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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.
