The Revolt Against Humanity

September 26, 2022
Poet and critic Kirsch (The Blessing and the Curse) delivers an intense study of the various schools of thought on “the end of humanity’s reign on Earth.” On one hand is the “Anthropocene antihumanist” camp, who assert that humans aren’t “Earth’s protagonists” but rather are to blame for making the planet nearly uninhabitable; as a result, their disappearance should be welcomed. Transhumanists, meanwhile, believe technology will ease the way for a new and improved species, posthumans, who some theorists believe will live past 170 years and will think “more rapidly and deeply” than Albert Einstein. Kirsch suggests that the main difference between these two perspectives is that transhumanists believe the universe “would be meaningless without minds to experience and understand it,” while antihumanists propose that the universe “doesn’t need to include consciousness for its existence to be meaningful.” Kirsch defers to scientists, philosophers, and activists rather than taking a side himself, but the expert perspectives, paired with anecdotes from sci-fi films and literature, make for a fascinating look at the “profound civilizational changes” that may come. The result is a nice lay of the post-human land.

October 15, 2022
A critical assessment of the doom ostensibly advocated by the speculative and apocalyptic thinking of anti- and transhumanists. According to Kirsch, a poet and literary critic, the continued existence of the human species is threatened by two contemporary strands of thought. One involves a radical faction of the Anthropocene crowd, which views human dominance over and exploitation of nature as an existential catastrophe in the making. For them, climate change requires the removal of humans through, for example, policies that drastically shrink human settlements to leave most of the Earth devoid of human habitation or that reduce the birth rate to zero. "The idea that we will destroy ourselves by despoiling the planet is...radically unsettling," writes the author. "It means that humanity is endangered not only by our acknowledged vices, such as hatred and violence, but by pursuing aims that we ordinarily consider good and natural: prosperity, comfort, increase of our kind." The other is a brand of transhumanism wedded to digital technologies able to generate "new forms of intelligent life," thereby freeing post-humans of their material needs. Both strands assert that "the only way to restore the sovereignty of nature is for human civilization to collapse." In essence, these thinkers "attack the very achievements that humanists cherish," and their goal is "a world without us." Alarmist in tone and selective in its reading of the literature--the author rightly includes Elizabeth Kolbert, Naomi Klein, Michio Kaku, and Ray Kurzweil, but where is Bruno Latour's canonical We Have Never Been Modern?--this short book takes scenarios that Kirsch admits are "necessarily speculative" and casts them as real forces having "the power to change the world." The author fails to acknowledge that the central thrust of the Anthropocene argument is to imagine and bring about a better humanity (because it's shared), not to engender a revolt against it. Acknowledging this, though, would cast further doubt on an already one-sided argument. A brief look at the idea of human exceptionalism, resonant with conspiratorial anxiety.

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