite. At an historical level the mythical processes of death and rebirth are located in particular events, whether geological or human - geological as the various mass extinctions that have punctuated the Earth’s four billion-year history, human as the collapse and rebirth of civilisations.