It is a challenge to the rest of the world “to debase themselves in their turn, to deny their own values … to sacrifice everything by which a human being or a culture has some value in its own eyes.”

“deep time,” posing a temporal scale of the earth’s history so vast as to be sublimely incommensurable with human experience.

the gun in its inherent lethality becomes the last guarantee of a society of equals and the frightful specter of a vanished individual agency.

“Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.”

“belittlement” is the inevitable lot of human beings in a social world,

The gun symbolically, and too often in actuality, redeems the hollowness of a material culture that produces powerlessness and disappointment.

Eurocentrism

abstract space is not literally homogeneous; rather, “it simply has homogeneity as its goal.”

these minerals must stay in the ground