(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The apocalypse visions peddled by nihilistic humanists and anti-human transhumanists confuse the doom of humanity with salvation.
"And I heard a voice from heaven like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty thunder, and the voice I heard was like that of harpists playing on their harps." It is John's 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 today's chat threads. Many terrible endings have come and gone in the United States: 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 the apocalypse, 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.
Higher Misanthropy
In 2018, the philosopher published Todd May a chronicle i The New York Times where he asked "whether it would be a tragedy if there were no longer people on the planet". And the answer I'm going to give may seem confusing at first. I would suggest, at least tentatively, both that it would be a tragedy and that it might be something positive. In other words, to escape an apocalypse we must not pass through a needle's eye, but through another apocalypse. For May, an apocalypse is a morally desirable solution to problems such as 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.
For Todd May, an apocalypse is a morally desirable solution to problems such as global warming.
Elon Musk and Peter Thiel
Another form of modern anti-humanism is promoted by tech tycoons such as 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 surpassed by computing power, to the extent that computers threaten to make human thinking redundant. But the misanthropic appeal to 'transhumanism' – a reason detached from the brain and thus pure – is itself a form of evangelism, not "sinners in the hands of an angry God", but rather "ideas in the service of oligarchs". The Silicon Valley gurus promise an enchantment of the perverse kind: digital paradises of unfettered thinking and cultivation of ecotopes no longer destroyed by humans. Musk and Thiel are also harpists who play their harps.
The misanthropic appeal to 'transhumanism' – a reason 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 – the author and philosopher claimed Maurice Blanchot i The Writing of Disaster that "We are on the brink of disaster without being able to place it in the future". The reason, he said, is that the disaster 'is rather always already over'". What Blanchot meant was that the disaster is only recognized after it has occurred. In that sense, an apocalypse is never a revelation of something new; instead, it reveals the unsettling dimensions of a world we already know.
The corona restrictions
I was reminded of this during the corona pandemic. Although 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 East Germany. The nearest icebergs were at least 3000 kilometers to the northwest. Soon it became difficult to see much, as the coronary restrictions shrunk my daily walk to the short walk between the 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. However loud these gatherings became, they were muted compared to a normal 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 signs 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 rhythm scheme established in the first stanza gradually loosens up, with the exception of the end-rhyme couplets that end each stanza. Bishop takes the poem's metaphors in the opposite direction, with an emphasis on self-isolation and loss of sight: "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 more than the imagined, by valuing an iceberg that is "Like jewelry from a grave", that "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 is first published by IWM Post (spring/summer 2024). Contributed by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) © John Palattella / Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) / Eurozine. Translated from English by the editor.
