The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (24 page)

grudgingly dished out by nature, we would omit the mandates of survival from our lives out of a stratospherically acerbic resentment. And then we would not reproduce. As a species, we do not shout into the sky, “The pleasures of this world are not enough for us.”

In fact, they are just enough to drive us on like oxen pulling a cart full of our calves, which in their turn will put on the yoke. As highly evolved beings, though, we like to think that it will not always be this way. “Someday,” we say to ourselves, “we will escape from this world in which we are battered between long burden and brief delight, and we will live in pleasure and contentment for what days are left to us.” The belief in the possibility of long-lasting, high-flown pleasures is a deceptive but nicely adaptive flimflam of consciousness. Why the above hypothesis should appear as a controversial theory of evolutionary psychology rather than as a commonplace in current psychology, excepting positive psychology, is one hair-ripping riddle for the ages.

Of course, the ultimate con for the continuance of our species—which, if only in principle, is capable of estimating the pros and cons of this toilsome life and coming to the sensible solution of putting paid to its existence—is the assurance of eternal felicity in the afterlife. While priests and nuns of the Catholic Church lead celibate lives, if only in principle, the core of this religion is the family, specifically its Western form known as the nuclear family, with marriage taking a place beside holy orders as one of Catholicism’s seven sacraments. Catholics have always been notorious breeders, with a papal go-ahead to eschew the inconveniences of birth control. Traditionally, this ethos has resulted in a squad of offspring for every Catholic household, although it should be said that other religiosos also procreate with ecumenical gusto. In the hierarchy of fabricated realities comprising our lives, the family has proven itself more durable than national or ethnic affiliations, which in turn outrank god-figures in terms of stability and staying power. Thus, any progress by liberation in this world can begin only when our gods have been devalued to the status of refrigerator magnets or lawn ornaments.

Following the death rattle of deities, it would appear that nations or ethnic communities are next up for the boneyard of history. The family will certainly hang tough long after fealty to a country or a people has been shucked off as an impediment to the evolution of the species. Last of all, and apparently the least endangered of fabricated realities, is the self. This hierarchy may change in time, depending on the inroads made by neuroscience, which could reverse the progression, with the extinction of the self foretelling that of families, national and ethnic structures, and gods. But the exemplary sequence by which we free ourselves from our selves and our institutions is still that of the legendary Buddha, who, born a prince, embarked on a quest to nullify his ego by first leaving behind his sociopolitical station along with his family and gods. Buddha’s example notwithstanding, a speedy and efficient breakdown of fabricated realities having a global ambit seems remote without the intervention of science, which could provide a vaccination against the development of “selves” after models already in use to wipe out certain viruses and diseases. Once we have revoked our selves, what would be our incentive to reproduce? Ten billion non-selves would be the equivalent of none. But such a painstaking route to a humanless planet is incontestably as fantastic as Zapffe’s suggestion that we cease reproducing for reasons both practical and philosophical. What a tragedy that a world without humans should come to pass without our assistance or acquiescence, leaving us with only the fear, pain, and lonely resistance we have demonstrated as our preferred style of dying.

6. As one who kept a diary of his romantic affiliations and activities, Schopenhauer should not be understood here as a reclusive thinker who was indulging himself in a moment of detached ideation. Unfortunately, the relevant document was destroyed by a prudish 108

overseer of the philosopher’s posthumous reputation. More unfortunately, Schopenhauer fathered a child, an all but certain eventuality considering the philosopher’s promiscuous nature and the lack of effective birth-control methods at the time. This fact lends a special piquancy, perhaps indicating a bad conscience, to his ejaculations quoted in the present work on the aversion human beings might have to the reproductive act without the pleasures accompanying it.

7. One may rail against those who have taken a different byway in this life, but not from a superior or self-righteous position. Having said as much, we may continue as if it had not been said. What else can we do? No one is better than anyone else, only more or less fortunate. But if all of us ever behaved accordingly, we would have no need of Zapffe’s Last Messiah: everyone would become voiceless and motionless before the universe until no one was left standing. Then decomposition would take over, and the elements would do their work until the ashen outlines of our skeletons have been disseminated over the lands, our seed never to be sown again. Without apology, then, let us each look down upon the opposition from a superior and self-righteous vantage.

8. Contradicting the positive image that is propagated by society, the data of positive psychology has revealed that, whatever a couple’s rationale may be for having children, they can expect newborns in their household to have a negative effect on their well being or, best case, no effect. It seems that the two happiest days in parents’ lives are the day their children are born and the day they leave home. Mutatis mutandis, the same has been said about people who buy recreational boats, a high-maintenance hobby that customarily delivers a worse than neutral payback. The reader is invited to reflect to no avail on any acquisition or pursuit that is not more trouble than it is worth. And many practices besides procreation are devoid of a praiseworthy incentive. Child-bearers, then, should not feel unfairly culled as the worst offenders in the conspiracy against the human race.

9. Nevertheless, we cannot count out the possibility that with the passing of hundreds or thousands of years the world will have attained the highest imaginable state of unity as well as the hedonic payoff for which we have slaved. Those extant during this epoch, which all previous eras of history have been working toward, may even be immortal, thriving without physical bodies in a full-immersion virtual environment maintained by technological systems inconceivable to date (Kurzweil’s Singularity). Let us also presage that at this distant stage of human evolution we have fully fathomed all matters of the universe—its beginning, its end, and all of its workings. Having reached such an apex, we would need only to stave off a single question. The question takes various forms.

Here is one of them: “What use is it to exist?” Herman Tennessen, in his essay

“Happiness Is for the Pigs: Philosophy versus Psychotherapy (Journal of Existentialism 7, no. 26, Winter 1967), cites another form of the question: “What is it all about?” He then explains the context and import of the question. “Mitja (in Brothers Karamazov) felt that though his question may be absurd and senseless, yet he had to ask just that, and he had to ask it in just that way. Socrates bandied about that an unexamined life is not worthy of Man. And Aristotle saw Man’s ‘proper’ goal and ‘proper’ limit in the right exercise of those faculties which are uniquely human. It is commonplace that men, unlike other living organisms, are not equipped with built-in mechanisms for automatic maintenance of their existence. Man would perish immediately if he were to respond to his environment exclusively in terms of unlearned biologically inherited forms of behavior.

In order to survive, the human being must discover how various things around as well as in him operate. And the place he occupies in the present scheme of organic creation is the consequence of having learned how to exploit his intellectual capacities for such 109

discoveries. Hence, more human than any other human longing is the pursuance of a total view of Man’s function—or malfunction—in the Universe, his possible place and importance in the widest conceivable cosmic scheme. In other words it is the attempt to answer, or at least articulate whatever questions are entailed in the dying groan of ontological despair: what is it all about? This may well prove biologically harmful or even fatal to Man. Intellectual honesty and Man’s high spiritual demands for order and meaning may drive Man to the deepest antipathy to life and necessitate, as one existentialist chooses to express it: ‘a no to this wild, banal, grotesque and loathsome carnival in the world’s graveyard’” (emphasis not added). The work from which Tennessen quotes is Zapffe’s On the Tragic.

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CREATING HORROR

ATMOSPHERE

Billions of years had to pass following the formation of this planet before its atmosphere became . . . atmospheric. This development occurred in conjunction with the debut of consciousness among our species. Seeing shadows in the moonlight and hearing leaves rustling in the wind, our ancestors impregnated these sights and sounds with conceptions of what they might portend. With our bodies bogged down in the ordure of this world, the exercise of our new faculty of consciousness resulted in the genesis of other worlds, excrescences born of our anxieties about the one we knew. Created out of nothing, or very little, these worlds borrowed aspects of ours to exude atmospheres that fostered strange rules and strange rulers. From the beginning, the unadorned atmosphere of the moonlit night and the lonely place has been used in horror tales to prepare the entrance of a supernatural abomination. One continues to see this kind of bare-bones atmosphere in the movies. The shadows, the rustling leaves, the moon with or without clouds, and the lonely place—the same primal scenery that raised the hair on the heads of our ancestors endures as establishing shots and in production design. But once the monster arrives, atmosphere recedes into the background—now you see it, now you don’t—so that the action can begin. In better movies, atmosphere and action are more integrated. The focus does not shift from spooky backdrops to actors fighting for their lives or from an atmospheric nightscape to a busy police station where someone is telling an off-color joke while someone else is crabbing about the poor quality of the coffee. These movies, the better ones, are often based on works of fiction and take place in a relatively unchanging locale—a room, a house, an apartment building, a mental institution, a motel or hotel, a forest or desert or jungle, someplace where atmosphere is ever-present and part of the action and every character is enmeshed in the same supernatural snare.

Nevertheless, atmosphere in movies, even the better ones, is still based on physical surroundings. It is on the outside, a costume in which a horror tale is dressed up. And costumes come straight from Wardrobe, not from the consciousness of human beings, where atmosphere was born and subsequently raised to labyrinthine dimensions.

Unlike filmmakers, horror writers do not create atmosphere with locations, lighting, and sound effects. There are indeed ready-made atmospheres that may be chosen for a work of horror fiction, but the great names of this literary genre do not select what atmosphere they will use—it selects them. For these writers, the atmosphere of their works is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. And it comes from inside, where their incomparable consciousness has been brewed out of a mix of their sensations, their memories, their emotions, their physiology, and everything else that makes them who they are and predetermines what they will choose to express as artists if they are bold enough to do so or incapable of doing otherwise. These are the solitaries of horror, whose writing bubbles from inside their own heads and cannot be understood solely within the trends of their art form. They come out of nowhere and are buried unceremoniously.

They will be exhumed only when their consciousness hits the sensitive nerves of another, which will happen more exquisitely than it will often. Their subject is not the world about 112

them but the world that has been generated within them. From horror to horror, they repeat themselves because all they have to work with are themselves and their dreams, every one of which is a bad dream. As anyone knows, it is impossible to recreate one’s dreams in a way that others can experience. Their moods are too profound and strangely magnified and their thoughts are too intricate and ambiguous. But the atmosphere of those dreams is part of the consciousness of great horror writers and shapes the moods and thoughts of their waking life, which is what they attempt to put onto a page and transfuse to us. Thus Lovecraft, in a 1935 letter to Catherine L. Moore, set down these remarks on the weird story: “It must, if it is to be authentic art, form primarily the crystallization or symbolization of a definite human mood—not the attempted delineation of events, since the “events” involved are of course largely fictitious and impossible.

These events should figure secondarily—atmosphere being first. All real art must somehow be connected with truth, and in the case of weird art the emphasis must fall upon the one factor representing truth—certainly not the events (!!!) but the mood of intense and fruitless human aspiration typified by the pretended overturning of cosmic laws and the pretend transcending of possible human experience” (emphasis not added).

Lovecraft’s theoretics of atmosphere and mood in the weird (or horror) story are now legendary, and the literary works in which he most ably put his ideals into practice are masterpieces. Yet he wrote himself off as a failure and struggled to the end of his life to do what, in fact, no other horror writer had done before him nor will ever do: lay bare his consciousness in an artifact. By the stress he placed on atmosphere, Lovecraft showed the way to an analytics of this element in horror literature, and, by extension, to an evaluation of the genre as a whole.

From the perspective of atmosphere, horror fiction may be dated only as far back as the novels of Ann Radcliffe. As a deservedly illustrious name in Gothic fiction, which was not gloriously atmospheric before her, Radcliffe turned a craze in the late eighteenth century for the picturesque in natural scenery into one that included gloom and dread as complements of the picturesque aesthetic. Her works are known for the descriptions they contain of immense and awesome landscapes featuring lofty mountains and deep gorges.