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 impossibly hard.
But there are few fireworks here. The best line in the volume is a quote from Paul Kingsnorth, dismissing contemporary human-centered environmentalism as “the catalytic converter on the silver SUV of the global economy.”
Kingsnorth is a representative of the anti-humanist lobby who see climate-induced extinction as karmic payback. On the other side of the coin are trans-humanists who hope to engineer our successors. An exemplar not quoted by Kirsch is the philosopher David Chalmers, interviewed by Prashanth Ramakrishna for the New York Times:
How much does it matter that our future is biological? At some point I think we must face the fact that there are going to be many faster substrates for running intelligence than our own. If we want to stick to our biological brains, then we are in danger of being left behind in a world with superfast superintelligent computers. Ultimately, we’d have to upgrade.
In many ways, these ideologies, post- and trans-, stand in opposition to one another: one technophobic, the other technocratic; one bleak, the other utopian. What they have in common, Kirsch notes, is hostility to humanism: the view that human beings are of special concern to human beings, that we should focus on human flourishing.
His thesis is that both post-humanisms are reactions to the death of God and the prospect of eventual human extinction:
[That] humanity is going to disappear … is perhaps the most important modern discovery, the one that condemns us to live in a different spiritual world from all our ancestors.
Post-humanists reclaim religion’s cosmic vision, its clarity of purpose. They help us face extinction by embracing or transcending it. We are lifted above our ordinary lives into a larger narrative.
This gives [post-humanism] the appeal of all apocalyptic thinking, which endows the present with extraordinary significance by seeing it as the hinge of history, the most important time of all.
It satisfies what Frank Kermode (in The Sense of an Ending) called our “need to know the shape of life in relation to the perspectives of time … a need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end.”
Redemption is the promise of post-humanism, at least in the forms that Kirsch examines: a way to reconcile oneself to a reality otherwise difficult to face. Both versions of the view confirm our self-importance; they glamorize our plight. In each of them, we supersede God, fashioning our replacements like a demiurge or withdrawing from nature so as to save it—like the God of the Kabbalah, whose contraction or tzimtzum made room for the existence of the universe.
The irony is that humanists are more modest. Humanity may be at the center of their moral vision, but it’s a human outlook, not a God’s-eye view. The climate crisis is pragmatic, not metaphysical—the problem is human suffering, not “the abolition of nature”—and there is no cosmic insult in the fact that our days are numbered. What reality calls for, now, is not imminent redemption but humility. We have to muddle through as best we can, assuaging the harms we’ll collectively cause—not relax into oblivion or quietly await a technological escape. It is not glamorous work.
Maybe this is what explains the sober rhetoric of Kirsch’s book, his refusal to orate or prophesy: an apt suspicion of salvation, a humanism hesitant to speak of heaven or hell. Is the Bible of the humanist Columbia Global Reports?