Houellebecq’s work is to be read, then, not as an expression of a philosophy to be accepted or rejected but rather as a misanthropic provocation. Our culture appears to give the lie to what Chapter 1 initially established as the logic of the cultural emergence of misanthropy. If the concept of the good society ought logically to spell finis to misanthropic discourses, then, for all its liberal democracy and cultivation of the pleasure principle, ours cannot even begin to herald, let alone approximate to it, since it is rather spawning them. Misanthropy bubbles up insistently in our culture, perhaps especially in popular culture. From Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) to Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002) and beyond, misanthropy has been abundantly evident in popular cinema. The techno-fabulist tradition repeatedly verged on misanthropy. After all, if it is Skynet, not human beings, that threatens the world with nuclear holocaust in The Terminator, the film emphasizes that, in the first place, human beings have been responsible for the uncontrollable nightmare unleashed by the machines. Compare the figure of the robot- or cyborg-hero as (more or less) the sole defender of truth and good in the Robocop films, Terminator 2 etc. Otherwise, in The Terminator itself, the general condition of humanity is summed up in the egregiously complacent psychologist who, when Kyle tells him the truth about a catastrophic future, quickly decides that he is totally insane.
So, too, in John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981), the political system is monstrous, those who have offended against and been incarcerated by it quite as much so – and in between them crawl a small bunch of killers and misfits who hardly seem untainted themselves. The film’s intense disgust is patent in its very texture, and leads inexorably to a conclusion in which Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) unreels and throws away the tape that would guarantee peace and save humanity from annihilation. Neither the world of law and order nor the world outside has even slightly encouraged Carpenter’s anti-hero to bother. In Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (1999), from the beginning, with Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker) half-dead from a beating at the hands of a gang of violent thugs, as his name suggests, his life is at an end. Saved from the gang by a mobster, he accepts that he must become the mobster’s samurai and finally meet execution at his hands. In the time remaining, he chooses honourable service, a quietist way of life and withdrawal. (He prefers the company of pigeons to people). ‘I seen all I need to see’, he says, just before he dies. The film gives us no reason to think otherwise, and the shufflingly, ineffably sombre soundtrack (by the Wu-Tang Clan) only further authenticates the mood.
Misanthropy is also thriving in contemporary fiction. On occasions, its manifestations may be relatively highbrow, as in the work of Martin Amis, John Banville, Thomas Bernhard, Tibor Fischer, Elfriede Jelinek and W. G. Sebald (though such writers also tend to have popular appeal). But it equally appears in novelists who would probably not want to be dubbed highbrow and on occasions relish not seeming so, from, at one end of the spectrum, Bret Easton Ellis, Jamaica Kincaid, the later J. G. Ballard and Will Self to T. K. Kenyon (Rabid) and Christopher Moore (Fluke), at the other. We might also note playwright Martin Crimp’s attempt to update Molière’s Le Misanthrope to modern Britain. Though television is hardly a misanthropic medium – with its endless array of beaming talking heads, television is even in effect the objective essence of a contemporary fear of misanthropy – there are strains of misanthropy in a few popular television series, if admittedly ones of an unconventional kind, from Blackadder to House to Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm to some of David Simon’s great work, notably, perhaps, his Iraq invasion mini-series, Generation Kill.
But let’s turn briefly to two great explosions of misanthropy in pop music: punk rock and gansta rap (some of which featured on the soundtrack to Generation Kill). The relative innocence of the ‘boy meets girl’ or ‘boy longs to meet girl’ pop of the fifties and after, and the heady dreaminess, political idealism, hippie mysticism and weird extravagance of late sixties rock met their death quite starkly, in the Rolling Stones’s Altamont concert (1969) and The Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ (1971). Though glam rock kept an overblown and more and more stagey tradition going for a while, and the rock grandees (and their dynastic heirs) became ever grander, as they still do, partly in reaction, from at least the New York Dolls, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers and the Ramones (e.g. ‘Poison Heart’), an acid and durable strain of misanthropy steadily appeared in pop music. It laced its way through Indie (think of ‘The Smiths’ ‘Death of a Disco Dancer’, 1987) to Grunge. Heavy metal has on occasions seemed partly powered by it (think of Motörhead – ‘No Voices in the Sky’, 1991, ‘Brave New World’, 2002, ‘Brotherhood of Man’, 2010). But like the Cynics and Houellebecq, it was punk that especially scandalized people. On occasions it even triggered off bouts of extreme violence. In the words of its historian Jon Savage, it was ‘an explosion of negatives’.43 Punk made its obscene arrival, screaming and yelling, at a time when an honourable progressive hope had failed: Britain was known as the sick man of Europe, the British economy was in crisis, the welfare state under threat and the enlightened post-war consensus collapsing. But like the Irish misanthropy in the fourth chapter, the music was an expression of classes (usually working and obscure lower middle) to whom the kindly light had never penetrated anyway, those who had remained untouched by the progressive dispensation and whom its failure prodded into gobbing profusely at the general show. Punk involved girls, too: young women’s misanthropy was an important aspect of it. That Johny Rotten (John Lydon) should sing, with the grimace with which others increasingly identified him, both ‘I am an antichrist’ and ‘I wanna destroy passer-by’, in a mid-seventies song called ‘Anarchy in the UK’, captures much of the point.44
Pauline Murray (of Penetration) thought the Sex Pistols’ message was very simple: the world and people were ‘a load of shit’.45 The names of the rockers themselves tell the tale: Sid Vicious, Rat Scabies. Lydon summed up his view of human society in a single sentence: ‘There are those who fart, and those who inhale those farts’ (punk was as scatological as Swift).46 In 1975, Lydon was wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt with the eyes torn out and a biro’d scrawl across it that simply if also somewhat ambiguously read ‘I hate …’.47 The hatred was evident, as much as anything else, at the venues, where the musicians and the audience frequently all got caught up in a mood of shared aggression and insult, cursing, vomiting, spitting, smacking and even bottling each other. But the rage was not merely directed at the present. Punk happened in a dead space somewhere between an inert past – ‘History is for pissing on’, said the Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren48 – and an empty prospect (‘No future’, sang the group itself). Nor were punks solely revolted by the self-deception and false decency of one particular phase in the growth of social democracy. They also directed their vitriol at an establishment that had not so much failed them as never noticed their existence in the first place. ‘We’re the flowers in your dustbin’, sang the Pistols, ‘we’re the poison in your human machine’, in ‘God Save the Queen’, which they released, as a supreme provocation, a ferocious counterblast to the official and public fantasy, just ten days before the royal Jubilee. Equally, like the best misanthropists, punks became the self-condemned. If ‘the fascist regime’ had made a punk a ‘potential h-bomb’ (‘God Save the Queen’ again), a blaster of human beings, it had also made him or her a ‘moron’. Punks turned on themselves, with a terrifying, by now almost legendary, masochism. They were ‘pretty vacant’, ‘not all there’, ‘out to lunch’ (‘Pretty Vacant’). Musically, they quite often saw themselves as, and sometimes declared themselves to be, rubbish. ‘We’re just trash’, said Howard Devoto of the Buzzcocks, was what he got as the punk motto from the New York Dolls.49 The audiences picked up on the rubbish theme, sometimes wearing bin-liners to gigs. In the circumstances, as ‘Pretty Vacant’ also proclaimed, the punks’ only alternative was not to care, to turn their guns indifferently in all directions, including themselves.
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In the words, then, of Derek Jarman, maker of Jubilee (1977), the punk film par excellence, ‘Punk was an understandable and very correct disgust with everything’.50 Rap music has been punctuated by a similar loathing. The theme can be quite blatant (X-Raided’s ‘Misanthropy’, ‘Misanthrope’ by ‘Caged’). But it is gangsta rap, above all, that has been richly misanthropic. Liberal academics prefer to mute the disturbing sides of subcultures, the degree to which they may actually be sour and bitter endgames,51 and rap is no exception. When, in her expert book about it, for example, Tricia Rose cheerfully erases the ‘non-progressive’ elements in rap, making of it a music of affirmation and empowerment,52 she sounds a bit like a Salvation Army worker in a brothel. The gangsta rappers are hardly Mary Poppinses of slum life. Rose’s view of them does not seem borne out by many of their titles and refrains: ‘Shit Don’t Stop’, ‘Me Against the World’, ‘The Streetz are Deathrow’ (2Pac [Tupac Shakur]); ‘Welcome to the Terrordome’ (Public Enemy); ‘Fuck Y’all’ (2Pac, ‘I don’t give a fuck’)’, ‘Fuck the world’ (Biggie Smalls, ‘Ready to Die’, 2Pac, ‘Fuck the World’). The rage and despair have nothing in common with the upbeat orthodoxies of cultural studies. Nor do the fates of Biggie and 2Pac. (They carried on a feud, eventually dying in murders that were its consequence, like villains in a revenge play). Nor indeed do some of the female rappers (Li’l Kim, Foxy Brown): by the time they have indifferently trashed both the ‘thug niggas’ and ‘gangsta bitches’ (their terms), they seem scarcely more right-on than the men.
Rap emerged from the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, from the Zulu Nation and the Nation of Islam, and initially bore their stamp, in figures like Afrika Bambaataa. But some of the rappers – not least the Wu-Tang Clan – also identified with the misanthropic Five Percenters, a splinter group who believed that only 5 per cent of the world’s population, the ‘poor righteous teachers’, were worth listening to.53 More importantly, as rap continued, sections of the culture became steadily more pessimistic, sometimes savagely so, about the gulf that yawned between new promises and old realities, realities that had not only proved (and continue to prove) lasting but, given the changes in US government policies and practices in taxation, welfare, industry, education, housing and city planning in the 1970s and 1980s, were getting worse: ghettoes, extreme poverty and the extreme hopelessness that it breeds, gangs, mayhem, murder, AIDS, drugs (especially crack) and a generalized violence, including police brutality and violence against women. ‘Welcome to the Killin Fields’, proclaimed the Wu-Tang Clan, in ‘Method Man’. In the words of Cornel West, the result of this situation was ‘a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive disposition towards the world’.54 But the rappers were also rooted. Rose emphasizes that the ‘ghetto badmen’ and their posses or crews fundamentally belonged to localities, or hoods.55 Gangsta misanthropy was an aspect of the attitude of ‘slackness’. ‘Slackness’ meant deliberately flouting consensual norms of decent behaviour that others had pasted over the social disaster, which the rapper knew first-hand, immediately, intimately, locally and vividly.56 Gangsta rappers were determined to keep the music real and of the streets – gangsta is sometimes known as ‘reality rap’57 – not least as an expression of disgust. People stink:
Broken glass everywhere
People pissing on the stairs, you know they just don’t care
I can’t take the smell, can’t take the noise
Got no money to move out, guess I got no choice
(Melle Mel, ‘The Message’)
They are also involved in a war of all against all:
Crime visions in my blood got me locked in prison
While we die hard people whine about religion, vision
Blow, spin, and sin and killing what’s revealing
It’s a never ending battle with no ending and beginning
(Wu-Tang Clan, ‘A Better Tomorrow’)
It is hardly surprising, then, if some of the rappers cast themselves as horsemen of the apocalypse:
I came to shake the frame in half
With thoughts that bomb, shit like math.
(Wu-Tang Clan, ‘Protect Ya Neck’)
If the black American child is born ‘blind to the ways of mankind’, says Grandmaster Mel, it will certainly soon get the education it needs: ‘You’ll grow in the ghetto living second-rate/And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate’. When quoted drily, such lyrics can sound lame. But that ignores the power that the music and the fiercely percussive voices of rap music generate as a complement to them.
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One thing has by now become starkly clear. From the vantage point of the arguments in Chapters 1–3, contemporary culture ought par excellence to be describable as post-misanthropic. But this is very certainly not the case, except in particular social and cultural spheres where being post-misanthropic pays, and the arguments in Chapters 4–6 do a great deal to explain that, as we have seen here and there. Punk and gangsta rap, for example, are the objective proof of the thesis of Chapter 4: there are, there always will be, so far as we know, others who are or feel themselves to be terminally excluded, and therefore will express a loathing of humanity. Admittedly, I am citing great eruptions in popular music in the 1980s and 1990s, surely quite a long time ago, which may seem to minimize any remarkable turn for the best that the world has taken over the past fifteen years. But gangsta rap remains vital, punk is an almost grippingly vivid memory, and, in any case, in a globalizing world, misanthropy continually migrates elsewhere, to a whole world still horribly disempowered: witness the favelas of Brazil, to take just one example among many, now producing their own versions of chronic misanthropy in Brazilian rap and heavy metal (e.g. Vulcano). The music of the favelas represents and exemplifies the misanthropic sneer of vast swathes of global culture that have absolutely no stake in the privileges that underlie others’ good cheer, a rictus that remains, now jeering at the ‘new enlightenment’ promoted by politics, business, commerce and various kinds of contemporary liberal together. But if anyone wants to find out more about misanthropy today, he or she need only go on the net. Try reading the writings of football fans.
Furthermore, as in Chapter 5, we’ve also seen that postmodern and liberal discourses are themselves capable of taking a misanthropic direction, as though they had been nursing a seed of misanthropy within themselves, or surreptitiously equipping themselves with some of Houellebecq’s armoury. Our culture, then, fairly teems with different, more or less explicit, more or less incipient forms of misanthropy; indeed, misanthropy appears to be a major if unacknowledged theme for our times. Recognizing this may make us feel less sceptical about some of the great misanthropists of Western tradition than we possibly sounded earlier: Hobbes, for example, foreseeing that, ‘when all the world is overcharged with inhabitants’, the logical consequence and indeed the remedy must be total war;58 Schopenhauer, declaring that the will feasts on itself until in time ‘the human race, because it subdues all the others, regards nature as manufactured for its own use’;59 Rousseau, grasping the logic of modern squandering: ‘What will [a man] think of this luxury when he finds that every region of the world has been made to contribute; that perhaps twenty million hands have worked for a long time, that it has cost the lives of perhaps thousands of men, and all this to present to him with pomp at noon what he is going to deposit in his toilet at night?’;60 or Ivy Compton-Burnett on progressives:
‘We are in error in thinking that the old abuses are eradicated,’ said Rosebery gravely.
‘They cannot be while people have power,’ said Emma. ‘If they did not use it for themselves, what use would it be to them?’61
None of them seem remote from the predicament that exercises contemporary misanthropists.
Ours is a period that has witnessed the continuing decline of the great religious narratives that for so long underpinned our culture and others, too – above all, providential narratives. This decline is, brutally, a fact, and it w
as right that it should happen. But the period has also witnessed the collapse of the great secular narratives of redemption (supremely, the Marxist narrative). The many and diverse efforts to resuscitate these secular narratives, to cling to their language and tones, to produce new or modified versions of them, invariably sound hollow, redundant litanies. Modernities and progressivisms proliferate and reappear as vigorously and indomitably as convolvulus or Japanese knotweed. That hardly increases their worth; rather, the reverse, it should make us more sceptical about them. They may express nothing more than muted panic, an apprehension of the imminent and wholesale failure of any hope of advance. But the great religious and secular narratives of salvation always subscribed at some level to the value of humanity, or at least the question of that value. Without them, much more radically alienated concepts of humanity become possible. Indeed, such concepts may be, not only one of the more significant achievements of our times, but almost uniquely significant accounts of what those times have really been about. Take W. G. Sebald, for example:
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