But such thinking ensures, seemingly in perpetuo, the dominance of heterosexual norms and anthropocentric humanism together. Properly self-identified gays and lesbians alone remain outside this syndrome, but as disquieting representations of an alien irony and negativity, of the death drive, like Shakespeare’s great melancholics and misanthropists, haunting the edges of the scene, a question posed to the human project itself. So, too, the queer misanthropist is pro-abortion, not because she or he is pro-choice, but because he or she is genuinely opposed to reproduction, against life. Hence Edelman sides with two great fictional Victorian misanthropists, Dickens’s Scrooge (in A Christmas Carol) and George Eliot’s Silas Marner (in the novel of that name). With his ‘stingy, reclusive, anticommunitarian ways’ (NF, p. 42), says Edelman, ‘disengaged from every form of human fellowship and every act of social intercourse’ and well-nigh rebuffing ‘the very warm-bloodedness of mammalian vitality’ itself, Scrooge is actually a ‘futuricide’, in that he ‘refuses the social imperative to grasp futurity in the form of the Child’ (NF, pp. 45–6, 49). Silas Marner, that ‘solitary, miserly, misanthropic man’ who sets at naught ‘the interconnections of which the social fabric is woven’, turns his back ‘on humankind’ (NF, pp. 54–5) and refuses human life. Those homosexuals who have grasped what has set them so singularly beyond the pale will likewise refuse to conspire in humanity’s inexorable delusion of its progress.
Queer misanthropy seriously challenges any assumption that contemporary Western culture is going anywhere or is the product of a history that has been doing so. In Edelman above all it reaches a point of extreme scepticism about our present world as a pre-eminent or at least laudable achievement. In one sense, we might say the same about contemporary post-humanists. But the post-humanists also conjure up a historical break with what they take to be the human past, drawing a line under humanity and heralding an era in which it surpasses itself, or fades from the scene. They fall into three main camps: techno-prophets, catastrophists and critical post-humanists.14 The third group is the least relevant of the three, because it tends to occupy a moderate, rational, cautious middle ground. The other two groups are opposed, but also oddly united.
The techno-prophets include ‘transhumanists’ like Marvin Minsky, Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil, who believe that science and technology, particularly information, cognitive, bio- and nano-technologies, are by now showing that they have the power to transform human beings and make their old, recidivist forms redundant and forgettable.15 Not surprisingly, perhaps, transhumanists tend to base themselves in California. Note for example the ‘extropians’, who had their own institute for a while before it wound itself up, distantly recalling Hawthorne’s A Blithedale Romance. Extropians lay particular emphasis on the human capacity for self-shaping through scientific and technical revolution – ‘artificial intelligence, nano-technology, genetic engineering, life extension, mind uploading, idea futures, robotics, space exploration, memetics’16 – as a grand reversal of the corrosive work of entropy, that key concept of recent but bleaker and more unstable years; hence their name. They even celebrate the possibility (as they take it to be) of human beings achieving immortality. Humanity can proceed to ever greater things, but only by leaving itself behind (though to judge by extropian writings, this may not improve its prose style). At all events, transhumanists and extropians alike jubilantly announce the ‘end of man’.
By contrast, catastrophists like Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Francis Fukuyama (in Our Posthuman Future) preach the imminent likelihood of science and technology exceeding the human capacity to control them – and thereby, for many if not all catastrophists, the imminence of meltdown, apocalypse, annihilation.17 They are the ‘Cassandras of future shock’, shivering with apprehension at each announcement of a new development in cloning, prostheses, genetically modified foods, androids, cyborgs, nano-materials, micro-fabrication and so on.18 The case of the catastrophists has become increasingly hectic, not least as the list of their techno-scientific anxieties has steadily increased. For the catastrophists, the logic of the ‘anthropocene’ era – the period, now defined by geologists and palaeontologists as beginning more or less with the Industrial Revolution, in which humans have been the dominant influence on climate, environment, the world at large – more and more obviously presages disaster.
Techno-prophets and catastrophists, however, agree in at least one single respect: human beings as constituted up till now are comprehensively inadequate to their world. The two groups merely draw different consequences from that assumption. The catastrophists suppose that the work of humanity is pointing towards an apocalyptic conclusion, while the techno-prophets tend to exhibit the presumption of the scientist who knows what humanity wants and should be better than humanity itself. Neither group has any belief in ordinary human beings. But there are different ways of thinking about the meaning of the modern apocalypse, different ways of understanding its historical logic. In feminist accounts of it, the history of horror coincides with the history of patriarchy and the coercive grip of heterosexual norms. It is not surprising, then – and here again a form of misanthropy actually seems to spring from a contemporary progressivism – that the most interesting and best-known post-humanists have been women. Like the techno-prophets, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti and N. Katherine Hayles have all given a new and unusually cheerful twist to misanthropy, turning it into a positive value. The title of Haraway’s famous ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ partly tells the tale. For such women, the hope for the future lies in what Braidotti calls ‘human enhancement’, which for her means escaping the anthropocentric perspective and recognizing the kinship of human being with the ‘auto-poietic’ forces of an ‘intelligent and self-organizing’ living matter.19 This is her ‘vision of posthuman humanity for the global era’.20 Hayles asserts that such a thought ‘does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human’.21 Haraway reads the process of our increasing ‘cyborgization’ as a similar ‘signal’. Nonetheless, in effect, all three women are radically rethinking the very meaning of misanthropy. After all, Haraway sees the ‘genetically engineered lab critter’ OncoMouse as her ‘sister’, and exclaims that ‘the machines are so alive; whereas the humans are so inert!’.22
Daniel Cottom is an even more representative figure, because he links post-humanism and misanthropy very explicitly indeed. Cottom argues for a benevolent or ‘strategic’ misanthropy that, because it cares for what human beings might become, fiercely opposes their present hubris. ‘The trope of misanthropy is the hope of society’, he says.23 Misanthropy is a manifestation of the unhuman in the human, and means turning away from mankind in order to fulfil one’s humanity.24 In effect, Cottom’s is a singular, misanthropic version of the Benjaminian belief that we have yet to escape our prehistory – except that being human is the very condition of our prehistory. For Cottom, philosophy, literature, photography, art and sculpture are best equipped to instruct us. He incorporates and fuses the kinds of misanthropy implicit in the work of the queer pessimists, post-humanists, techno-prophets, catastrophists and techno-feminists and articulates them together, but in an aesthetics. Certain kinds of art and thought ‘expose the fallacy that continuity is founded on communication’.25 It is in art and philosophy that we glimpse the possibility of not belonging to humanity at all.
But possibly the most influential source of contemporary misanthropy – and here, since we are dealing with an apprehension about and an ensuing mistrust of ourselves that is increasingly widely shared, we start to edge our way out of the corridors of the academy – is ecology. This is particularly true of ‘deep ecology’, ecology in its most philosophical form. From Arne Naess onwards, so-called ‘deep ecology’ has been particularly inclined to eco-misanthropy. The distinguished James E. Lovelock, whose influential Gaia theory was crucial to deep ecology, suggests that by the end of the twentieth century, it seemed clear that humans were ‘almost a planetary disease organism’.26 Other
s have coincided or followed suit. In 2006, to give just one example, University of Texas biologist Eric Pianka, whom the Texas Academy of Science made Distinguished Texas Scientist of the Year and to whom it gave a standing ovation, described what he merely took to be a biologically likely scenario, if one encouraging no faith in human powers of rational management.27 Human beings had proliferated (in ecological terms) dysfunctionally, like bacteria or viruses. They would continue to do so unless they somehow transcended their own witless drives, and would ultimately enjoy the fate of any flourishing microbe, which is sooner or later to reach its natural limits and be displaced by another.
It is not hard to multiply instances of eco-misanthropy, if, like that of the techno-prophets and post-humanists, it seems often to be a misanthropy of a rather new kind. Eco-critic Greg Garrard is quite rightly wary of what he calls ‘disanthropy’, the dream of a world finally and comprehensively rid of people. He suggests that, by now, ecological misanthropy is in large part a myth circulating in the right-wing blogosphere.28 The misanthropic tendency was notably evident in early forms of ecology, like a budding ‘Earth First!’, with its ‘epidemiological metaphors’, its talk of the ‘human pox’.29 Certainly, some more recent developments in ecology have not seemed remotely misanthropic. Environmental sociology, for example, has been producing very different models of the relationship between nature and human culture. One can hear advanced sociologists attempting to reconcile ecology with so-called ‘business ethics’ and management practices, not least through the concept of ‘environmental services’, which urges us to pay more attention to how we may best tend the services nature offers us (as our subordinate, because we have bigger brains than anything else in it). Yet the distrust of the human vector also remains, in a misanthropy that has perhaps become more dispassionate. After all, as he exclaimed himself, Pianka was not exactly a hater of humanity, and never wanted the world purged of it.
In any case, if one cared to derive from Garrard a model merely opposing sunny managerialists and eco-progressives to scowling, benighted, retrograde eco-Timons, it would be radically insufficient. Eco-misanthropy has migrated a long way beyond the confines of ecology itself, and crops up in a wide range of discourses. Like others, Land appears to imagine the ‘comprehensive ruin’ ahead of us chiefly in terms of eco-apocalypse. Cottom argues that more misanthropy might actually be good for the environment. But here a particularly intriguing example is English economist and political theorist John Gray, by no means a kooky radical. Gray foresees ‘an increasing devastation of the planet’. This effectively inclines him both to a kind of eco-theory in the negative – humanity is an ‘exceptionally destructive species’ that cannot check its own sprawling, insane, virus-like spread – and to a vision of an imminent ‘era of solitude’ when human beings will have so far destroyed other species and their natural habitats that they will be able to look forward to a life, not in a richly variegated world, but one in which they are the sole survivors.30 He is not alone. Indeed, a contemporary misanthropist might feel that, since the ‘anthropocene’ era is one in which human activity starts to afflict the very mineral stuff of the world, it also ushers in the final prospect of Planet Earth manifesting itself as human, that is, rotten, to the core. What price any of our theologies or metaphysics, our misanthropist might ask, if that assumption is conceivably right? In general, from the vast devastation of the rainforests to the melting of the icecaps, from the changes in weather patterns worldwide to the indifferent destruction of homelands, ways of life, lives themselves, from the imminence of major species loss to the vast ruination of natural beauty, for all the official propaganda, to many, economic activity as presently constituted, and that great contemporary fetish, ‘growth’, do not appear to be a self-evident good. The bleak conundrum, however, is that the evidence suggests that its momentum is also irresistible, not least because of the steady increase in the world’s population. The juggernaut must roll on. As Sheriff Bell says in No Country For Old Men, ‘I know as certain as death that there aint nothing short of the second coming of Christ that can slow this train’ (NC, p. 159).
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Here we arrive at popular misanthropy. Like McCarthy, Gray provides a particularly intriguing if an inflected example of it, if one that, strictly, is popularizing rather than popular. Gray is an original and perhaps almost uniquely English-sceptical proponent of the concept of the end of the Enlightenment, notably in Enlightenment’s Wake. The grand narratives that emerged from the Enlightenment are at an end. Unusually, and starkly, Gray takes this concept all the way down: the death of the Enlightenment project spells the end of any belief in universals to come, whether ‘grounded in a generic humanity’ or a ‘rational morality’ or both,31 and thus of any orientation of thought towards a moral telos. This disbelief holds good, not just for the grand narratives that were already disintegrating some decades ago – Hegelian, Marxist, emancipatory, humanist – but for those that have sought to replace them, notably the narratives of liberal democracy and the consciousness-raising narratives of an ‘Anglo-American academic class’, which for Gray is doomed to inwardness and political marginality (EW, p. 3).
This might seem to indicate a political and cultural position associated with the contemporary right. But in False Dawn in particular, Gray in fact turns out to be an excoriating critic of free-market ideology, neo-liberals, the supposed worldwide diffusion of the American way of life and the very concept of globalization – above all, globalization understood as the victory of a single economic principle. Globalization is not happening: witness the Asian economies. Concepts of the universal spread of free-market economics remain ‘fatefully entwined’ with the Enlightenment project; indeed, they are the chief and most plausible means by which the Enlightenment project has renewed and perpetuated itself. This is unsurprising, since the United States, chief source and home of neo-liberals, is in fact ‘the world’s last great Enlightenment regime’.32 Thus Gray ends up as a fierce critic of almost all the extant forms of liberalism: classical, economic, Rawlsian and postmodern. For all of them discover or at least hope for a possibility of peaceful coexistence or commensurability between values where, in truth, there must always be conflict.
Such intransigent scepticism might seem to leave him with nothing to rescue from the ruins. But there is one form of liberal thought that he continued to defend. This thought – the liberal thought of modus vivendi, or ‘agonistic liberalism’ – stems from Isaiah Berlin, more distantly, from John Stuart Mill and, more distantly still, significantly, from Hobbes. It rejects the possibility of any ‘universal principles’ and is therefore opposed to the prevailing ‘liberal ideal of toleration’, which itself implies them.33 The incommensurability of different value-systems does not point in the direction of an easy-going cultural relativism, but rather of ‘value pluralism’, a different matter (TF, p. 6). No ‘universal toleration’ underpins plural values, since values will always be at war. There is no way of ensuring that tragedy and disaster can be excluded from human affairs, and no way of putting an end to them in the future. All we can aspire to is the management of plural values through negotiation, in a state of constant alertness to the possible reappearance of conflict.
Agonistic liberals and value-pluralists imply the need for a modest, wary, limited faith, and for vigilance and patient endeavour, since the wrong decisions may easily be made, negotiations may go astray and havoc resume. The labour of reaching agreement and of circumventing conflict is a demanding if not a consuming one. The mechanisms required may be awesomely complex. Over the past decade, Gray has lost faith in them. Agonistic liberals and value-pluralists have increasingly receded from his later work. In Straw Dogs, Heresies and The Silence of Animals he has grown sombrely prophetic and distinctly misanthropic at once. The future will not be able to keep mayhem at bay, and this raises the most searching questions for the human trajectory itself. The twenty-first century threatens us with problems for the resolution of which no adequate structures have
been conceived or are conceivable. Various factors are at stake here, but the root of the difficulty, again, is the cumulative overcrowding of the planet. This menaces us with the near-certainty of resource or scarcity wars, and the persistence of widespread political failure and disorder. (We are currently seeing this in the Middle East). Even now, says Gray, most of ‘the sovereign states of the world’ are inherently ‘unstable’ (SD, p. 13). Overcrowding also confirms the truth of eco-misanthropy and anticipates the ‘era of solitude’ to come. New technologies will not help: they are bound to spawn new ‘ferocious crimes’ (ibid.). No putatively universal or international structures can possibly be adequate to deal with this predicament. ‘Controls cannot be enforced’ (SD, p. 12); or rather, insofar as they can be, it will be only on the basis of gross and brutal imbalances of wealth and power, radical and founding injustices which will perpetuate violent domination on the one hand and violent retaliation on the other – in other words, a regression to general turmoil. There is nothing in our humanisms that can counter all this. Humanism is by now ‘the creed of conventional people’ (SD, p. 37). It underpins both our progressive thinking and our more or less surreptitious persistence with Enlightenment ideals. But, says Gray, as Schopenhauer understood, the separation of man from his world on which it depends is baseless. ‘Like other animals, we are embodiments of universal Will, the struggling, suffering energy that animates everything in the world’ (SD, p. 41). Since we are a peculiarly successful embodiment of the Will, this ensures both the destruction of the planet and what will be our final inability to do anything serious about it. For we neither understand nor retain control of our actions.
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