Three cheers for the end of the world?

The strange ideologies of Anti-humanism and Trans-humanism

Image from smithsonianmag.com.

These days most thinking persons are—or should be!—preoccupied with a number of major challenges facing humanity, from international financial crises to cold and hot wars to the big elephant in the room: climate change. Some people, however, are taking a very different approach to these issues, wishing instead for humanity as a whole to go extinct or be so radically changed as to no longer resemble itself.

Welcome to the strange twin ideologies of Anti-humanism and Trans-humanism, two movements that, despite having the word “humanism” in their name, are in fact entirely antithetical to what humanism has been about from the Renaissance to the 21st century.

Anti-humanism can be characterized as an extreme version of the (largely politically leftist) environmentalist movement. Despite some excesses, environmentalism has always held the scientific as well as moral high grounds. It is hard to deny—though plenty of people insist in doing so—that humanity has had an deleterious, even disastrous effect on Earth’s environment, an effect the magnitude of which has increased steadily and rapidly since the industrial revolution.

The standard environmentalist response has been one of awareness, education, and political action aimed at ameliorating, the problem. Not just for the sake of the environment itself, or of other living species, but in order to insure humanity’s own survival and ability to thrive.

Not so Anti-humanists. For them the problem is humanity itself, and more specifically the kind of technology that human reason has been able to produce. The Anti-humanist hope is for a return to a pre-human natural equilibrium which, of course, never actually existed.

Even a cursory look at the actual, as distinct from romanticized, history of our planet reveals a number of massive planetary extinctions, the most recent one occurring 65 million years ago as a result of an asteroid impact off the Yucatan peninsula. And even outside of those extraordinary events, the terrestrial biosphere has never been in any kind of stable equilibrium, always altered—sometimes dramatically—by geological, atmospheric, and even biological events. For instance, the fact that animals, including ourselves, have been able to breath oxygen for the last couple billions of years was made possible by the evolution of photosynthetic cyanobacteria, a development that killed off countless anaerobic (i.e., incapable of metabolizing oxygen) species. But nobody’s been complaining about that massive remaking of the atmosphere!

Adam Kirsch recently wrote a detailed article in the Atlantic about both Anti- and Trans-humanism entitled “The people cheering for humanity’s end.” There he quotes Jedediah Purdy, author of After Nature, as summarizing one of the major tenets of both movements: “The Anthropocene [i.e., the current human-dominated era] finds its most extreme expression in our acknowledgment that the familiar divide between people and the natural world is no longer useful or accurate. Because we shape everything, from the upper atmosphere to the deep seas, there is no more nature that stands apart from human beings.”

But was there ever a Nature distinct from Humanity? Isn’t all that human beings do natural, since we are the evolved products of natural processes? It depends on how we choose to articulate concepts like “natural” and “unnatural.” If unnatural stands for anything that humanity does then the notion isn’t very useful at all. Conversely, there may be some value in—as the ancient Stoics and Epicureans would put it—distinguishing what we do “in agreement with Nature” vs what we do “against Nature.” But that divide isn’t one that is marked by the respective absence or presence of technology. Plenty of other species use (rudimentary) technology, so technology is natural. No other species, conversely, engages in the systematic killing of its own members on ideological grounds, simply because ideologies, so far as we can tell, are a human invention. It’s complicated.

One idea that is closely related to Anti-humanism is another “anti”: Anti-natalism, whose most famous defender is philosopher David Benatar, author of Better Never to Have Been. In that book, Benatar argues that humanity’s extinction will not deprive the universe of anything of value, saying that “things will someday be the way they should be—there will be no people.”

Should be? According to whose values? To the best of our knowledge values are, again, a human thing. (As well as a thing of any sufficiently complex, intelligent, and social species that may be out there in the cosmos.) They don’t exist otherwise, so to say that the universe would be better off without us is to incur in a gross category mistake, a big no-no for a philosopher.

At the opposite extreme of the humanist spectrum, so to speak, is Trans-humanism. In this camp we find another philosopher, Nick Bostrom, who in a paper entitled “Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards,” worries that humanity’s extinction, or bare survival, would mean that we will end up having accomplished “only a minuscule degree of what could have been achieved.”

The objection at this point should be obvious: according to whose standards would humanity have underperformed? Without humans there are no such standards, so what are we talking about?