The Coming Religious Wars
A review of “The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us” by Adam Kirsch
I read this short, interesting book on the plane during my trip to India in December 2023. There was no intentional connection between the trip and the book. The book — “monograph” might be a better description — had the advantage of being lightweight for carrying for 40 hours, being about 100 pages in length and being a paperback, so no need to be put into “airplane mode” on take-offs.
Adam Kirsch is a literary critic. He has written books on various literary subjects, including Calvin Trilling. In this case, he turns his attention to developing literary/philosophical themes that challenge the humanistic assumptions that are the roots on which the discipline of literary criticism stands.
Literary criticism is about the human institution that is literature. Literature is something done by humans as a way of understanding human existence. Humanity as the measure of all things is baked into the project of literature, e.g., stories may be about the actions of gods, but if humans are to understand these stories that they are telling, they will scale them against human beings.
Kirsch identifies two variants in the “revolt against humanity.” These two tendencies — I am loathe to dignify them with the name of “movement” or “school” — seem to be in fundamental disagreement with each other but on further reflection share much in common.
Kirsch calls one tendency “Anthropocene antihumanism.” Kirsch explains that Anthropocene antihumanism (“AA”) is inspired by revulsion at humanity’s destruction of the natural environment. AA is thoroughly premised on the idea of the “Anthropocene” — a geological era that can be identified by human activity at the geological level, e.g., the widespread distribution of artificial plastics in the geological record. This era is also defined as one in which human intervention is inherently destructive:
In the twenty-first century, Anthropocene antihumanism offers a much more radical response to a much deeper ecological crisis. It says that our self-destruction is now inevitable, and what’s more significant, that we should welcome it as a sentence we have justly passed on ourselves. Some antihumanist thinkers look forward to the actual extinction of our species, while others predict that even if some people survive the coming environmental apocalypse, civilization as a whole is doomed. Like all truly radical movements, Anthropocene antihumanism begins not with a political program but with a philosophical idea. It is a rejection of humanity’s traditional role as Earth’s protagonist, the most important being in creation. (p. 11.)
This book is a broad survey of the texts and writers that bear on the topic. Not surprisingly, several science fiction writers are mentioned, particularly in the section on Transhumanism. In the section on AA, Kirsch starts with the 2006 film Children of Men. I haven’t seen this movie (based on a book by English mystery writer P.D. James) but the scene he describes and its resonance with recent actions by Extinction Rebellion and other trendy anti-oil activists makes me want to repair this oversight.
Extinction Rebellion exists. It uses violent rhetoric like extinction and genocide despite its nominal commitment to non-violence. It has spawned other movements, many of whom do all they can to inconvenience the lives of other human beings in the name of the higher good.
I guess I am jaded. This is my second time around with the existential destruction of humanity. The last time was the 1980s when Leftists were assuring us that we had to unilaterally surrender our nuclear weapons to Communists because Western Democracies were the faction that put the world at risk of global nuclear annihilation. Kirsch mentions this prior point where humanity had to face its extinction (amplified by ideological politics):
The idea that life on Earth faces imminent catastrophe due to human recklessness is not entirely new. Since the late 1940s, humanity has lived with the knowledge that it has the power to annihilate itself at any moment through nuclear war. Indeed, the climate anxiety of the 2010s can be seen as a return of apocalyptic fears that went briefly into abeyance after the end of the Cold War. Climate activism features some of the same tropes as nuclear activism: sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg urging the US Congress to avert climate disaster was reminiscent of ten-year-old Samantha Smith, who in 1982 wrote a widely publicized letter to Soviet premier Yuri Andropov asking him to avert nuclear war. (p.18)
Ah, yes, Samantha Smith, the Ur-Greta Thunberg.
The Left is endlessly uncreative, like Satan.
Kirsch minimizes nuclear extinction because surviving nuclear war merely involves practicing the values of peace and cooperation, which “we already preach.” On the other hand, the ecological holocaust — presumably global warming — arises from the ideology of human flourishing which we believe is right and good. Humanity becomes a kind of parasite, destroying the life of the rest of the Earth:
Instead, it becomes part of a zero-sum competition that pits the gratification of human desires against the well-being of all of nature — not just animals and plants, but soil, stones, and water. If that’s the case, then humanity can no longer be considered a part of creation or nature, as science and religion teach in their different ways. Instead, it must be seen as an anti-natural force that has usurped and abolished nature, substituting its own will for the processes that once appeared to be the immutable basis of life on Earth.
This understanding of humanity’s place outside and against the natural order is summed up in the term “Anthropocene,” “Anthropocene,” which in the last decade has become one of the most important concepts in the humanities and social sciences. Technically speaking, the Anthropocene is a proposed designation for a new geological era to follow the Holocene, the era that began about 11,000 years ago with the end of the last ice age. The International Commission on Stratigraphy, the scientific body that formally determines the names and dates of geological epochs, has been considering since 2008 whether to determine that we have now entered the Anthropocene or “human era” instead. (p. 19–20)
One can’t help but notice that separating humanity from “nature” is a religious move. Anyone who has tried to make sense of Cardinal De Lubec’s musing about “pura natura” can attest to this point. Nature is simply everything in the created world; supernature is the natural world with grace added.
The religious dimension becomes explicit when Kirsch points out:
In our time, the Anthropocene poses an equally profound challenge. If the killing of God demands the birth of the superman, the killing of nature demands the creation of the posthuman — a new being equal to the task of ruling a denaturalized world. The idea of the posthuman gives rise to aspirations that are both ideological — a new way of thinking about what we are — and technological — an actual transformation of the world and of our own bodies. For the same technological power that enables us to remold nature also makes it possible to remake ourselves, in ways that used to seem equally unthinkable. Once we have done away with nature as a limiting concept, why should human nature be an exception? (p. 23–24)
Proponents of AA have a theory of human anthropology just as Christianity has its anthropology of original sin. The AA version zeroes in on humanity's innate concupiscence which makes human beings capitalistic in their essence.
Human sin begins with humanity’s insatiable appetite for comfort, security, food, and housing. To give nature some space to exist, humans must voluntarily relinquish control over the world. To round out the intrinsic religious dimension of environmentalism, humanity is to become ascetic and this asceticism will be grounded in mysticism.
Recognizing that people renounce things because of a commitment to a goal, including religious goals, environmentalists seek to cultivate a “mystique around the idea of nature, in order to encourage sacrifices on its behalf.” Thus, Biologist E.O. Wilson argues that “nature deserves reverence” because nature is “amazingly comprehensible with so many secrets to unlock.”
Some radical environmentalists view “mystical asceticism” as leaving too much power in the hands of human beings:
In short, as English writer Paul Kingsnorth complains in his 2011 essay “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,” “Today’s environmentalism is about people.” Kingsnorth is one of the most interesting and significant thinkers about the Anthropocene because he reverses the usual terms of the discussion. Instead of thinking of the environment as the problem, he thinks of the existence of human beings as the problem. (p. 29–30)
So, humans are the problem.
It is a short step from there to finding that humans are evil:
If he must choose between nature and humanity, Kingsnorth chooses the former, with full awareness of where such a decision may lead. In the celebrated essay “Dark Ecology,” he writes about his uncomfortable realization that his views resembled those of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who believed that “only the collapse of modern technological civilization can avert disaster.” Kingsnorth rejects terroristic violence, advocating instead for individual withdrawal from the system: “Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction,” he urges. But he recognizes that even nonviolent varieties of Anthropocene antihumanism involve an adverse judgment on the human species. Antihumanists reject any claim humanity might once have had to admiration and solidarity. Instead, they invest their admiration in the nonhuman: animals, plants, rocks, water, air. Any of these entities is superior to humanity, for the simple reason that it doesn’t destroy all the others. (p. 31)
Antihumanists do not believe that human self-reflection adds anything to the universe. We can reflect on the beauty of a sunset; ticks can find new hosts during a sunset. What is the difference? And who are we to privilege our thinking as opposed to, say, our digestion? Antihumanists have their version of the Christian Fall, which involves a separation from Nature because of their self-consciousness:
This is true first of all in a physical sense. While we tend to think of ourselves as independent, self-contained beings, we are actually quite permeable. “I am surrounded and penetrated by entities such as stomach bacteria, parasites, mitochondria,” Morton writes. Our anxiety about this symbiosis between humans and nonhumans, our insistence on standing alone and apart, is responsible for what Morton dramatically refers to as “the Severing,” the millennia-long process of estrangement from the natural world that has finally brought us to the disaster of the Anthropocene. “Extinction is the logical conclusion of alienation,” he concludes. (p. 38)
Perhaps trash should get a vote. Kirsch writes about Political theorist Jane Bennet’s reflections on the vibrancy of a random pile of trash. In Bennett’s view, trash became “vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them.” (p. 39)
From there it is another short step to argue that it would have been better for people to never have existed. According to David Benatar, “all human lives contain much more bad than is ordinarily recognized.” Benatar concludes, “Humans have the unfortunate distinction of being the most destructive and harmful species on earth. The amount of suffering in the world could be radically reduced if there were no more humans.”
And what would the universe lose if the human experiment in self-reflection disappeared?[1] Not much according to Benatar:
“What is so special about a world that contains moral agents and rational deliberators?” Benatar jeers. “That humans value a world that contains beings such as themselves says more about their inappropriate sense of self-importance than it does about the world.” (p. 45)
Ok….maybe, but you first.
This perspective seems nuts, but the last twenty years have shown us how quickly things can move from “nutty discussions among academics” to “use my invented pronoun or lose your job.” Kirsch points out that society is facing a demographic decline. How much of that is due to a generalized loss of moral confidence by human beings who may believe that life is not worth living?
Kirsch concludes the section on AA with a summary of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, The Overstory by Richard Powers, which has the theme that trees are morally superior to human beings. The Powers’ story concludes with a scientist drinking poison distilled from a tree while uttering the last words “Dying is life, too.”
As literature, this is toxically death-affirming.
If you think this stuff is not already here, it is.[2]
Kirsch explains the Transhumanist skein as follows:
Transhumanism, by contrast, glorifies some of the very things that antihumanism decries — scientific and technological progress, the supremacy of reason. But it believes that the only way forward for humanity is to create new forms of intelligent life that will no longer be Homo sapiens. Some transhumanists believe that genetic engineering and nanotechnology will allow us to alter our brains and bodies so profoundly that we will escape human limitations like mortality and embodiment. Others look forward, with hope or trepidation, to the invention of artificial intelligences infinitely superior to our own. These beings will demote humanity to the rank we assign to animals — unless they decide that their goals are better served by wiping us out completely.(p.12)
If the AA component of the revolt against humanity is all about original sin and perdition, the Transhumanist (“TH”) is all about the Eschaton and the Second Coming. In the TH scheme, this involves turning the universe into a computer.
In “The Singularity Is Near,” Kurzweil describes himself as a “patternist,” that is, “someone who views patterns of information as the fundamental reality.” Examples of information patterns include DNA, semiconductor chips, and the letters on this page, all of which configure molecules so that they become meaningful instead of random. By turning matter into information, we redeem it from entropy and nullity. Ultimately, “even the ‘dumb’ matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence,” Kurzweil prophesies. (pp. 67–68)
In this case, humanity is not the devil but is the god who will “redeem” the universe.
Before that is the dream of immortality. Kirsch offers this observation:
But transhumanists believe that we will take the first steps toward disembodiment sooner than most people realize. In fact, while engineering challenges remain, we have already made the key conceptual breakthroughs. First, we know that the human mind has a completely material basis. There is no intangible soul or spirit that occupies our bodies; the experience of being an “I” is produced by chemical-electrical processes in the brain. This thoroughgoing materialism is still resisted by most religious believers, but science has known it for a long time. (pp. 68–69) [3]
Kirsch concludes with a chapter on “Spiritual Warfare.” It seems obvious that what motivates each side is not technical, but theological. Both TH and AA are specific kinds of Christian heresies.
I began by noting that I read this on my trip to India. While in India, I had a short discussion about the Hindu idea of “god.” I was told by my Hindu interlocutor that for Hindus, god is not self-aware or sentient. This view completely overturns the Western perspective for whom God is “thought thinking itself.” Self-awareness is a divine property. It must be because we find self-awareness in human beings, and if it exists in the creation, it must exist in the Creator.
I imagine that Hindus would say that self-awareness is not a divine quality. It is an error on the part of human beings who must get past the illusion of sentience to the awareness that all are one in Brahma.
Perhaps AA would map nicely onto Hinduism, but I saw nothing in India that suggested that anyone would give someone preaching voluntary extinction the time of day. Individuals in the Hindu tradition may choose to non-violently end their lives, but only when they have achieved enlightenment.
For the average Hindu, there are “yogas” and “dharmas” that yoke one to this life. The idea of abandoning one’s duty to one’s family in order to commit collective suicide would be antithetical to the core teaching of Hinduism. I suspect that they would find the idea of mass suicide to be a distasteful first-world solution to a first-world fetish.[4]
But for some Christians, the idea of original sin and the damnation of the unsaved still lurks in the culture like primitive code. Alternatively, the idea that some will be raised to a resurrection body in a New Jerusalem may be a badly remembered bit of childhood Sunday school. Because these bits of imagery are unhooked from the rest of Christian thought, they can do a lot of damage. Thus, Christianity preaches immanence and transcendence. We are saved in the here and now; God exists in the here and now. Yet, God and our salvation transcend this material plane.
Most importantly, we are not God. We don’t decide whether humanity shall go extinct or that it will renounce its ability to self-reflect for the sake of greater efficiency.
Kirsch makes some good points about how the ideas of AA have a natural constituency among globalists and those who want their utopia in the here and now. Populists, nationalists, and conservatives will oppose both TH and AA.
How serious is this stuff? I’d like to say that it is pure nonsense, but the ideas — particularly the extreme ideas — push the Overton Window way open. If you don’t know how wide that window is, you are never going to appreciate the debate.
Footnotes:
[1] I recently reviewed the science fiction novel “Blindsight” by Peter Watts, which argues that self-consciousness may be an evolutionary dead-end. Blindsight argues that humanity may well lose to very efficient Turing-test passing automata which neatly outthinks us by raw processing power while we are engaging in introspection and deciding which course best reflects who we are.
[2] See also “Blindsight,” supra.
[3] Kirsch seems very confident about this assertion, but, alas, it is not true. Mind is not reducible to brain, any more than “syntax” is reducible to “meaning.”
[4] And that is the problem with “voluntary self-extinction.” Guilty white liberals in Berkeley might be willing to go extinct, but I suspect that Hindus in India would view suicide qua suicide as a breach of dharma consigning them to another turn on the wheel. I don’t think 1.4 billion Hindus are going to go along with the program. And if they do, then the Chinese will have their own perspective. The future belongs to those who show up.
