The Sense of an Ending

Adam Kirsch’s recent book is not what you’d expect.

Despite the title, it’s an oddly unpolemical account of tendencies in “post-humanism” that embrace our extinction, composed in a flat but fluent style, in the series “Columbia Global Reports”—as if McKinsey had been hired to document the apocalypse. Kirsch writes with summary detachment about anti-humanists who hope that our demise will be a boon to the rest of nature and those who welcome our replacement by superior beings, perhaps in the form of advanced AI.

Adam Kirsch is not generally a bland or unrhetorical writer: his prose is often memorable. On David Edmonds’ book about logical positivism:

for the members of the Vienna Circle, metaphysics was a queen like Marie Antoinette—imperious, out of touch, and ripe for the guillotine.

And reviewing Katherine Rundell on John Donne:

Shakespeare, Donne’s contemporary, amazes us by making great verse seem so easy to write, as if it simply spoke itself. Donne amazes us by making it look almost i…