1
Adam Kirsch's short book The Revolt Against Humanity is, on the surface, a concise and readable survey of some intriguingly weird thinkers. But it flirts with being something more, or maybe less—a defense of the indefensible. I'm not sure Kirsch intended for his book to be a provocation. But what other purpose could a book like this have?
Revolt profiles two groups who are culturally opposed but, in Kirsch's view, ideologically akin: transhumanists who want to wipe humans off the Earth and replace us all with intelligent machines, and antihumanists who want to wipe humans off the Earth and not replace us with anything at all. In the early chapters—the book has only six—Kirsch does his best to withhold judgment of these factions while fairly describing their admittedly strange views. Inevitably, the antihumanists fare worse. Transhumanists desire something comprehensible, if fanciful. Having convinced themselves that human beings are machines, they want to turn us all into better machines. Sure, why not. Grant the premise, and the science fiction novel writes itself. At bottom, the transhumanists are moral reformers of a familiar type. As Orwell said of Dickens, they're change-of-heart men. The difference is that, being technological fetishists, they think the solution to our troubles is to literally change the human heart: to toss it on the scrapheap and install a new organ. If their plan seems a little skimpy on details, well, who can blame them? Moralists always build their dreamworlds from the top down.
These transhumanists, in Kirsch's telling, come across as L. Ron Hubbard types without the patience for founding cults or writing fiction—as nerdy boys who had a hard time with puberty, perhaps a hard time with life itself. They're quirky, but relatable. We all remember our pimply years. The antihumanists, by contrast, want to tear down civilization, drive humanity to extinction, and purge consciousness from the cosmos. It's a little harder to get on board with that proposal.
And yes, that's really what these people want, as Kirsch takes pains to make clear. He quotes an antihumanist who writes, "The death of the human species is the most life-affirming event that could liberate the natural world from oppression." Even the syntax grates. She goes on: "For me personally, I am deeply saddened that there has never managed to be an annihilation of the human species, in spite of plague and war." Kirsch summarizes this author's views as follows: "Only by exterminating humanity can we express the disinterested moral concern that we profess to be the highest human ideal." This particular thinker isn't merely antinatalist; she advocates the "cessation of reproduction" but "the also deceleration of human life through … euthanasia."
"Deceleration"--that's one way to put it. If this is provocation, what sort of provocation is it? Most rebels are content to rail against authority. It takes a special kind of tastelessness to argue that the peons and lowly peasants should all be liquidated, too. Even our most hopeless partisans tend to restrict themselves to hating Jews *or* Palestinians; this thinker wants to wipe them both off the map.
As with any clumsy attempt to be outrageous, a natural response is to refuse to take the bait—to muster an air of stoic detachment and insist on being unimpressed. But what use would that be? This kind of remark is outrageous. The only honest response is to admit to being outraged. And the only intelligent response is to figure out why one is outraged. For me, the one thing more infuriating than incuriosity is cynicism. This remark evinces it in spades.
The same is probably true of all antihumanists, even ones who won't tug on your sleeve at parties and tell you that they really wish there would be more plagues and wars. I do my best to take ideas seriously. But I'm not sure these people take their own ideas seriously. It's this carelessness with ideas, this self-negating meretriciousness, that I find annoying. If you're going to go around threatening to annihilate humanity, shouldn't you at least have the dignity to mean it? The more serious antihumanists, such as philosopher David Benatar, claim they want to spare unborn people the pain of existence. They mostly seem to succeed at giving us living people a headache.
2
The middle section of the book discusses moderate plans to reduce humanity's ecological footprint, a la Edward O. Wilson's "half-Earth" proposal, or to shrink the population by conventional means. These ideas are more inspiring, but it seems to me they don't quite fit the brief. Nothing could be more intrinsically humanist than reducing the size of the human race. With fewer people around, each individual person will matter more. With less use of resources, there'll be more to go around. With universal contraception, every birth will become an affirmation of the value of parenthood. With less environmental impact, the longevity of the race will be assured. And with widespread acceptance of euthanasia, living itself will become something more than it is now: a joyful assertion of the choice to be alive.
These plans to reduce the population, then, seem to me an outgrowth of basic humanist impulses. More importantly, they're actual plans. In many places, they're already in effect. The Blue-state lifestyle makes a fetish of living with "intentionality." Reproductive rights, state-supported euthanasia, alternative family arrangements, solarpunk cities, and international husbandry of wild spaces, all fulfill, in different ways, and to different degrees, the humanist dream of turning nature into art—of making life itself an expression of human values. If the future is here, but not evenly distributed, this would seem to be a likely preview of the coming state of affairs.
The antihumanist movement, by contrast, is not so much apocalyptic as inert, confined entirely to the realm of ideas. I had fun imagining how ordinary people might react to the propositions in Kirsch's book. What would a conservative say about these ideas? Today's conservatives oppose state-backed euthanasia, believing such programs desacralize life by turning it into a kind of public commodity, managed by bureaucratic procedure. They don't care about the details of the programs—the very fact that there are details upsets them. The divinity of life, in their view, is nonnegotiable.
But now here comes the antihumanist, with her childish literalism, her blundering commitment to philosophical consistency. If life really is so sacred, she says, why should we let it be tainted with the ugly work of living? Why not leave all those dear little unborn souls high up in heaven where they belong? Life may be a blessing, but living's a curse.
I think even the most zealous rightwing culture warrior would have to be baffled at seeing his paranoia ratified to this degree. Where's the conspiracy? Where's the cabal of elite woke perverts scheming to undermine the white race? All the horror's right out there in the open. These people are giving literal TED Talks saying they want us all to die. Faced with that kind of mind virus, what can you say?
There's no comfort for liberalism in this philosophy, either. Liberals rejoice at seeing conservative values sent up. But in the antihumanist symposium, their own beliefs fare worse. Liberalism comes saddled with the legacy of utilitarianism, a moral system that arrives at its edicts by totting up human pleasures and pains. The antihumanists then play a mean trick—they tweak the math. Look, they say, the calculus is simple: if no one exists at all, no one has to suffer. Meanwhile, the absence of pleasure won't be felt, because no one will be around to mourn its loss. As for values, they only exist in human minds, so the absence of humans will make any conflict of values disappear. Problem solved! Utilitarianism works! What do you say to that, liberal? The naive response, again, is to be at a loss for words.
And antihumanists must be equally galling to leftists, who, though they might wish to see the rich euthanized, or even dysthanized, would balk at including minorities in the purge. This provocation is the cheekiest of all, because antihumanists explicitly frame their proposals in leftist terms. If the goal of leftism is to end oppression, well, isn't humanity the ultimate oppressor? If the goal of leftism is to eat the rich, well, hasn't the human race hoarded for itself the riches of nature? If the goal of leftism is to attack privilege at the root, punishing those who bear responsibility for an unjust system—well, who deserves punishment more than humans, the self-appointed stewards of the Earth? Presumably, if the transhumanists had their way, and we were all traded in for sentient machines, antihumanists would have to annihilate the machines too. In their view, consciousness is equivalent to sin.
What all this pedantry suggests to me is the bankruptcy of the old ideologies. Antihumanists are like the horsemen of our informational apocalypse. Their presence announces the futility of debate. It's not just that, relative to antihumanists, everyone else ends up on the same team. It's that, with these people on the scene, discussion inevitably peters out into a reductio ad absurdum. If our mortal world is fallen and depraved, as conservatives claim, why not transmigrate? If liberals want to minimize pain, and life is full of pains, why not minimize life? If the goal of leftism is to make people equal, well, what's more equalizing than extinction? See, people? The joke's on you.
But no one's listening. No one even has the courtesy to get angry. The work of humanism carries on—the interlinking of countries, the ratcheting of technological advance, the transformation of the globe into something like a vast park: the conversion of everything, simply everything, into culture. In a world already remade by human ideas, old philosophies, like deprecated code, seem to have less power than ever before. Kirsch's posthumanists are playing language games, but not in the way Wittgenstein meant. The games are no longer played for stakes. These writers can't be dismissed as fringe thinkers. They hold faculty posts, they publish peer-reviewed papers, they put out books with university presses and get written up in elite publications. They even have influential Substacks. They're what count in our day as serious intellectuals. Doesn't this prove intellectualism is dead?
3
At the end of the book, Kirsch moves away from description and veers off into futurism. It's here that I found myself craving a stronger authorial voice.
Kirsch's forecasts aren't so much dire as unhinged. He foresees a bright future for antihumanism:
As the Anthropocene generation grows up and comes to power, antihumanism is likely to become more broadly appealing … Governments that seek to shrink humanity’s footprint could impose sanctions on those with growing populations … a country committed to antihumanism might well decide it was justified to go to war against one that is immorally anthropocentric. … Ultimately, transhumanists and antihumanists could converge on an ideal of extinction …
Oh? And who will be carrying out these wars of extermination?
Secular, highly educated people are already more likely to have fewer children, worry more about climate change, and have jobs that involve the processing of information and symbols—words, images, code—rather than interacting with people and objects in the real world. … This class is already prone to believe that their superior rationality makes them better stewards and more responsible citizens … They are the natural constituency for a biopolitics of limit … A platform of human tzimtzum could unite greens and techies, Greta Thunberg and Peter Thiel.
Kirsch seems to predict here that Western elites will wage war on Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and other regions with growing populations, with the ultimate aim of driving their inhabitants to extinction. This is, to say the least, a bold prophecy. Does Kirsch really think it will come to pass? If so—if this isn't mere idle conjecture; if there's even a slight chance these events will come about—aren't we obligated to take the prediction seriously? To grapple with what it would mean for the ideological descendants of Greta Thunberg and Peter Thiel to carry out a violent campaign of human eradication? Shouldn't we bestir ourselves to have some moral response?
Kirsch anticipates this objection, and heads it off:
If rational thought leads to the conclusion that a world without human beings in it is superior to one where we exist, then doing away with humanity might be the consummation of humanism …
… neither literature nor liberalism can flourish in a posthuman future. … But attempting to preserve the past by setting an arbitrary limit to progress, insisting that any further change would upset the natural order of things, is the classic posture of the reactionary …
In other words, if you claim to be progressive, and you feel upset by these proposals, you're not really much of a progressive at all. Kirsch suggests the antihumanist paradigm maps neatly onto our current culture war, with traditionalists continuing to value human life, progressives seeking its eradication, and liberals, aka centrists, stuck between. But what about all the people who just, you know, go on living? What's astonishing here is the sterility of Kirsch's logic, its formal self-sufficiency. If rationalism were to demand human extinction, then clinging to human survival would be irrational. QED. Getting worked up about that obvious tautology would be like waging war on an equation.
But is it just an equation? That's the question I can't help asking. Am I supposed to take this forecast seriously, to hold my nose and throw my lot in with the conservatives before Peter Thiel sends his murderbots to town? Or is this whole business just a debate-club stunt? What does Kirsch himself think? Is it improper to ask that question? Are these arguments about life and death, birth and love, hope and suffering, art and science, supposed to mean anything to the rest of us? And if not, what's the point?
To put the matter a bit … well, a bit more provocatively: if Western elites are trying to bring about the death of our species, shouldn't we denounce and resist their evil schemes? And if we're not going to use the word evil … I mean, what are words even for?
The year is 2066. The bombs of the drone fleets have been pounding for weeks. The slaughterbots have already murdered millions. Liberated dogs and cats shiver in the streets, while libraries burn and museums crumble as the emissaries of the Anticulture Commission purge the last traces of human art from the world. Fires ripple along the horizon, showing where the Bioflensers, in their campaign to restore the virgin state of nature, are burning out invasive species.
At last the day you've been dreading arrives: the Euthanasia Squad touches down. As your elderly parents are led to the Deceleration Chamber, and your forbidden second child is ripped from your embrace, you throw out your arms in a last desperate protest.
"Now, now," the American agent chides you, activating the stasis field. While you thrash in mute protest, she watches your struggles with a pitying smile. Your last sight, before the needle slides in, is of her bending down to whisper consolingly in your ear.
"Don't you know that setting an arbitrary limit to progress is the classic posture of the reactionary?"