The Voice of the Void

The Far End of the Human-Hating Spectrum

A much more economics-based essay is coming up, related to my other posts on human trajectories. If I haven’t been posting often enough for you, you can find another essay and a podcast on Biostasis Technologies’ blog. The essay looks at the powerful effect of exercise on longevity. For now, I was annoyed enough by a ridiculous philosophical view that is so anti-extropic I had to write about it.

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In our amazing and beautiful world – yes, including the human world – there are also many things that are ugly and repulsive. In today’s culture, we are not supposed to say that anything is ugly or repulsive. Everything is equal! We are all the same! I am saying it anyway because to do otherwise is to annihilate any basis for values.

Ahumanism is one of those ugly things. It does not offend me personally. It offends me philosophically and existentially. It offends me as a human being. Ahumanism pushes certain ideas to an extreme. Relatively few would endorse it in full. Yet its pretensions echo themes common in anti-human belief and activism.

When I write of ahumanism here, I am specifically focusing on Patricia MacCormack’s philosophy, as dumped on us in her book, The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene. I feel it necessary to say that I am not making any of this up. Look for yourself! I promise MacCormack is a real person and it is a real book that I am commenting on, not a parody or a fake. She exists and the book exists. She expects to be taken seriously. And, in an important sense, her views should be taken seriously despite their confusion, self-immolation, and  irrationality, and clownishness, too many people have absorbed at least elements of the same anti-human, self-hating, anti-existence way of thinking.

Again, I want to emphasize that I am picking on MacCormack because she has so proudly distilled the essence of this evil philosophy. (I rarely use the term “evil” but I will do so here.) That does not mean that MacCormack is having much of an evil effect on the world. Nor does it meant that I think that she herself is evil. I think one of her ideas is evil but there is more to her than this idea. She may be a lovely person in many ways and probably has never harmed anyone significantly. But the existentially horrible message that she conveys and amplifies must be identified and challenged.

MacCormack’s ahumanism

In short, MacCormack wants humans to stop reproducing and for the species to die out. Suicide is a praiseworthy for those virtuous enough to do it. Animals can eat each other but it is unacceptable for humans to eat other animals. She takes a postmodernist, “progressive”, anti-rationalist stance. She epitomizes misanthropism, praises Marx and Engels, hates men, claims to be optimistic and life-affirming as she worships death for humanity, advocates eating and having sex with dead bodies, and recommends that we spend what time we have left practicing occultism and engaged in death studies.

When she talks of death, MacCormack means it as “both advocating for the deceleration of human life through cessation of reproduction, thus death of humans (…), and the absolute end of perception that apprehends all living organisms and relations through anthropocentric-signifying systems.” In other words, it is hard to get people to kill themselves so we should pressure everyone to stop having children. And we humans should cease thinking about the world from a human perspective.

MacCormack shows little interest in engaging in rational argumentation for her views. “I have sought to no longer argue like a human, with other humans.” “These claims are presumed rather than argued, so the calls to action are presented not as balanced contemplations but as para-academic DIY pleas to activism, small and large.” We are to take action based on “presumptions’ that are asserted, not argued. How convenient that no rational argument is needed or appropriate.

Before diving into the ugly, murky details of her ahumanism, first let us get a sense of her style:

The negative value of the end of anthropocentrism is where the jubilance of the world begins. The everything else that comes at the end of these systems is primarily only really the end of the primacy of one isomorphic functioning mode of knowledge. Difference and proliferation which seethes beneath in a germinal state has the capacity to express when the anthropocentric mode is diminished to one of many ways, historical or majoritarian-hysterical.

Okay then. In a panel discussion on YouTube, MacCormack also uses the term “post-bourgeoise.” Anyone who uses the term “bourgeoise” in the 21st century deserves some derision. The term comes from Marxist philosophy and means the social class that owns the means of production. Whatever usefulness it may have had in the century before last it is laughably outdated. Everyone with a 401(k) or IRA is a member of the bourgeoise today. The real power of rule is not in owning capital it is in the political control of capital.

Look, I studied Marxism both independently and as part of my degree at Oxford University. I know Marx, Engels, Lukács, Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School. I know my bourgeoise from my bologna. Non-ironic use of the term is a sure sign that the writer’s brain has been overcome by an intellectually terminal infestation of sub-Marxist postmodern pseudo-intellectualism.

MacCormack says: “The strive for solidarity is consistent in this manifesto and the work of what could be called “post-communist” (or even post-political) writers of manifesti, which is why the book is so inspired by Guattari.” Sorry, “manifesti” is not a word. It’s a pointless academic invention in a futile attempt to sound intelligent.

Questions and answers about ahumanism

Q: Would you say that ahumanism is misanthropic?

A: Yes. Misanthropy – literally “hatred of the human” – is the general hatred, dislike, or distrust of the human species, human behavior, or human nature. Misanthropists see all or most humans as fundamentally flawed and unworthy. These flaws cannot be corrected other than through a total transformation in how we live. MacCormack goes to an extreme in his misanthropy. There is no such transformation possible. All we can do is to let ourselves go extinct.

Arthur Schopenhauer often comes up in discussions of misanthropy. For Schopenhauer human existence is the results of a pointless, blind will that pushes us to eternally engage in futile struggles. His philosophy has some parallels with Buddhism. But MacCormack has no problem with the “will” behind the rest of nature. It is specifically humans whose existence she judges as worthless or, rather, of negative worth (from some unspecified perspective).

Q: Since she comes from a postmodernist background it is safe to assume that she is socialistic?

A: She explicitly credits Marx and Engels. This makes sense since the ideas of that dire pair led to the brutal deaths of around a hundred million humans. MacCormack would consider that a good start. She also credits the SCUM manifesto. This manifesto comes from Valeri Solanas and stands for the Society for Cutting Up Men. (Solanas attempted to murder Andy Warhol in 1968.) Of course, to MacCormack, Solanas got it only half right. The men should go first but every human being should die off. She also likes Hugo Ball’s Flight Out of Time: The Dada Manifesto. Dada texts aggressively attack reason, rational principles, and the principle of non-contradiction.

Q: MacCormack says that “This manifesto is emphatically optimistic and life-affirming.” Does it strike you that way?

A: Sure, if war is peace and if freedom is slavery. Seeking an end to the human race is optimistic and life-affirming in that sense. In the real world, this is a philosophy of hatred of humanity and a glamorizing of our species extinction. She does (inconsistently) affirm the life of all of nature red in tooth and claw with the sole exception of humans. MacCormack writes: “I call for an end to the human both conceptually as exceptionalized and actually as a species.” She has hidden the optimistic and life-affirming aspects of her view very thoroughly. I cannot find any sign of them. The book’s description reinforces this absurdity in declaring “the apocalypse as an optimistic beginning.”

When she says she calls for the end of the human “as exceptionalized”, the implication is that all other lifeforms should go on about their lives, killing and devouring each other without remorse but humans are the exception and should happily die out. It is MacCormack who is turning humans into an exception.

MacCormack seems to have missed an obvious way out of the imperative to off our species. It is only humans who are to self-terminate. All other species, including scorpions, deadly bacteria, and the Box jellyfish, are exempt from thanatological urgings. The postmodernists ignore physical and biological reality. Why not then simply declare that you identify as ahuman? If women can be men and men can be women just by declaring it to be so – without even any physical changes let alone the currently impossible biological and genetic changes to make it so – why not declare that you resign from the human race? Problem solved!

Of course, MacCormack will not let consistency get in her way. Consistency is a bourgeois, rational idea.

Q: MacCormack says in her foreword: “It is a manifesto of doing something right now, individually, collectively, artistically.” Is that an accurate statement?

A: Yes! The thing you can do right now is to die and to encourage others to kill themselves and, in the meantime, to have no children. You can also take action by eating and having sex with dead human bodies, by advocating death activism, queer feminism, and occultism “as artistic political practices”. MacCormack is quick to stress that “the celebration of the corpse and of death here is entirely mutual and consensual.”

Only humans care about mutualism and consent so it is another inconsistency to take a  specifically human moral standpoint to condemn humans. If humans have the same status as other animals – nay, a lower status – why should be apply human morals to our actions? Her advocacy of cannibalism and necrophilia makes sense in her worldview but her condemnation of our eating of other animals does not fit. Apparently antinatalist abolitionism is a “summoning to creativity”. Creativity is not about exploring new ways of living for her; it is about finding better ways to accelerate our extinction.

Q: Is MacCormack justified in claiming that her book is “a work of radical compassion?”

A: For all other living beings (or maybe only animals), yes. There is no compassion for humans who should fuck off and die. MacCormack asserts that “Radical compassion is as simple as it is difficult – simple because very few demographics of humans would be unable to the practices of compassion offered…”  Except most of the world’s population who need to eat and do not have the luxury of artificial meat or existing solely on vegetables. (For some unknown reason, MacCormack does not accord moral status to vegetation, a position which seems terribly “bourgeois” and animal centric. Basically, radical compassion = professed compassion for other animals but hatred for humans.

On p.191 of her book, we are told that The Ahuman Manifesto is an apocalyptic conclusion stained with tears ‘of love and joy’. It is hard to see love and joy in this nihilistic philosophy. In MacCormack’s view humans should not value themselves more than they value bacteria. How is this not complete and utter nihilism?

Her philosophy is nihilist. It says that, for humans, existence is no better than non-existence. More than that, existence is worse than non-existence.

Q: MacCormack is really into death, huh?

A: She loves death, at least the death of humans. She is so turned on about human death that she spends considerable time talking about “thanaterotics.” But this is all entirely healthy because her “death love” is “free of misogyny, racism, and of the angst-ridden pessimism of the typical white male, who can only rather insensitively imagine necrophilia and cannibalism in the savage, sensational and pornographic terms of the serial killer” (as Steven Alexander put it).

We must not use compulsion in pursuit of her aims, so her philosophy is one of ethical affirmation and a type of freedom, according to her. True, it is the freedom to be eaten or used as a dead and decaying object of sexual gratification.

Q: Would you say that MacCormack is a traitor to the human race.

A: Definitely. MacCormack says so herself.

Q: What is MacCormack’s motivation?

A: I can only speculate. But I will not do that right now.

Q: What novel would be a natural place for MacCormack as a character?

A: That’s easy: Either The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. MacCormack is close to an archetypal villain or weak person or parasite like Wesley Mouch, Ellsworth Toohey, and others.

Conclusion

Beyond MacCormack there are several related issues that call for separate essays:

• What is the connection between ahumanism, deep ecology, and the degrowthers?

• Her rejection of personal identity.

• The moral status of other species.

• MacCormack’s phallophobia.

I may tackle the first and third of those in the near future. For now, don’t hate your existence, don’t feel guilty for existing, and don’t work on wiping out your species! Go forth and create, procreate, invent, and produce.