The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (5 page)

of the more militant environmentalists, however, have concurred with Zapffe that we should retire from existence, although their advocacy of abstinence and universal suicide to save the earth from a death-pillage by human beings is not exactly what the philosopher had in mind. While a worldwide suicide pact is highly appealing, what romantic fabrications would cause one to take part in it solely to conserve this planet?

The earth is not our home. We came from nothing, and to that condition our nostalgia should turn. Why would anyone care about this dim bulb in the blackness of space? The earth produced us, or at least subsidized our evolution. Is it really entitled to receive a pardon, let alone the sacrifice of human lives, for this original sin—a capital crime in reverse (very much in the same way that reproduction makes one an accessory before the fact to an individual’s death)? Someone once said that nature abhors a vacuum. This is precisely why nature should be abhorred. Instead, the nonhuman environment is simultaneously extolled and ravaged by a company of poor players who can no longer act naturally. It is one thing for the flora and fauna to feed and fight and breed in an unthinking continuance of their existence. It is quite another for us to do so in defiance of our own minds, which over and again pose the same question: “What are we still doing in this horrible place?”

There is a theory that the creation of the human species is nature’s roundabout way of cutting into its veins and bleeding out.14 A strange idea, no protesting that, but not the strangest we have ever heard or lived by. We could at least assume the theory and see where it leads. If it is false, then where is the harm? But until it is proven so, we must let ourselves be drawn along by nature, as we always have, if only by twiddling our thumbs and letting its suicidal course continue without interference. From a human vantage, would this not be a just self-punishment by nature for fashioning a world in which pain is essential, a world that could not exist without pain, a world where pain is the guiding principle of all organisms, which are relentlessly pushed by pain throughout their lives to do that which will improve their chances of surviving long enough to create more of themselves? Left unchecked, this process will last as long as a single cell is left quivering in this cesspool of the solar system, this toilet of the galaxy. So why not lend a hand in nature’s eradication, in case it has second thoughts? For want of a deity, let the earth take the blame for our troubles. What else is it good for? Let it save itself if it can—the condemned are known for the acrobatics they will perform to wriggle out of their sentences—but if it cannot destroy what it has made, then may it perish along with every other living thing it has brought forth in pain. While pain is not a problem for a species, even a hyper-sophisticated hive of creatures such as human beings, it is not a phenomenon whose praises are often sung.

As “pain” signifies imperfection in the world of lived experience, more often the word

“evil” is used to connote a disruption within the religious systems that have been ingrained for millennia into the psyche of our species. The impellent for favoring the latter term, with its dual overtones of both the moral and the metaphysical, is not only to bolster the credibility of another world, one that is “better” than this one, but also to create a distance between the condition of being and the condition of suffering. This ploy is more arresting in Western than in Eastern religions. The purpose of distancing the condition of being from that of suffering is to salvage the world as a terrain of action 27

where there is something of worth to be fought over rather than dismissing it as a material hell where to be born is a curse and to breed others in our image is an act of criminal insanity. Such is the function of the concept of evil—to give glamour, in both meanings of the word, to our lives. Pain, on the other hand, is an unglamorous fact of life and cannot be raised or lowered to the status of a concept, either moral or metaphysical, and compresses the distance between the condition of being and the condition of suffering. In pain, the two are one. For a Western religion such as Christianity, evil can be brushed aside as being “in the world” but not identical with it, offering believers the possibility of atoning for their divagations from the straight and narrow, and, if all goes well, securing their eternal salvation. Ask Gilles de Rais, who confessed to the sexually motivated disfigurement and murder of scores and perhaps hundreds of children, then was executed in good odor with the Church for his spoken repentance and therewith reserved a place for himself in God’s heaven. For those who play by the rules of the Catholic religion, there is no sound argument against Rais’ salvation. Neither is there a case on behalf of any of his victims who might have died in a damning state of sin as laid out in the Bible or in the Byzantine theology of various propagandists for the Almighty—ask St.

Augustine. Any other interpretation of these technicalities is born of an effete sense of justice divorced from the order of the Creation. A sense of irony is not an attribute of the Lord . . . or of the moral statutes, natural or divine, that we trust to save our world from anarchy and chaos. Irony is as caustic as doubt, including the doubt that being alive is all right. Believe it or not, as you choose.

DISILLUSIONMENT

“Depressing” is the adjective that ordinary persons affix to the life-perspectives expressed by men such as Zapffe, Schopenhauer, and Lovecraft. The doctrines of any world-class religion, dolorous as some of them are, will never be similarly defamed. The world dotes on its lunatics, whether saintly or sadistic, and commemorates their careers.

Psychopaths make terrific material for news agencies and movie studios; their exploits always draw a crowd. But the moment a discouraging word is spoken, some depressing knowledge, that crowd either disperses or goes on the attack. It is depression not madness that cows us, demoralization not insanity that we dread, disillusionment of the mind not its derangement that imperils our culture of hope. Salvation by immortality—that keystone of every religious schema except Buddhism—has meaning only for those who have been bred to be normal psychotics. An epidemic of depression would stultify the disembodied voice of hope, stopping life dead in its tracks. Irrationality heightened into rampaging delusion provides our species with the morale to forge ahead and to keep making more of ourselves, which is to say that it obliges us with a rationale for bragging about what we are biologically and socially bidden to do anyway.

Zapffe, Schopenhauer, and Lovecraft were men of sound mind who subsisted nicely without the grand designs of religion that are handed out on every street corner . . . and that they handed back. This is a risky thing for anyone to do, but it is even more touchy for writers because anti-spiritual convictions will demote their work to a lower archive than that of wordsmiths who capitulate to what “the heart knows” . . . or at least follow the maxim of being equivocal on the subject of our species. Readers—and this includes even the highest brows—do not want to be told that their lives came about by an 28

evolutionary contingency and that meaning is not even in play as an issue in human existence, at least not against a cosmic and eternal background.15 Wherefore Schopenhauer’s failure to loom as large as Nietzsche in the museum of modern thought.

Schopenhauer promises nothing but extinction for the individual, or, more specifically, the postmortem recall of his “true nature” as a tiny parcel of the personless and ever-roiling Will. (“The Will does not think and cannot die. I am just a thinking puppet of the Will and will stop thinking when my body is dead.”) Nietzsche borrows from religion and preaches that, although we will not be delivered into the afterlives of his ecclesiastic models, we must be willing in spirit to reprise this life again and again to its tiniest detail for all eternity.16 As unappealing as the prospect of repeating our lives even once may seem to some of us, we are not the ones who make a writer’s reputation. This is the bailiwick of the philosophical trendsetters among us, who eventually discovered Nietzsche to be the most spellbinding conundrum in the history of the mind. All the better for the perseverance of his corpus, which has supplied his exegetes with lifetimes of interpretation, argumentation, and general schismatic disharmony—all the purposeful activities that any religionist, with or without a deity, goes for.

Among other things, Nietzsche is of legendary repute as a go-getter for personal and species-wide survival, making an exception for weaklings and anti-lifers whom a strong society must be rid of. As with other isolated eruptions from this all-affirming, all-loving philosopher, Nietzsche’s abhorrence of the weak and life-denying is deliciously tricky for his interpreters to reconcile within the totality of his works. Some are able to do so to their satisfaction and some are not. Thinkers great and not so great have their internal conflicts, but Nietzsche is philosophy’s toughest knot to untie, which has worked out swimmingly for his fame. Not so for Schopenhauer, who is philosophy’s red-headed stepchild because he is clearly on record as having said that being alive is not all right.

Even his most admiring commentators, who do not find the bulk of his output to be off-putting, pull up when he waxes pessimistic, which is well beyond queer when one considers that comparatively few pages of the thousands that Schopenhauer wrote openly harp on the forlorn nature of existence and few who analyze his work have much to say about this side of what he wrote. (In Patrick Gardiner’s seminal English-language study Schopenhauer (1963), the term “pessimism” does not appear in the index nor is it subject of discussion in the book itself.) And yet his stock is rather low compared to other major thinkers, as is that of all philosophers who have unconcealed leanings against life. It would be naïve to bemoan the fact that pessimistic writers do not rate and may be denounced in both good conscience and good company. This judgment makes every kind of sense in a world of card-carrying or crypto-optimists. Once you understand that, you can spare yourself from suffering inordinately at the hands of “normal people,” a debatable confederation of creatures but an insidious one. In concert, they are more a force of nature than a group of individuals who keep the conspiracy going by echoing the same banalities and watchwords.

Integral to the normal world’s network of cloying essentials—purpose, patriotism, home cooking—is the conviction that all of us are (or have like an extra internal organ) a so-called self (often capitalized). No quibbling, everyone shares the same conviction, even those who, like the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, have done a 29

good job of logically arguing against the existence of a self. But logic cannot exorcise that “I” which stares back at you in the mirror. When people say they have not been feeling their old self, our thoughts turn to psychology not metaphysics. To reason or to hold as an article of faith that the self is an illusion may help us to step around the worst pitfalls of the ego, but mitigation is light years from liberation. And like the soul, or angels, the self is a blank slate on which so many people have written so many things.

Yet even if there is something like a self living invisibly inside us, who is to say—except anyone who wants to—that it is not toyed with in the same way as the visible matter encasing it? Why should not every self come with its own strings attached? Some believe that a Big Self enfolds all of our little selves. Can little selves have littler selves? Can a Big Self have bigger selves? As above, so below . . . as the saying goes. That said, some of us are more sure than others of our selves, whether they are lastingly modeled at the self factory or cut to be altered like a suit of clothes. And how many of us want nothing so bad as to be somebody?

Without a whole-hearted belief in the self, the person, our world is kaput. Were a personal god to be excluded from everyone’s universe, persons would still retain their status. Otherwise, everything we know would be a no-go. Why bother to succeed as individuals or to progress as societies once we have identified ourselves as only a crisscrossing mesh of stuttering memories, sensations, and impulses? Because these events occur inside the same sack of skin, we suppose an enduring, continuous personality—something to be exalted or condemned either in the mass or as separate units, something that serves as the substructure for war, romance, and every other genre of human activity. In the hierarchy of our most puissant fictions—Homeland, God, Family—the Person is at the pinnacle.

We cannot corroborate the reality of ourselves any more than that of our gods. And still we are suckered into posing under a false identity, inducted into a secret agency that seems to us the most real thing going. How does this occur? So far, the best theory we have is that the person is made possible by consciousness, which divides one head from another and from the world around it, giving the creature that carries around that head the sense of being somebody, specifically a human somebody. No creature caged in a zoo knows what kind of thing it is, let alone makes a stink about being superior to another kind of thing, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral. As for us humans, we thoroughly reek of our sense of being special. For millennia, those hailed as the most conscious among us—the ones who are needful of the most refined type of brainwashing—have made investigations into what it means to be human. Their disparate ramblings on this subject keep our brains buzzing while our bodies go the way of surviving, reproducing, and dying. Meanwhile, speculation continues apace on the subject of our humanness, our selves, our personhood. When you start with a premise that is imprudently unfounded, only insanity and nightmare can follow—the prima materia of what fascinates us when presented in the form of histories, biographies, celebrity gossip, clinical studies, and news reports.

Even though both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche spoke only to an audience of atheists, Schopenhauer erred—from a public relations standpoint—by not according human 30

beings any special status among the world of things organic and inorganic or trucking in an overblown meaning to our existence. Contra Schopenhauer, Nietzsche not only took religious readings of life seriously enough to deprecate them at great length, but was hell-bent on replacing them with a grander scheme of goal-oriented values and a sense of purpose that, in the main, even nonbelievers seem to thirst for—some bombastic project in which persons, whom he also took seriously, could lose (or find) themselves. Key to Nietzsche’s popular success with atheist-amoralist folk is his materialistic mysticism, a sleight of mind that makes the world’s meaninglessness into something meaningful and transmogrifies fate into freedom before our eyes. As for Schopenhauer’s truly fatalistic puppetry, in which an unknowable phenomenon (the Will) pulls all the strings—that had to go. If none but Schopenhauer have conceived of the Will as an actual phenomenon—