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The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us Paperback – January 10, 2023

by Adam Kirsch (Author)

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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.

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From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A brisk and bracing new book.” —New York Review of Books

“With admirable concision and clarity, this short book achieves its stated aims not only to introduce some very challenging and disturbing ideas, but also to understand their historical background and appeal, and to reflect on their ‘possible implications for the future.’” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“In his brief but fascinating The Revolt Against Humanity, our own Adam Kirsch explains why predictions of humanity’s passing have been more than a passing fad in the last half-century, linking them to two broader ideologies that now dominate the way we think about the future: transhumanism and Anthropocene antihumanism.” —New Criterion

“[A]n intense study of the various schools of thought on ‘the end of humanity’s reign on Earth.’ ... [T]he 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.” —Publishers Weekly

“Kirsch, a widely respected poet, critic, shows readers the bleeding edge of philosophic and literary speculation about what comes next for mankind. The picture he paints is not pretty.” —WORLD magazine

“Six erudite, clear, and concise chapters explore the issues raised by the serious prospect of the end of human life, at least as we know it.” Philosophy Now

“The Revolt Against Humanity is a profound, daring, and intellectually thrilling examination of the role of human beings on Earth: Would the world be better off without us? Beautifully written, the book will spark your thoughts, challenge your preconceptions, and leave you asking yourself wonderfully unanswerable questions.” —Ellen Ullman, author of Close to the Machine and Life in Code

“We’re told that ideas can have momentous consequences. In that case, we owe it to ourselves to pay close attention to the chilling ideas Adam Kirsch highlights in this profound and disturbing book. On one side, some environmental activists welcome the idea that humanity may be on the brink of extinction; on the other, a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs dreams of using their fortunes and technical knowhow to empower us to transcend our humanity altogether. Kirsch proves an illuminating guide to both trends. He’s also an uncommonly insightful critic, drawing on the wisdom of poets, novelists, and philosophers to make sense of our unsettling attraction to the idea of a world without us.” —Damon Linker, author of The Theocons and The Religious Test

About the Author

Adam Kirsch is a poet and literary critic. He is the author of three collections of poems and several books of criticism and biography, including The Global Novel, published by Columbia Global Reports in 2017. He lives in New York City, where he is an editor at the Wall Street Journal's weekend Review section.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

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

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

But the image of humanity can only be redrawn so long as there are human beings to do it. Even the most radical twentieth-century thinkers stop short at the prospect of the actual extinction of the species Homo sapiens, which would mean the end of all our projects, values, and meanings. Humanity may be destined to disappear someday, but almost everyone would agree that the day should be postponed as long as possible, just as individuals generally try to delay the inevitable end of their own lives.

In recent years, however, a disparate group of thinkers has begun to challenge this core assumption. From Silicon Valley boardrooms 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 is still new enough to appear outlandish, but it has already spread beyond the fringes of the intellectual world, and in the coming years and decades it has the potential to transform politics and society in profound ways.

This book aims to provide an introduction to the key ideas and thinkers shaping the new worldview, to understand its historical background and the sources of its appeal, and to think about its possible implications for the future. What I am calling the revolt against humanity finds support among very different kinds of people: engineers and philosophers, political activists and would-be hermits, novelists and paleontologists. Not only do 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 being driven by two ways of thinking that appear to be opposites.

The first is Anthropocene antihumanism, inspired by revulsion at humanity’s destruction of the natural environment. The idea that we are out of tune with nature isn’t new; it has been a staple of social critique since the Industrial Revolution. Half a century ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, an expose of the dangers of DDT, helped inspire modern environmentalism with its warning about following “the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.” But environmentalism is a meliorist movement, aimed at ensuring the long-term well-being of humanity, along with other forms of life. Carson didn’t challenge the right of humans to use pesticides; she simply argued that “the methods employed must be such that they do not destroy us along with the insects.” In the twenty-first century, Anthropocene antihumanism offers a much more radical response to a much deeper ecological crisis. It says that our self-destruction is now inevitable, and what’s more significant, that we should welcome it as a sentence we have justly passed on ourselves. Some antihumanist thinkers look forward to the actual extinction of our species, while others predict that even if some people survive the coming environmental apocalypse, civilization as a whole is doomed. Like all truly radical movements, Anthropocene antihumanism begins not with a political program but with a philosophical idea. It is a rejection of humanity’s traditional role as Earth’s protagonist, the most important being in creation.

Transhumanism, by contrast, glorifies some of the very things that antihumanism decries—scientific and technological progress, the supremacy of reason. But it believes that the only way forward for humanity is to create new forms of intelligent life that will no longer be Homo sapiens. Some transhumanists believe that genetic engineering and nanotechnology will allow us to alter our brains and bodies so profoundly that we will escape human limitations like mortality and embodiment. Others look forward, with hope or trepidation, to the invention of artificial intelligences infinitely superior to our own. These beings will demote humanity to the rank we assign to animals— unless they decide that their goals are better served by wiping us out completely.

The antihumanist future and the transhumanist future are opposites in most ways, except the most fundamental: they are worlds from which we have disappeared, and rightfully so. The attempt to imagine and embrace a world without us is the thread that connects the figures discussed in this book. In exploring these visions of a humanless world, I will not try to evaluate the likelihood of their coming true. I recognize that some of the predictions and exhortations we will encounter are so extreme that it is tempting not to take them seriously, if only as a defense mechanism.

But the premise of the book is that the revolt against humanity is a real and significant phenomenon even if it is “just” an idea, and its predictions of a future without us never come true. After all, disappointed prophecies have been responsible for some of the most important movements in history, from Christianity to Communism. The revolt against humanity isn’t yet a movement on that scale, and might never be, but I believe it belongs 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 is to see it as more than a response to the ecological and technological crises of the last ten or twenty years. Rather, those crises— from climate change to the rise of artificial intelligence—have prompted a new approach to problems that have been at the center of modern thought since Darwin and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century. To understand Anthropocene antihumanism and transhumanism, it’s necessary to listen not only to tech entrepreneurs and environmental activists, but to poets, novelists, and philosophers, who often serve as a better seismograph for the future.

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

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Columbia Global Reports (January 10, 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 104 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1735913766
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1735913766
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.5 x 7.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #377,870 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #132 in Philosophy Criticism (Books)
- #192 in Humanist Philosophy
- #1,275 in Philosophy of Ethics & Morality

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ots

BIG little book

Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2023

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It is small in size as books go but it is huge in content:
There are two quite extraordinary themes covered,
1. Would the earth be better off without we parasitic humans entirely? Will we become extinct?
2. Will we evolve into transhuman higher states and thus be of some value? Become a better species?

In part one the author writes a nice survey of reasons the earth would simply be better off if we humans disappeared entirely. Perhaps as the line from the movie 'Apocalypse Now' has it, in regard to humans, nature will "terminate, with extreme prejudice."
Or possibly the termination is already underway. On page 17 the author quotes the wonderful Greta Thunberg, "People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction." [I do believe she is probably correct].
On page 22 the author points out, "One of the symbols of our age is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of waste halfway between California and Hawaii that is three times the size of France."
On page 33 the author says, "The state of the planet reveals that humanity is essentially a destroyer and has been from the beginning." [I agree with him, too]. A few pages later he writes, "Humans have the unfortunate distinction of being the most destructive and harmful species on earth."
As the 'Good Book' says, "By their fruits you will know them."

In the second half of this book we encounter the idea of humanity saved by its own transformation. By essentially going beyond what we have thought and believed 'people' to be.
On page 54 we read, "Transhumanism agrees with antihumanism that human nature is morally and physically ... doomed to disappear. But...this is a wonderful prospect, because we will disappear by climbing instead of falling."

On page 69 we see what some transhumanists are basing their hopes on, "...we know that the human mind has a completely material basis. There is no intangible soul or spirit that occupies our bodies; the experience of being an "I" is produced by chemical-electrical processes in the brain."

So- which side has got it right? Will we fall into disastrous total extinction, or will we rise up into a new and superior species?

We do know that a great many species before us has disappeared into total extinction. My guess is we will follow the path of utter ruin and no return. I hope I'm wrong but when it comes to the idea of humans doing the right thing, I have a hard time believing.

This little book covers a lot of territory, covers many of the arguments for one way or the other. It's a quick and fascinating read that I can highly recommend.

3 people found this helpful

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SSG

Clear and well written.

Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2023

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This book encapsulates the subject matter in a concise treatment.

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Barbara Cottrell

An easy to read book on a profound subject

Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2024

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I'm doing research for a story about the anti-human movement, so this book couldn't have come at a better time! The Revolt Against Humanity is a deep dive into Anthropocene anti-humanism and the trans-human movement. It is thought provoking read, but it's presented in a clearly written, engaging way. It shows that philosophy doesn't have to be a dense tome to be profound.

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C. D. Elder

Terrifying Survey of End Times

Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2023

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This short book is short survey of the looming end of humanity (those who complain about a lack of depth in this book do not understand its intent). As such, it does an excellent job, pointing the curious on to many primary sources. However, the subject is absolutely terrifying, and almost no hope for humanity is found in these pages. If you are like me, you have a sense that humankind is spiraling down the drain. This book helped me frame my thoughts, pushing the many theorized endings to their logical conclusion. None of them seem likely to turn out well. This book may very well change the way you live, as it is doing for me. I need a good think and a reread.

10 people found this helpful

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Dale Kutnick

Great polemic, but his over-generalization and hyperbole (esp on transhumanists) is annoying.

Reviewed in the United States on April 19, 2023

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I enjoyed the book overall, but mostly as a review and historical perspective on humanist and transhumanist thinking and evolution. I thought, however, that he was too “black and white” on the anti humanist sentiment among transhumanists, since my philosophical bent (and weltanshauung) supports BOTH of these.

One person found this helpful

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beka

I'm not alone

Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2023

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I'm not alone in my thoughts. Thank you, Adam Kirsch.

3 people found this helpful

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sean