I recently saw a graffito announcing ‘Humanity sucks!’ Without knowing what the artist meant, one can imagine. The human world as we know it is a world of violence, greed, selfishness, and zealous self-destructiveness. Inequality, hatred, and indifference corrupt our treatment of other people. Brutality and exploitativeness stain our treatment of billions of animals. Global heating, philistine assaults on the arts, warmongering – these and other failings are standard entries in a misanthropic litany.
By misanthropy, I don’t mean a radical anti-social attitude or a hatred of human beings. Reclusion and hatred can be expressions of our misanthropic judgements, no doubt. But there is a much wider range of ways to express genuine misanthropic convictions. According to several recent philosophers, myself included, we ought to define misanthropy as a negative appraisal of the moral condition of humankind. It’s a verdict or assessment passed, not on individuals, but on humankind or human forms of life. Think of the eco-misanthropes – the greed, wastefulness and destructiveness they decry are features of social and economic systems, rather than (necessarily) vices of individual persons. Greed and our other failings are built into the system. If we look for these failings at the level of the individual, then we miss their collective manifestations.
The American writer Adam Kirsch refers to eco-misanthropy in a recent book on the ‘revolt against humanity’. Actually, there are two such revolts. One is Anthropocene antihumanism, an attack on the entrenched failings of humanity as it has come to be. The other is transhumanism, a diverse group of technologists, futurists, gurus and others who aspire to radically transform the human condition. Science and technology, they argue, can enhance our currently feeble mental and physical abilities. No sickness, no aging, no death, even. Moreover, we can acquire new sorts of mental and physical abilities and even opt for more radical ‘upgrades’. Future ‘post-humans’, depending on who you read, could move from one artificial body to another. The aim is a world of upgraded, enhanced creatures, brought into being by transhumanist methods – the condition of ‘posthumanity’. Super-intelligent, incapable of ageing and illness and effectively immortal, ‘posthumans’ represent the best future for humans. For one enthusiast, our extinction, if done well, could be ‘a career move for Homo sapiens.
What the two ‘revolts’ have in common, for Kirsch, are their shared ‘visions of a humanless world’. Anthropocene antihumanists …
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