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Title: Thoughts On Political Misanthropy Author: Julian Langer Date: 23/01/2020 Language: en Topics: misanthropy, humanism, anti-humanism, antinatalism, environmentalism, Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-06 from https://www.radicalartreview.org/post/thoughts-on-political-misanthropy-voluntary-human-extinction-julian-langer-ecologism
“Fifty years ago, I concluded that the best thing for the planet would
be a peaceful phase-out of human existence.”
With these words, Les Knight justifies the Voluntary Human Extinction
Movement in an article for The Guardian. Rather than write out the whole
piece, I’d invite anyone reading this to read Les’s article before going
on (it is quite short).
If you cannot be bothered to read it, my brief summary would be this:
the earth would be better off without humanity, which has caused all
these problems, so we should work towards the extinction of humanity.
In a singular term, the ideology being pushed here is what I’d call
political misanthropy. It is political in the sense that it relates to
decisions being collectively made regarding the affairs of the city. It
is misanthropy in the sense that the perspective views humans as at the
very least “bad”, though probably more like “evil”.
Now, while I am an eco-anarchist writer writing within anti-civilisation
discourse, despite what you might assume, I am not a misanthrope. I’ll
give you a moment to let that sink in … yes, I desire the ending of this
10,000-year-old failed cultural experiment and a total rewilding of
earth. But I do not feel hatred for humanity and I do not share in the
misanthropic perspective that there is something evil about humanity.
What I call myself is an anti-humanist. Yeah, sounds like it is the same
thing, doesn’t it! But anti-humanism has an extremely different
perspective and reasoning to misanthropy.
As an anti-humanist, my perspective has two threads to it, which twist
around each other to form a single strand.
The first of these draws from post-structuralist psychological and
sociological studies; the second comes from my experience of the world
as an egoist who rejects species-being.
Basically, I do not believe in the existence of humanity. Or rather, I
believe in humanity in the same way that I believe in juggalos,
hipsters, cybergoths, steampunks and hippies – it is a stereotype.
Yes, there is a biological basis for this stereotype of habitual
similarities, but really every “human” is uniquely them, in the sense
that everything is different. Not believing in humanity can be a weird
thing to tell someone – especially if they identify as a human! It can
become an even stranger conversation when you compare people who are
proud to be human (humanists) are using the same type of identity
thought as that of people who are proud to be white, and point out how
similar speciesism is to racism.
Returning to Les, if he means the extinction of a stereotype, which I
call dehumanisation/becoming-animal (and he almost certainly is not),
then I can embrace this call for extinction. However, if Les means
attempting to remove unique living animals that are included within this
stereotype (which he no doubt does mean), then I feel rejectful of this
attempt. Les, as a misanthrope, is a humanist, who seemingly privileges
humans in the great chain of being, in the same way that Satanists are
Christians, who raise God up to be an almighty evil.
If we move past the question of “what the fuck is a human?” and just
work with the stereotype, then what is the cause of all this?
I assume that we are including uncontacted tribes, such as the
Sentinelese, the Batek or the Yuqui and indigenous communities who were
colonised by European settlers in the last few centuries, as humans (if
not, we’re surely being racist)! Are they the cause of all this? If not,
are they evil, or is guilt by association enough to condemn these
peoples to their end? My intuition and instinct is that you (even if
that you is Les himself) will also find the idea of their extinction
being necessary ridiculous at best and vile at worst.
Like many others who have similar to perspectives to mine, I am of the
opinion that our present situation is mostly due to technological
development – advanced technologies, industrial technologies and (yes)
agricultural-architectural technologies. And like the horses who pulled
ploughs for centuries (and still do in many places), humans seem more
like the fuel this now global totalitarian culture/machine uses to
sustain itself with. The response this often gets is that technology
serves human needs and ends, but I believe that closer inspection
reveals that technological development and humans serve technological
needs and ends.
If there is one thing that “voluntary human extinction” is, or is
intended to be, it is a solution.
There is (apparently) a problem (humanity), so there is a solution –
this is what we were all taught in math class as kids. The ideology of
solutionism (people who believe in the existence of solutions) stems
from political optimism.
As a pessimist, I am extremely mistrusting and rejecting of optimism.
Pessimism doesn’t mean sad, miserable, or defeated – which tends to be
the experience of optimists who didn’t get what they thought they would
do from their solutions. Pessimism is the assertion that the “human”
will ultimately collapse into the inhuman/unhuman, rendering all the
solutions of humanity futile (including humanity’s extinction as a
solution) – we all die eventually and always will, and every
“improvement” has not been worth the cost, when the payment is due and
it is mass extinction, mass poverty across the world, lives typified by
mass boredom and everything else that makes up normal everyday Reality
of this culture.
Arriving at one of the solutions that Les suggests – martyrdom through
vasectomy – I have a disgust reaction. On a personally embodied level, I
do not want to abuse my body out of self-sacrifice. As an egoist, my
motivations are desire based, rather than moral based, and the only
reasons conceivable to me for my having a vasectomy seem like moral
ones.
Basing arguments in moral logic seem to me to have been one of the
greatest continual weaknesses of environmental thought, as it stinks of
self-sacrifice and is highly off putting. I favour the approach that one
of my literary loves, Daniel Quinn, suggests, in encouraging people to
seek what they want/desire, what they really want/desire. Really, people
don’t want mass extinction and most people (misanthropes are people too)
don’t want the extinction of the living animals who make up the
stereotype of “human”. The extinction solution is so off-putting, it
seems to only succeed in making environmental discourse appear more like
bullshit self-sacrifice, than something that is actually desirable.
Relating to people on desire-based levels is terrible, because we aren’t
discussing what is right or wrong and we are not forming solutions to
problems. We’re entering into a space that is dark, animal, confusing,
conflictual and so inhuman that churches have put in centuries upon
centuries of effort to ensure that people weren’t relating on desire
based levels.
In the last mass extinction event, were the survivors the individuals
who did not breed? What about the one before? What about the one before
that? Any of them?
Surely a mass extinction event is more of a reason to have children?!
Not to raise them to be horrible little conformist consumers, who make
this Reality more revolting. If “human” is a stereotype, as an
environmentalist, I encourage you to dehumanise yourself and your life
and to raise little inhuman/unhuman/abhuman children, who will grow up
in the nightmare that this Reality has built, but are capable of
surviving it and supporting those other non-human living beings
(including biologically stereotypical humans who are not humans) out of
an egoist desire for their presence.
Extinction might hold a (comfortable and disgusting) promise, but
promises rarely amount to much. Dehumanising the world by raising
unhuman/inhuman/posthuman children, in a landscape full of ruins, in the
midst of ecological collapse, to face whatever world comes after this –
it is awful to imagine and far less certain a route. However terrible it
might be though, I am thoroughly in favour of life!