(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The visions of apocalypse that nihilistic humanists and misanthropic transhumanists propagate confuse humanity's demise with salvation.
“And I heard a voice from heaven, as the sound of many waters, and as the sound of loud thunder: and the voice which I heard was as of harpers playing on their harps.” It is from the Book of Revelation, but the words could just as easily have been spoken by an American at any time between the religious revivals of the 1700th century and the chat threads of today. Many terrible endings have come and gone in USA: Civil War, slavery, two world wars, assassinations, dirty wars, a Capitol stormed by hooligans. Yet the reality is different: The world as we know it, in all its beauty and horror, mystery and terror, is still here. However, people continue to believe otherwise – that Apocalypsen, as the literary critic Frank Kermode once suggested, may be true, or cannot but be true, in another sense.
In the spirit of Kermode, it would be rash not to recognize that when our virtual communication networks are overflowing with lakes of fire and talking heads speaking in diabolical tongues, it is because the political systems and new technologies have given us a sense that the promises have weathered. And not only that: 'Hot wars', a warmer climate and a resurgence of fascism are no longer unusual. Nor is it an old, ugly trope that has recently been bottled in a new, eco-friendly bottle: that it is the people themselves who are the problem.
For Todd May is a pokalypse a morally desirable solution to problems like global warming.
Higher Misanthropy
In 2018, the philosopher published Todd May a column in The New York Times in which he asked “whether it would be a tragedy if there were no more humans on the planet.” And the answer I am going to give may seem confusing at first. I want to suggest, at least tentatively, both that it would be a tragedy and that there might be something positive. In other words, to escape an apocalypse we must pass not through the eye of a needle but through another apocalypse. For May, an apocalypse is a morally desirable solution to problems like global warming. Call it the higher misanthropy. If anything, the circularity of May’s thinking reinforces his sense that humanity is trapped by its own thoughts and devices, virtual or real.
Elon Musk and Peter Thiel
Another form of modern antihumanism is promoted by technology magnates who Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. They dream of new forms of human intelligence that will no longer be human, such as artificial general intelligence or an embodied internet. Why privilege the human brain, they ask, if it can always be outdone by computing power, to the point where computers threaten to make human thinking redundant. But the misanthropic appeal of transhumanism – a reason detached from the brain and thus pure – is itself a form of evangelization, not “sinners in the hands of an angry God” but rather “ideas in the service of the oligarchs.” The Silicon Valley gurus promise a perverse kind of enchantment: digital paradises of unhindered thought and the cultivation of ecotopes no longer destroyed by humans. Musk and Thiel are also harpists playing their harps.
The misanthropic appeal to 'transhumanism' – a mind that is detached from the brain and thus pure – is itself a form of evangelism.
Maurice Blanchot
45 years ago – barely a moment in the long history of apocalyptic thinking –
claimed the writer and philosopher Maurice Blanchot i The Writing of Disaster that “We find ourselves on the brink of catastrophe without being able to place it in the future.” The reason, he said, is that catastrophe “is rather always already past.” What Blanchot meant was that catastrophe is only recognized after it has occurred. In this sense, an apocalypse is never a revelation of something new; instead, it reveals the disturbing dimensions of a world we already know.
The corona restrictions
I was reminded of this during the coronavirus pandemic. Even though there was no snow on the ground at the time, I thought of icebergs. "We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship," begins the first stanza of Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Imaginary Iceberg," which continues:
«although it meant the end of travel./ Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock, / and all the sea were moving marble.»
During that time these lines came to me in all weathers. "The Imaginary Iceberg" is a poem I love, although at the time I couldn't remember when I had last read it. Yet there it was, with the first four lines on repeat in my inner ear, a phantom verse.
It was March, and I was in a small town in eastern Germany. The nearest icebergs were at least 3000 kilometers to the northwest. Soon it became difficult to see much of anything, as Covid-19 restrictions reduced my daily walk to the short walk between my apartment and the office. There were polite murmurs about the restrictions. That changed in April, when vaccine opponents began organizing weekly protests in Germany’s major cities. As loud as these gatherings became, they were muted compared to a typical response to the pandemic in the United States. The pastor, David Jeremiah, who was one of President Trump’s evangelical advisers, wondered if the virus was a biblical prophecy, calling the pandemic “the most apocalyptic thing that has ever happened to us.” Many Americans agreed: In mid-March, publishers in the United States reported strong sales of books about the apocalypse.
As the weeks of shutdown wore on and the apocalyptic fervor showed no sign of abating, I began to understand what The Imaginary Iceberg would make me hear. The poem has three stanzas of eleven lines, and as they unfold, the tight rhyme and rhythmic pattern established in the first stanza gradually loosens, with the exception of the couplets with end rhyme that conclude each stanza. Bishop takes the poem's metaphor in the opposite direction, emphasizing confinement and loss of vision: "The iceberg cuts its facets from within." The poem begins innocently enough with a clear statement, but turns into a parable about the dangers of valuing the imaginary higher than the imagined, of valuing an iceberg that is "Like jewelry from a grave," which "saves itself perpetually and adorns / only itself."
Publishers in the US reported strong sales of books about the apocalypse during the pandemic.
Bishop warns against abandoning the necessary work of perception and understanding in favor of the seduction of apocalyptic revelation, however tempting it may be. "We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship, / although it meant the end of travel." Beware of ways of thinking based on a catastrophic break between the present and the past, I heard the poem say. Bishop's wise warning comes with a gift: the dimensions of an imaginary iceberg can be explored with her as a guide, even if you put a stop to the journey.
The text was first published by IWM Post. Contribution from the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM)
© John Palattella / Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) / Eurozine. He is also the literary editor of The Nation. Translated by the editor of MODERN TIMES.
