The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us

Should we welcome the end of humanity?

In this blistering book about the history of an idea, one of our leading critics draws on his dazzling range and calls our attention to a seemingly inconceivable topic that is being seriously discussed: that the end of humanity’s reign on earth is imminent, and that we should welcome it. Kirsch journeys through literature, philosophy, science, and popular culture, to identify two strands of thinking: Anthropocene antihumanism says that our climate destruction has doomed humanity and we should welcome our extinction, while Transhumanism believes that genetic engineering and artificial intelligence will lead to new forms of life superior to humans.

Kirsch’s introduction of thinkers and writers from Roger Hallam to Jane Bennett, David Benatar to Nick Bostrom, Patricia MacCormack to Ray Kurzweil, Ian McEwan to Richard Powers, will make you see the current moment in a new light. The revolt against humanity has already spread beyond the fringes of the intellectual world, and it can transform politics and society in profound ways—if it hasn’t already.

Introduction

“Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing itsend.” With this declaration in The Order of Things (1966), Frenchphilosopher Michel Foucault heralded a new way of thinkingthat would transform the humanities and social sciences. Foucault’scentral idea was that the ways we understand ourselvesas human beings aren’t timeless or natural, no matter how muchwe take them for granted. Rather, the modern concept of “man”was invented in the eighteenth century, with the emergence ofnew ways of thinking about biology, society, and language, andeventually it will be replaced in turn.

As Foucault writes in the book’s famous last sentence, oneday “man would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at theedge of the sea.” It’s an eerie image, but he claimed to find it “asource of profound relief,” since it implies that human ideas andinstitutions aren’t fixed once and for all. They can be endlesslyreconfigured, maybe even for the better. This was the liberatingpromise of postmodernism: The face in the sand is swept away, but someone will always come along to draw a new picture in adifferent style.

But the image of humanity can only be redrawn solong as there are human beings to do it. Even the most radicaltwentieth-century thinkers stop short at the prospectof the actual extinction of the species Homo sapiens, whichwould mean the end of all our projects, values, and meanings.Humanity may be destined to disappear someday, but almosteveryone would agree that the day should be postponed as longas possible, just as individuals generally try to delay the inevitableend of their own lives.

In recent years, however, a disparate group of thinkers hasbegun to challenge this core assumption. From Silicon Valleyboardrooms to rural communes to academic philosophy departments,a seemingly inconceivable idea is being seriously discussed:that the end of humanity’s reign on Earth is imminent,and that we should welcome it. The revolt against humanity isstill new enough to appear outlandish, but it has already spreadbeyond the fringes of the intellectual world, and in the comingyears and decades it has the potential to transform politics andsociety in profound ways.


This book aims to provide an introduction to the key ideas andthinkers shaping the new worldview, to understand its historicalbackground and the sources of its appeal, and to think aboutits possible implications for the future. What I am calling therevolt against humanity finds support among very differentkinds of people: engineers and philosophers, political activistsand would-be hermits, novelists and paleontologists. Not onlydo they not see themselves as a single movement, but in many cases they would want nothing to do with one another. Indeed,I will try to show that the turn against human primacy is beingdriven by two ways of thinking that appear to be opposites.

The first is Anthropocene antihumanism, inspired byrevulsion at humanity’s destruction of the natural environment.The idea that we are out of tune with nature isn’t new; it hasbeen a staple of social critique since the Industrial Revolution.Half a century ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, an expose ofthe dangers of DDT, helped inspire modern environmentalismwith its warning about following “the impetuous and heedlesspace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.” But environmentalismis a meliorist movement, aimed at ensuring thelong-term well-being of humanity, along with other forms oflife. Carson didn’t challenge the right of humans to use pesticides;she simply argued that “the methods employed must besuch that they do not destroy us along with the insects.”In the twenty-first century, Anthropocene antihumanismoffers a much more radical response to a much deeper ecologicalcrisis. It says that our self-destruction is now inevitable,and what’s more significant, that we should welcome itas a sentence we have justly passed on ourselves. Some antihumanistthinkers look forward to the actual extinction of ourspecies, while others predict that even if some people survivethe coming environmental apocalypse, civilization as a whole isdoomed. Like all truly radical movements, Anthropocene antihumanismbegins not with a political program but with a philosophicalidea. It is a rejection of humanity’s traditional role asEarth’s protagonist, the most important being in creation.

Transhumanism, by contrast, glorifies some of the verythings that antihumanism decries—scientific and technological progress, the supremacy of reason. But it believes that the onlyway forward for humanity is to create new forms of intelligentlife that will no longer be Homo sapiens. Some transhumanistsbelieve that genetic engineering and nanotechnology willallow us to alter our brains and bodies so profoundly that wewill escape human limitations like mortality and embodiment.Others look forward, with hope or trepidation, to the inventionof artificial intelligences infinitely superior to our own. Thesebeings will demote humanity to the rank we assign to animals—unless they decide that their goals are better served by wipingus out completely.

The antihumanist future and the transhumanist future areopposites in most ways, except the most fundamental: they areworlds from which we have disappeared, and rightfully so. Theattempt to imagine and embrace a world without us is the threadthat connects the figures discussed in this book. In exploringthese visions of a humanless world, I will not try to evaluate thelikelihood of their coming true. I recognize that some of the predictionsand exhortations we will encounter are so extreme thatit is tempting not to take them seriously, if only as a defensemechanism.

But the premise of the book is that the revolt againsthumanity is a real and significant phenomenon even if it is “just”an idea, and its predictions of a future without us never cometrue. After all, disappointed prophecies have been responsiblefor some of the most important movements in history, fromChristianity to Communism. The revolt against humanity isn’tyet a movement on that scale, and might never be, but I believe itbelongs in the same category. It is a spiritual development of the first order, a new way of making sense of the nature and purpose of human existence.

To understand the revolt against humanity in these terms isto see it as more than a response to the ecological and technologicalcrises of the last ten or twenty years. Rather, those crises—from climate change to the rise of artificial intelligence—haveprompted a new approach to problems that have been at thecenter of modern thought since Darwin and Nietzsche in thenineteenth century. To understand Anthropocene antihumanismand transhumanism, it’s necessary to listen not onlyto tech entrepreneurs and environmental activists, but to poets,novelists, and philosophers, who often serve as a better seismographfor the future.

It’s because the revolt against humanity speaks to such deepneeds that it has the potential to transform the “real world” ofpolitics and society, culture and business, in ways that I explorein the last chapter. These scenarios are necessarily speculative,and the notion that human beings could turn against humanityand embrace their own elimination might sound unbelievable.But if the twenty-first century has taught us anything so far, it’sthat ideas that once seemed unserious and out-of-bounds havethe power to change the world.