Everyone has an anthropology. There is no not having one. If a man says he does not, all he is saying is that his anthropology is implicit, a set of assumptions which he has not thought to call into question. –Walker Percy, “Rediscovering A Canticle for Leibowitz”
The reigning anthropology of our own day, argues Percy, “is something of a mishmash and does not necessarily make sense. It might be called the Western democratic-technological humanist view of man as a higher organism invested in certain traditional trappings of a more or less nominal Judaeo-Christianity.”
The traditional trappings by now are rapidly falling away. In any event, what Percy found interesting in Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is the way in which it challenged the reigning anthropology with a very different one. That’s good work for a piece of dystopian sci-fi, and it’s something I also attempted in my new post-apocalyptic short story, “The Bureau of Myths.”
So as a writer or reader, what’s your anthropology?
“The Bureau of Myths” is available on Amazon for just 99 cents.
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