Misanthropy

by Andrew Gibson

  The archaeological work at the site of the first English settlement in America at Jamestown, Virginia, has recently discovered that the earliest settlers in fact resorted to cannibalism. This was no solitary instance. McCarthy’s vision has a starkness of this order: the romance of the colonization of the West concealed a strictly unspeakable history. Blood Meridian is rawly determined to see things straight (its author did his research). Like almost no other, it is a blood-soaked book. McCarthy is acutely aware of a historical monstrosity so extreme that the human thing itself becomes monstrous in thought. The protracted revulsion the book engenders is a deliberate effect, and is a token of McCarthy’s revulsion both from American history and the determined evasion of it: ‘The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the saying goes. Which I reckon some would take as meaning that the truth cant compete’ (NC, p. 285).

  Misanthropy is an ungainsayable consequence of McCarthy’s mode of historical analysis. Monstrosity is what survives in Blood Meridian: the most monstrous of all its figures, Judge Holden, is its last man standing, as an injured Chigurh is still thriving at the end of No Country for Old Men, bleeding but not killed, an obstinately durable lump of motiveless malignity. McCarthy’s brooding imagination makes both Chigurh and Judge Holden seem larger than themselves, embodiments of some evil beyond the pale that is in fact more profoundly American than what opposes it, but also more than just American, too. The two central figures in The Border Trilogy, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, seek to traverse and even emerge on some other side of the inhumanity of man. But there is no ‘other side’, only, as Billy learns, ‘an enormous emptiness without echo’.63 Ultimately, there is nowhere to go beyond Judge Holden and Chigurh, or (in All The Pretty Horses) Alfonsa’s radically un-American historical pessimism:

  There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don’t believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood.64

  Thus, convinced as McCarthy is that his band of murderous filibusters in Blood Meridian are ‘itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague’, carrying ‘war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land’65 – the real madman, in the first instance, was the execrable William Walker – native Americans and Mexicans fare no better at his hands; which brings us back to Auden, and the perpetrators of evil passing it on like a plague to their victims. In McCarthy’s terms, colonial depravity is beyond all moralisms, but what equally appals him is the insistent will to draw a veil over it, and the advantage that always grants the monsters, for ‘the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it’ (TC, p. 604). Even more chillingly, McCarthy appears to fear that human beings ‘have made of the world a lie every word’.66 He has little to offer to allay such fears, save his own intransigent resolve to keep on staring the Gorgon in the face.

  McCarthy brings us up as far as the contemporary scene, the subject of my final chapter. There we shall come upon John Gray. Gray argues that America is the last great Enlightenment nation left on earth. If so, McCarthy seeks to engineer its collapse as such: a collapse, that is, into anti-Enlightenment misanthropy. If America has sustained certain Enlightenment faiths, and therefore repeatedly affirmed itself as an outstanding example of the truth of progress, from slavery to Vietnam to G. W. Bush and Donald Trump, the evidence of this has hardly been conclusive, clear or unequivocal. Hence, again and again, boosterism comes into play, because it pastes great swathes of positivity over the insufficiency of the evidence. American misanthropy functions as a rejection of a current but conventional and fraudulent rhetoric whose main purpose is to conceal the traces of a wholesale flight from reality. It appears thus particularly in literature and art.

  American misanthropy tends to reverse terms, to insist on a bedrock of negativity beneath positive appearances, implying that the grim truth goes overlooked and unexpressed, chiefly because America has no investment in acknowledging it. ‘Ah, happiness courts the light’, as a sadder and wiser narrator says at the end of ‘Bartleby’, ‘so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none’ (BA, p. 40). Two centuries earlier, Hooker had referred his congregation to Ecclesiastes 7.4: ‘The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth’.67 Redburn takes the case further: we will make no moral progress unless we learn the truth ‘that one grief outweighs ten thousand joys’ (R, p. 383). Amidst the heedless parade of the world about its pleasures, it is misery alone that counts. The willingness to risk a sobering knowledge of the pervasiveness and profundity of misery and its causes – where those who ‘court the light’ will always set them at naught and prefer another tale – is integral to the logic of American misanthropy. But we might finally also ponder the split between a line of thought, running from eighteenth-century rationalists to contemporary managerialists, technocrats, cognitivists and social democrats, that tells us that mankind can be clear about itself and even its destiny and control both for the good, and another line that runs from Christ through the great theologians to psychoanalysis, Michel Foucault and Slavov Žižek, that, in Christ’s words on Calvary, says of human beings that ‘they know not what they do’ (Lk. 23.34). The first is presently fashionable, the second inconveniently, repeatedly and disastrously borne out by history. If the implications of climate change are to be believed, the future may also confirm it (and with it the misanthropic case, or so some might think). Contemporary culture has wagered massively on a conviction that ancient conceptions of historical logic, as in Galatians 6.7 – ‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever [a] man soweth, that shall he also reap’ – are just fuddy-duddy, old-guy stuff, and clearly past their sell-by date. As we shall see, however, like McCarthy, not all our contemporaries are quite convinced.

  CONCLUSION: CONTEMPORARY CULTURE AND THE END(S) OF MISANTHROPY

  To recapitulate, by way of summing up: at least three conditions of the misanthropic vision seem crucial: a failure or absence of democracy; hatred of, or at least disaffection from, the body; and a lack of historical consciousness. By this token, contemporary Western culture ought logically to have surmounted misanthropy and made it a thing of the past. First, ours are societies that, broadly speaking, pride themselves on representing a gain for democracy. The evils of the France of the Ancien Régime, or so conventional wisdom might have it, are imaginable only on the edges of the West of today, those border zones of Western culture in which democratic values have yet fully to establish themselves. Secondly, in the West, at least, we get the soma. We understand and are relaxed about pleasure, about the principle of everyone taking their pleasure and as much pleasure as possible, as never before. This would most obviously be the case with sexual pleasure. Within such a regime, Swiftian physical disgust seems pathological, an extraordinary aberration, if (one hopes) curable. Thirdly, ours is a historically conscious age, increasingly aware of the determining force of historical circumstance. It is no longer nature that we cannot think beyond, as in Hobbes, but historicity, as in Richard Rorty. Nature is precisely what we cannot know and remains beyond our compass. The grandiose generalities of misanthropy are unavailable to anyone thinking properly within the horizons of contemporary intellectual modesty. All in all, misanthropy should surely be defunct.

  There is a great deal around us that would seem to testify to the death of misanthropy. One would be hard pressed, to say the least, to find much explicit trace of it in the dominant culture, the boosterist world of political discourse, business and finance, corporate management, advertising companies – though they may all be working from misanthropic premises, like Richelieu – and government service, think tanks, the press, the media, museum and gallery culture, even, increasingly, the academy and contemporary arts. It is not clear, howev
er, that, elsewhere in the culture, misanthropy is dead at all. The opposite appears to be true: at other levels, or in subcultures, like malaria, now threatening a major resurgence, misanthropy is flourishing, diversifying and assuming new forms. Hence, to take just a couple of initial examples almost at random, this time from the Nordic countries, the Schopenhauerian misanthropic tradition persists in the work of Norwegians Hermann Tonnessen and Peter Wessel Zapffe, and continuing interest in it since their deaths, and the films of Lars von Trier preserve the misanthropic tradition in Scandinavian cinema represented by some of Ingmar Bergman’s work.

  I shall focus principally on three types of contemporary misanthropy, though they are certainly not the only ones (the terms are mine). First, the dark radicalisms: these tend to come out of the tradition of ‘radical philosophy’, defining themselves against its other contemporary mutations, abstracted and remote from any practical efficacy as they seem (the scattered, twenty-first century, [extremely] late Marxisms, Simon Critchley’s rigorous love, or faith of the faithless).1 Secondly, the post-liberalisms or post-progressivisms: these are academic more often than not, and emerge out of a bleak, melancholic, disbelieving if sporadic implosion of contemporary liberal faiths. The disbelief is understandable from a number of different points of view, but one would be the extent to which, as Howard Hotson has brilliantly shown, progressivism has by now become the official ideology, for example, of vast, impersonal outfits like that ‘global consortium of large transnational corporations’, the World Economic Forum, with its ‘commit[ment] to improving the state of the world’.2 The third type, popular misanthropies, is by far the most fascinating and significant, and I shall spend the most time on them. Contemporary culture abounds in assertions of indifference to humanity, declarations of humanity’s categorical inadequacy and expressions of a desire to see it come to an end or be superseded by other life forms. They may not always quite fit with the standard definition of misanthropy. But if they are not exactly an expression of a rooted hatred of human beings, and are therefore not misanthropies in a classical sense, they also grant little or no value to humanity in either its past or its present forms, and here coincide with misanthropic tradition.

  By ‘dark radicalisms’ I mean what Steve Fuller calls ‘dark ecology’, which he thinks of as the ‘higher misanthropy’. ‘Dark ecological’ thought abandons ‘our need to identify with the human altogether’. It promotes the assumption that ‘that there may be something fundamentally unreliable about being human’.3 Thus, for example, in The Dark Enlightenment, philosopher Nick Land argues that the very advances in science, medicine and technology that have so clearly improved people’s lives over the past two centuries and more have also led to a heedless and ever more ravenous consumption of the world’s resources and, unsurprisingly, to new forms of political conflict and international warfare. According to Land, democracy itself exhibits a ‘relentless trend to degeneration’, not least in that, ‘essentially tragic … it provides the populace with a weapon to destroy itself, one that is always eagerly seized, and used’. In fact, ‘Every major threshold of socio-political “progress” has ratcheted Western civilization towards comprehensive ruin’. Land unnervingly suggests that we should welcome and hasten this process, for it is the moment of utter calamity that will finally allow humanity to get beyond itself, in a self-transcendence by now imperative. In other words (a startling thesis), ‘Emancipation requires the programmatic destruction of independence’.4

  Elsewhere, too, certain strains in contemporary philosophy have pushed it closer to an incipient misanthropy than it has been, perhaps, at any time since Schopenhauer. Fuller particularly remarks on the currency of ‘object-oriented philosophy’, notably in the work of Graham Harman. Harman calls for an end to modern thought. For even in the case of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’, it leaves humans ‘in absolute command at the centre of philosophy’. We should focus instead on ‘inanimate reality’, the infinitely diverse and various forms of objects and their transformations.5 The human subject no longer serves a useful function as a priority for thought, and must be evacuated from it. Compare the other philosophers who, along with Harman, were briefly known as the speculative realists: Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier and Iain Hamilton Grant all urge us to think beyond the human parenthesis. They require that we think a different time, a time beyond both the scope and the historical experience of the human world, a time indifferent to it. This is the time that modern science has increasingly borne in on us, a ‘cosmological time’ within which ‘anthropomorphic time’ is ‘nested’.6 Meillassoux calls it ‘ancestral time’.7 It exists beyond the human world as and in objects, not least ‘arche-fossils’, materials that bear the traces of ‘phenomena anterior even to the emergence of life … such as the starlight whose luminescence provides an index of the age of distant stars’.8 The timescales and historical transformations involved are beyond ‘the phenomenological capacity not only of individuals, but also of any and all species’.9 Nature does not descend to the systemic level of any one of its products, whether human or other.

  Thus humanity does not serve as a limit or defining point for anything in nature. The reverse is rather the case: nature – one fears that this might be self-evident – will extinguish humanity as it has stars, and equally produce wholly new species. Speculative realists insist that the question is what thought, logic can make of our knowledge of nature’s ‘other temporality’, a time anterior and posterior to and outside ‘the possibility of [human] experience’.10 Bracketed within the vast expanses of objectively existent, non-human time, the human intellect and its creations are nothing. The philosophers think this soberly and without pathos. Brassier in particular appears not only to write off anthropocentric thought, but to be in effect indifferent even to a degree zero of the human thing. Philosophically, it merits no regard.

  *

  The ‘dark radicals’ are patently at odds with contemporary boosters. They have equally no investment in present-day liberal ideas. But postmodern liberals are themselves haunted by their own misgivings. Take queer theory, for example: it might seem by now to have founded a practically exemplary postmodern ethics, one easily reconcilable with law, government and the accepted way of doing things (gay vicars, gay marriages). Yet it has also been exhibiting a strain of misanthropy, notably in the work of Judith Halberstam and above all Lee Edelman. This attitude is born of the conviction that, contrary to many contemporary persuasions, queer desire and experience do not fit into conventional moulds at all, and repeatedly leave gays and lesbians unhappily beleaguered and at odds with a hostile world. In Halberstam’s (rather cumbersome) terms, such thinkers continue to assert queerness ‘as a mode of critique rather than as a new investment in normativity or life or respectability or wholeness or legitimacy’ (my italics).11 This amounts in effect to turning one’s back on the community – like a good misanthropist.

  Halberstam takes fierce issue with what, in an excellent phrase, she calls the ‘toxic positivity of contemporary life’ (QA, p. 3), a culture with a tone and indeed a rhetoric audible everywhere around us. Toxic positivity is a ‘mass delusion’ that lazily colludes with capital and ‘normativity’ together (QA, pp. 2–3). It imposes emptily selective but overweening ‘logics of success’ (QA, p. 19). Against them all, like Beckett, a key figure for her, Halberstam values failure and stupidity, losers, oddballs, eccentrics, wayward minds. The structure here is that of classical misanthropy, but with a peculiar, contemporary twist, a kind of exceptionalist thought in the negative. This might not seem to make Halberstam an example of misanthropy, and indeed she does tend to slip into another form of toxic positivity herself, that of ‘the subversive intellectual’ (QA, p. 19). However, she also dwells on what she readily admits are ‘wholly improbable fantasies’ of alternatives to where we are now (QA, p. 21). These alternatives inhabit the murky waters of a dark, counter-intuitive realm of ‘critique and refusal’ (QA, p. 2). They are inseparable from a work of negation. Thus Ha
lberstam ransacks ‘the archive of anti-social feminism’, and scours ‘the bleak and angry territories of the anti-social turn’ (QA, p. 110). She writes about gay and lesbian novelists and artists who commit themselves to queer negativity, and feminist subjects who refuse to cohere, speak, even ‘quite simply to be’, where being has already been defined for them (QA, pp. 126, 140). She sinks into the archive of abjection, ‘the brutality and narrow-mindedness of the human’, notably in the case of Nazi homosexuality, and art that refuses to forget it. This art finally ‘lets no one off the hook’ (‘The killer in you is the killer in me’, QA, pp. 171, 182). One of her select group of eminences grises is Renton in Irving Welch’s Trainspotting: ‘Choose life. Well, ah choose not tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it’s thair fuckin problem’.12

  Edelman is still more extreme. He stakes his claim ‘to the very space that “politics” makes unthinkable’, right outside what we take to be the human domain, ‘the place of the social order’s death drive’.13 Of course, liberals strive to dissociate gays and lesbians from this place. But gays should accept and even embrace it, as a negativity ‘opposed to every form of social viability’ (NF, p. 9). For the normative order cannot underwrite any good, predetermined as it is against homosexuals from the start. Homosexuality is irreducibly linked to the aberrant or atypical, to the isolato who wanders outside the human norm and fails to fit with normative conceptions of human being. In particular, in No Future, Edelman argues that we should abandon what he sees as the ubiquitous politics of ‘reproductive futurism’ as an ‘organizing principle of communal relations’ (NF, p. 2). Our culture endlessly commits itself to an endlessly future-oriented thought in the figure of human reproduction and above all the child. (Here Edelman sounds just a little like St Augustine). It thinks of the child as the germ of a future and an image of progress that must be nurtured and protected and to which the present must be endlessly sacrificed. Thus the child ‘has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust’ (NF, p. 11). This, we assume, is human life itself.