Against the Human
"Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here." —Cooper, Interstellar
"This is what I mean when I'm talkin' about time, and death, and futility." —Det. Rust Cohle, True Detective Season 1
"Making kin and making kind ... stretch the imagination and can change the story." —Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble
In his brief book The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us, Adam Kirsch proposes that radical pessimism and fervent transhumanism are opposite poles of an anti-human spectrum: "The antihumanist future and the transhumanist future are opposites in most ways, except the most fundamental: they are worlds from which we have disappeared, and rightfully so."
Reading the book is like watching Matthew McConaughey's character of Detective Rust Cohle from True Detective speak for a while and then give over the stage to McConaughey's character from Interstellar, Cooper. While the character of Cohle has been recognized as drawing from a history of pessimistic philosophy going back at least to Schopenhauer (and likely coming mostly via Thomas Ligotti), there ought to be more attention to the ideology of Cooper.
I would not at all be surprised to learn that the billionaire class of techbros watches Interstellar religiously. It's not hard to imagine Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and various AI evangelists dreaming of themselves as Cooper, heading off into the eternal future, robot friends by their side, to save humanity by populating the galaxies with our sacred seed.
Without Us
Kirsch's book is something like an ambitious undergraduate essay, its research good enough to be frustrating in what it misses, its claims clever enough to hold interest if not water. This is at least as much a fault of the format as of Kirsch's work: the book is part of the Columbia Global Reports series, which is described as "works of original thinking and on-site reporting from all over the world, on a wide range of topics. Our books are short, but ambitious. They offer new ways of looking at and understanding the major issues of our time. Most readers are curious and busy. Our books are for them." I fear that curious, busy readers will think they have understood Kirsch's topics sufficiently by reading the book, rather than realizing that the book is only useful as a prod to more exploration. Kirsch offers a list of further reading, which is helpful, but it's mostly primary sources from advocates of one view or another rather than what I read Kirsch's book hoping it was: more objective, historicized explorations of the topics, even if from a particular commitment to either pessimism/antihumanism or techno-optimism/transhumanism — the topics are so fraught that I'm not sure anybody could be neutral about them, so the goal would be to present the ideas as honestly as possible, not warping the arguments to fit your opinion about them.
An example of a more thorough, semi-objective view might be the work of Emile P. Torres, who is clearly not a fan of the techbro class and their dreams of digital rapture, but who seems to work hard to represent their positions with as much nuance as possible. What I most like about Torres's work is the way Torres brings in their own developing ideological commitments, and they aren't afraid to say, for instance, "Not that long ago, I found the arguments for why a 'misaligned' AGI would destroy us somewhat convincing, although I have recently changed my tune." That's a small instance, but Torres also has a background in tech philosophy that allows them to start from a place of sympathy to some of the urges of transhumanism that those of us who have always found the whole concept horrifying don't really have access to.
Actually, I've been thinking about all of this because I listened to Torres on the Movement Memos podcast discussing transhumanism, longtermerism, and the sci-fi delusions of the billionaires. I appreciated how the conversation delves into some of the details of the topic, but found it hard to listen to because I have such a visceral negative reaction to all the premises of the ideologies Torres explores. It reminded me of when I was working on a now-abandoned project on rightwing militarist ideologies of the 1980s; after reading a lot of issues of Soldier of Fortune magazine and the novel The Turner Diaries, I had to stop because I found the ideas I was having to analyze so hideous that my blood pressure was constantly rising and I was overwhelmed by a kind of fight-or-flight response to the material. (I don't feel fight-or-flight when reading about transhumanism, I just feel disgust.)
Shortly after listening to the podcast, I also watched Christopher Nolan's 2014 movie Interstellar for the first time. It was on a streaming site I subscribe to, and I was in the mood for a big dumb movie, so I figured why not. (I have a very conflicted relationship with Nolen's movies. I adore The Prestige, liked both Following and Memento, thought Insomnia was okay but not as good as the original, and against my own best judgment I actually enjoyed the first two Batman movies enough to watch them multiple times. I at least partially agree with every criticism of them and yet still can't help getting caught up in their spectacular nonsense. The third film I pretty much hated and have not revisited. Inception was annoying because there was a great movie buried in its premise and visuals but it was not even close to being a great movie. I have not seen Dunkirk, Tenet, or Oppenheimer.) I would have been put off by the fundamental ideology of Intersteller without having listened to Torres, but with that discussion fresh in my mind, inevitably Interstellar presented itself as preaching the gospel of transhumanism and longtermerism.
I would not be surprised if either Christopher or (co-writer) Jonathan Nolan once read Stanley Schmidt's 1971 story "The Unreachable Stars", which posits a future where people have given up on scientific progress and forgotten that they ever made their way to outer space. I read the story as a child and have long remembered its ardent advocacy for an ethos of ad astra. (I don't remember any details, though, and don't have a copy at hand.) Mike Ashley describes it briefly at the beginning of the third volume of his history of SF magazines, Gateway to Forever, and notes that in the story the "belief that man had once travelled to the Moon is dismissed as legend", which also happens in Interstellar. In Schmidt's story, it is aliens who encourage the benighted humans to reach for the stars, but Interstellar goes even harder toward prohumanism, proposing that human descendants are in fact the time-bending force that is the savior of humanity.
The solipsism and arrogance of such a view is obscured by the propaganda effect of science fiction narratives generally, especially from the United States, where the white supremacist pioneer mythology finds its afterlife in space opera. Story after story tells of heroic people launching themselves through galaxies for the purpose of spreading the human race. The conceit is now so familiar as to be banal. Occasionally, another idea breaks through — there was Barry Malzberg's Beyond Apollo, Joanna Russ's We Who Are About To..., and more recently the comparatively upbeat Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson, as well as what seems to me the most accurate space movie, Aniara — but for the most part space stories are ideologically where they were in the 1960s at the latest, tales of the fundamental goodness of human life and the need to preserve and extend it at all costs.
The ideology is arrogant, but it is more than the arrogance of humanism — it is the arrogance of anthropocentrism (or what we might call human supremacist thinking). The anthropocentrism is obvious from the human-centered focus of such stories, but there's another telling feature common to such thinking: the absence of animals. Back in 2006, I wrote a column for Strange Horizons with exactly that title, inspired by the future presented in the TV show Battlestar Galactica. The ellision of other sentient Earthly beings seems to be an unconscious feature of a lot of space stories, making me think it is not just an oversight, but an unconscious wish. Anthropocentrism is not just arrogant, it is annihilationist.
Taking note of anthropocentrism reveals a flaw in Adam Kirsch's move to place antihumanist pessimism on the same spectrum as transhumanist optimism. I call transhumanism (and longtermerism and the whole TESCREAL bundle of bull) optimistic because of its hyperanthropocentrism: though cetainly it rues the limits of human intelligence and biology, its goal is to improve and propagate the humanistic base. It dreams of a bright posthumanist future. The most radical antihumanist pessimism yearns for the extinction of the human race; transhumanism yearns for the transcendence of the human race. As Kirsch says, this is a kind of negative view of the human of now. But the philosophies are fundamentally different in their attachments, which is why it's not clarifying for Kirsch to set them up in parallel.
"The attempt to imagine and embrace a world without us is the thread that connects" antihumanism and transhumanism, Kirsch states. In a narrow sense, this is true — but not usefully so. In linking them as "worlds from which we have disappeared", the word disappeared obfuscates. He's talking about two very different types of disappearing. One of these philosophies desires a universe in which humans have gone extinct, the other desires a universe in which humans have overcome their limitations and become a new form of intelligence/life. The antihumanist world is without us because we human beings no longer exist; the transhumanist world is without us because life has become super-us. In the transhumanist future, there is still a place for us, it's just not us as the bodies or intelligences we are now. The transhumanist future is one where the pure products of humanity continue to evolve. The antihumanist future sees us as the problem.
We can see how Kirsch is mistaken in identifying "the most fundamental" element of these two philosophies if we look at their moral/ethical implications for actual behavior.
Church of the Holy Human
Transhumanism, as Torres points out in their essay on TANSCREAL, is explicitly a substitute for religion:
Essentially, a bunch of 20th-century atheists concluded that their lives lacked the meaning, purpose and hope provided by traditional religion. In response to this realization, they invented a new, secular religion, in which “heaven” is something we create ourselves, in this world. This new religion offered the promise of eternal life, just like Christianity, and has its own version of resurrection: those who don’t become immortal can have their bodies cryogenized by a company named Alcor, based in California, so they can be revived when the technological know-how becomes available.
Transhumanism replaces the Ten Commandments with the command to develop technology that will allow the dream of escape: escape from the body, escape from society, escape from Earth.
As Douglas Rushkoff shows in his book Team Human, the transhumanist vision is not just religious, but also hypercapitalist, which helps explain the billionaires' fondness for it. "The more we see the human being as a technology to be enhanced," Rushkoff writes, "the greater the danger of applying this same market ethos to people, and extending our utility value at the expense of others. Life extension becomes the last-ditch attempt of the market to increase our available timeline as consumers — and consumers willing to spend anything for that extra few years of longevity."
Rushkoff makes the link between transhumanism and various New Age tendencies that commodify spirituality, bridging the cosmic and the capitalistic via individualism. New Age movements, he says, "stressed individual enlightenment over communal health. It was the same old personal salvation wine, only in California chardonnay bottles. The social justice agenda of the antiwar and civil rights movements was repackaged as the stridently individualistic self-help movement." Transhumanism is galaxy-brain Goop.
Obviously from the saccharine title of his book (and popular podcast), Rushkoff is more in the humanist than antihumanist camp. But not egregiously so. His call for more care of the commons, more attention to communal life and interbeing, is worth heeding. He is felled in the end, though, by his optimism — he asserts, with zero evidence, that the future is full of possibility. This sort of content-free naiveté is good for selling books (we all like to be told there's hope for the future), but it's hardly more helpful than an inspirational poster stuck to a wall.
Ethics in Action
I'm enough of a pragmatist to think that any belief ought to be judged by the behaviors it sanctions and encourages. (What kind of social control does it imply, what kind of police action?) In its contempt for actual living humans and the planet they are stuck on, transhumanism sanctions and encourages destruction. It offers no care for people, animals, or environments beyond their usefulness to the ultimate goal of getting off the planet, out of our bodies, and into immortality. It is rapaciousness masquerading as salvation.
In my experience, people tend to have a more visceral negative reaction to antihumanism than to transhumanism because antihumanism feels traitorous. Transhumanism may seem nutty or utopian or irresponsible, but at least it's based on the idea that our species ought to continue and thrive. This is what makes transhumanism so insidious, however.
The various TESCREAL ideas let rich and powerful people pretend they are doing good things for humanity when they are doing quite the opposite. Any one of the robber barons could right now begin to end child hunger on this planet. Today, each of the techbro billionaires decided not to do that, and they'll decide the same tomorrow. Instead, they pile their wealth toward superyachts and rocketships and robots. These self-absorbed men of mountainous egos do not want to help the living, they want to nurse their own messiah complex and indulge their every power fantasy. This is not new. This is the way of power. The eighteenth century French royalty living completely separate from a world of starving peasants was a similar escapist fantasy of the wealth-hoarding class, but today's bratty rulers are infected with sci-fi brainworms. Still, the impulse — the obsession — is to escape society, to flee from the huddled masses, the dirty proles, the normies. Jeet Heer, in a recent column in The Nation, quotes historian Quinn Slobodian to describe the basic scene: "We live in a time, Slobdian observes, 'when billionaires dream of escaping the state, and the idea of the public is repellent.' This era is created by 'a decades-long effort to pierce holes in the social fabric, to opt out, secede, and defect from the collective.'"
Collective Antihumanism
Unlike transhumanism, and whatever its failures of vision, antihumanism is not a philosophy that denies collectivity. It could, in fact, strengthen that impulse. We have to step back and define some core values before we can get to that, however.
Antihumanism can have various forms and motivations, but all its tendencies say: We overvalue the human. This may be via an antinatalism that concludes, in the words of David Benatar, "that all lives contain more bad than good, and that they are deprived of more good than they contain" (and therefore bringing new life into the world is unjustifiable because even the best life is one of suffering). Or it may be in a softer form that encourages us away from anthropocentrism and human supremacy. (In "Twenty-Two Theses on Nature", Steven Shaviro writes as his second thesis: "We must think Nature without any residual anthropocentrism: that is to say, without exempting ourselves from it, and also without remaking it in our own image. Human beings are part of Nature, but Nature is not human, and is not centered upon human beings or upon anything human." I am not proposing Shaviro as an antihumanist; his approach to anthropocentrism, though, is sharp, clear, and helpful.) I think of these as harder and softer antihumanism — antinatalism and voluntary human extinction are about as antihumanist as it's possible to get short of advocating for nuclear war to wipe us all out; ecocentrism is more properly thought of as anti-human-supremacism, but, for the moment at least, I think it can be helpful to keep it in mind as a variety of antihumanism, since its goal is to oppose the arrogance of humanism(s).
While Kirsch sees antihumanism and transhumanism as congruent because they are both negative about the human in the present, he does not give enough priority to the way their negativities derive from different analyses: antihumanism sees the human of now as plagued with suffering; transhumanism sees the human of now as inadequate. Antihumanism is pessimistic because it interprets the problem of the human as unsolveable — suffering is a condition of existence, therefore nonexistence is preferable. Transhumanism, on the other hand, is wildly optimistic about the future of the human. Because the analyses at the base of these philosophies are not at all the same, their prescriptions are not at all the same, particularly about what to do with the already-existing human.
For our thought experiment here, it's most honest if we analyze the ethical implications of hard antihumanism instead of soft. For that reason, I'll use antinatalism as the prompt, since even voluntary human extinction may be based on the premise that reproduction is okay in limited amounts (e.g. five thousand years ago, before humans conquered the planet). To test the ethics of antihumanism, let's not leave ourselves with any sort of friendly out, any wiggle room. Antinatalism says being is always worse than not-being.
If hard antihumanism is based in the conviction that nonexistence is always better than existence, then what behaviors follow from that conviction?
Not suicide. As many proponents of antihumanism have said, there is a vast difference between not existing and becoming nonexistent. While I expect most antinatalists are in favor of things like physician-assisted suicide, the philosophy's central question is about suffering, and suicide creates plenty of suffering, as anyone who has experienced the suicide of a friend or loved one can tell you. The problem, antinatalism says, is not so much living as it is being born.
Thus the most obvious ethical command of antinatalism is: don't reproduce. To reproduce is to bring a suffering being into the world. The child may go on to have the most wonderful, happy, privileged life, but it will still suffer: it will get sick, it will feel grief, etc. To create a child is to create suffering.
Most arguments about antinatalism are about that fundamental imperative, since it's a defining core to the philosophy, but I'm much more interested in the other implications. (Cards on the table: While I have some sympathy for the basic logic of antinatalism, I think it is a completely useless logic and not worth spending any time arguing. People are not going to stop reproducing. If anything is wired into us as a species, it's the urge to procreate. We as individuals can and do decide for ourselves whether we think procreation is good or bad for whatever reason, but raising our individual conclusion to some sort of universal imperative is not useful. Doing so, in fact, can lead to authoritarianism of the worst sort.)
Compostism
Where antihumanism becomes interesting to contemplate is in the ethical implications other than the imperative not to reproduce. Since antihumanism seems so negative, how can it be positive? And yet — separated from the single imperative not to reproduce, even hard antihumanism's propositions are similar to those of many religions.
The basic premise is: suffering is bad. Therefore, good behavior is behavior that reduces suffering. The ideal may be to avoid creating new suffering beings, but the ideal is (for all practical purposes) impossible, and any meaningful ethics must concern itself with the reality and not the ideal. Good behavior is behavior that reduces suffering here and now, not in some imagined future or alternate reality.
If we assume antihumanism to be anti-anthropocentric, then we get to something like the vow to compassion for all sentient beings that is fundamental to many forms of Buddhism. Christianity (which is quite human-supremacist, with humans having been made in the image of God) ascribes value to suffering, since suffering shows us the battle for our soul that leads to either eternal joy or eternal damnation (see, for instance, Job and Paul). Yet Paul also argues that suffering ought to teach us compassion for each other: "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ."
Even the best-known philosopher of pessimism, Schopenhauer, argues (in Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics) that the basis of ethics is compassion, that the cardinal virtues are justice and loving kindness, and that moral action requires attending to the suffering of all sentient beings. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sums up Schopenhauer's views nicely: "Among the precepts he respects are those prescribing that one treat others as kindly as one treats oneself, that one refrain from violence and take measures to reduce suffering in the world, that one avoid egoism and thoughts directed towards revenge, and that one cultivate a strong sense of compassion."
Antihumanism does not provide a set of commands in the way religions do — committed antihumanists could, I assume, argue with each other forever about how to identify and address suffering, how to prioritize behaviors, what is anthropocentric and what is not, etc. But even with big books full of commandments, religious believers do this, too. Some whole religions seem based on argument. It's the philosophical fun of belief in anything: arguing about what that belief means.
The ethics of antihumanism do not need to lead to brutal nihilism; indeed, if the antihumanism arises from a concern for suffering and a belief that humans ought not to be the center of everything, then those ethics should in fact lead away from brutal nihilism. This is what distinguishes antihumanism from the destructive, escapist fantasies of transhumanism. Antihumanism may not put The Human at the center of everything, and it may see human existence as a locus of suffering, but it still prioritizes compassion for actually existing humans, because actually existing humans suffer.
Antihumanism, though, may be too negative a term. Other ways are possible. I recently read a provocative academic article from 2019: "Posthuman Sustainability: An Ethos for our Anthropocenic Future" by Olga Cielemęcka and Christine Daigle, which has a stirring conclusion:
Diverse practices, including those performed by mothers protesting a forest cutting, coral reef scientists, city-dwellers creating bee corridors, land and river protectors, or people standing in solidarity with communities who suffer disproportionality from environmental degradation, debunk the individualistic, human-centric understanding of sustainability modeled on the economy of debt and inheritance. Instead, they already bring forth posthuman sustainability practices: oriented not towards a future conceived in a linear fashion but rather emerging from the entanglement of beings and the plurality of temporal dimensions of the past, present, and futures and its different scales: geological time, human time, and bees’ time are not the same. In it they recognize the non-heterogeneity of the future, and the violence that occurs whenever ‘our future’ becomes more important or worth protecting than that of some other being.
Or there is Donna Haraway, who in Staying with the Trouble proposes the seriously playful idea of being a compostist rather than a posthumanist: "Critters — human and not — become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding." This is an ethics based in refuge and regeneration, of seeing not only what is salveable, but what deserves to be saved and strengthened. "Renewed generative flourishing," Haraway writes, "cannot grow from myths of immortality or failure to become-with the dead and the extinct." Transhumanism's fantasy of immortality denies us the beauty of becoming compost.
We can redeem the suffering of the born through the regenerative power of community and a vision of interbeing: of birth not as crime but as opportunity for compassion before death provides us the only good transcendence: from embodiment to dispersal back into the matter of the universe. I like the Mahayana Buddhist vision of bodhisattvas, people who choose to remain with the suffering until all the suffering is gone. What an honor! The privilege of birth is the privilege to be here for the suffering and to guide each other — and celebrate with each other, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic. It's all related, all connected, all necessary if we are to help each other toward the best composting of our selves.
We may all be trapped in the prison of life, but that does not mean we ought to be terrible to our fellow prisoners. Quite the opposite. Because we recognize that existence is suffering, we must do what we can to help our fellow prisoners suffer less. Suffering cannot be eradicated, but it can certainly be lessened, and any morality must be measured by the extent to which it lessens the suffering of the living. The prison may even be little more than a state of our mind. We cannot know that alone, however. We need each other if we are to reach beyond the prison bars.
The Ego and Its Humanism
Adam Kirsch's conclusions in The Revolt Against Humanity are unclear, partly because he too easily conflates antihumanism and transhumanism, partly because he does not recognize the fundamental call to compassion within antihumanism's ethics. He writes in his final chapter, for instance, "A government that adhered to antihumanist principles wouldn't subsidize large families, but reward citizens who have one child or none.... Reducing carbon emissions and preserving nonhuman habitats would take precedence over providing cheap fuel and housing." This implies that antihumanists would consider it good policy to punish families with multiple children, to let people freeze in the winter if they can't afford heating oil priced to reflect its environmental impact, and to let homeless people perish in the streets. That wouldn't be antihumanist, that would be cruel. There is no imperative toward cruelty within antihumanist philosophy.
Consider: Why do antihumanism and ecocentrism dance well together? Because ecocentrism says our humanist arrogance has led us to bring the biosphere to the point of destruction. Why is such destruction bad? One big reason is because a biosphere near the point of destruction is a system that creates immense suffering among all sentient beings.
Certainly, some environmentalists and ecocentrists are misanthropic and seem to delight in the idea of human misery. (Hello, Unabomber.) They may have a romantic attachment to the idea of Nature as a sublime force, of humans as having separated themselves from the natural chain of being, etc. Human life in that case is a cancer and ought to be destroyed. If it lacks a deep concern with suffering, that's an ideology dazzled by dreams of genocide.
Kirsch cannot see beyond the arrogance of his humanism. He seems to place himself in the camp of "traditional humanists, with their old-fashioned belief that the individual human being is the source of all value". This chains value to human ego. Everything beyond human ego is, in Kirsch's scheme, valueless. To find a truly nihilistic vision, we need look no further.
In its arrogance, Kirsch's "traditional humanism" is only different in degree from transhumanism. We might rename transhumanism as hyperhumanism.
And so we return to Interstellar.
Humanists and transhumanists both see the trajectory of Interstellar's plot as uplifting. All the film's elements (acting, filming, editing, music) push us to feel joy at Cooper's journey to join Brand (Anne Hathaway) on a desolate planet where they can restart the human project. Considered without the melodrama of the film's technique, Cooper and Brand's fate is not one even the crusty old misanthropist Rust Cohl would wish on anybody.
Only antihumanists see Interstellar for what it is: a horror story, a tale of endlessly prolonged suffering in a solipsistic quest for a future where humans alone continue into eternity. This is the future anthropocentrism — whether humanist or transhumanist — wants for us.
Other visions are possible. We must let go of ego, of loving our humanity against everything else. We must not reject our compost nature.
Let yourself become the soil from which a balm for suffering grows.
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Images: 1. photo by James Wheeler on Unsplash; 2. Interstellar; 3. Kirsch's Revolt Against Humanity; 4. True Detective; 5. photo by Mario Purisic on Unsplash; 6. Arthur Schopenhauer; 7. Interstellar (end); 8. photo by David Mark from Pixabay
