The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2 page)

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For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. They live—

they reproduce—they stop living. For humans, things are more intricate, given that we know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer at intervals throughout our lives and then suffer—slowly or quickly and with pain—at the point of death. This is the knowledge which we “enjoy” as the highest beings in the animated diorama known as nature. United by such knowledge, we are also divided by it. For example, a debate has been going on among us for some years, a shadowy polemic that periodically attracts public notice. The issue: what do various people think about being alive in this world? Overwhelmingly, the average person will say, “Being alive is all right.” More thoughtful respondents will add, “Especially when you consider the alternative,” betraying a jocularity that is as logically puzzling as it is macabre. These speakers weigh down one side of the survey. On the other side is a small sample in disagreement with the majority. Their response to the question of what they think about being alive in this world will be a negative one. They may even fulminate that being alive is objectionable and useless on principle. Now both of these groups exhibit consciousness in its widely accepted sense. Why, then, are their responses so lopsided? For one thing, most people do not experience being alive as all that terrible. And even those who are statistically ill-favored do not generalize their experience into a principle, nor does their consciousness accentuate those things that are unquestionably awful about being alive.

They go about their business as best they can for as long as they can.

Nobody’s welfare, not even those who think and feel that being alive is objectionable and useless, is served by immolation in a calculus of the worst . . . if they can help it. But we do not control what we think or feel about being alive, or about anything else. If we did have this degree of mastery over our internal lives, then we would be spared an assortment of sufferings. Psychiatrists would be out of a job as depressives chose to stop being depressed and schizophrenics chose to silence unwanted voices in their heads.

Those who believe they can choose their thoughts and feelings are nevertheless disabled from choosing what they choose to think and feel. Should they still believe themselves in control of what they choose to choose to think and feel, they still could not choose to choose to choose . . . and so on?2 Were there any choice on our part about what we think and feel, it would not be adventurous to conjecture that we would think only as needed and choose to feel good as appropriate. Some might choose to live in a permanent state of intense euphoria. With godlike power over your thoughts and moods, why hold back?

Such control would permit us, by fiat of self-addlement, to be careless of every hideous fact that our consciousness may impart about life and death. What is more, those who say that being alive is all right and those who aver the opposite would become united rather divided: we all do what we can to lock out what being alive implies, whichever side of the issue we may be on. And since we have no power of veto over our birth, we could choose to be ecstatic about it rather than negative. We would all be on the same side if we had absolute control over any lethal knowledge that might come into our heads. But the best we can do is this: stay as stupid as we can for as long as we can. And some people can stay just so stupid for just so long.

Of course, it could be argued—and probably has—that our “knowledge” that we are alive and will die is only a compound of flabby abstractions that coincide with no definite or 15

uniform experience in human life. Practically speaking, this does seem be the way it is.

“Being alive” encompasses such an abounding medley of feelings and sensations that it means nothing to say one knows anything about it. We may think of ourselves as “being alive” in moments of exhilaration or well being, yet we have no smaller portion of life in us when we are depressed or are suffering in some other style. And if we are not suffering at present—or at least not suffering noticeably—it is insurmountably difficult to know what suffering is like, or what it was once like for us in the past as well as what it will be like in the future. As for knowing that we will die, our ignorance is absolute, now and forever. We can only fear death without knowing anything about what we fear. Some people can short-circuit their jitters about public speaking by exposing themselves to it repeatedly. But no mortal can overcome the fear of death with practice. You can only put it out of your mind for the nonce, pathetically non-victorious over your fear and still unwitting of the feared inevitability. Therefore, we can have no conscious knowledge that we are alive and will die. This logic correlates to Zeno’s “proof” that nothing can move from one point to another because the distance between one point and another comprises an infinite number of incremental steps that in theory can never be completed. But just as things do in fact move from one point to another, so do we in fact have conscious knowledge that we are alive and will die. Everyone knows it, if only in a far off way. And the farther off it is, the more fluidly we can stay in motion and not lose our heads.

Because even if we have conscious knowledge that we are alive and will die, the less we are conscious of this knowledge, the more we can keep doing what we do and keep being as we are, all things being equal. Luckily for us, or most of us, bringing to bear our consciousness on the subjects here under discussion is an uphill battle. Our brains do not seem to focus on these things very well or for very long. And should we manage to meditate on them for more than a few minutes, there really seems nothing to get excited about. “Yes, we are alive and will one day die. What of it? Pass those potato jobbies over to this side of the table, if you wouldn’t mind.” When the theme of life and death arises, that old warhorse, our minds go blank . . . unless we are philosophers who earn a living thinking about these things. Judging by the number of works they have produced, they know plenty about life and death, although not everything about them and perhaps not what is most interesting about them. The rest of us, or most us, only know that being alive is all right—“What a feast, and those potatoes”—especially when you consider the alternative.

PHILOSOPHY

If the brainiest among us are sometimes dubious about the value of existence, when push comes to shove they respond in the same way as the man in the street, declaiming, in more erudite terms, “Being alive is all right, etc.” The butcher, the baker, and the crushing majority of philosophers all agree on one thing: human life is splendidly justified, and its continuance by means of biological reproduction should be forever in vogue. To tout the opposing side is asking for trouble vis-à-vis a world in which all commerce depends on handshakes and smiles. But some people are born to bellyache that being alive is not all right. Should they vent this unpopular view in philosophical or literary works, they may do so without apprehension that their efforts will have an excess of admirers. Among such efforts is a treatise whose title has been rendered into English as On the Tragic (1941). Written by the Norwegian philosopher and man of letters Peter 16

Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990), On the Tragic has not appeared in any major language at the time of this writing. By some fluke or fortune, however, Zapffe’s essay “The Last Messiah” (1933), which broadly sketches the principles of his masterwork, has been twice been translated into English.3

The aforementioned translations of “The Last Messiah” have been received as a belated gift by English-language readers who treasure philosophical and literary works of a pessimistic, nihilistic, or defeatist nature as indispensable to their existence, hyperbolically speaking. A good number of such readers naturally died before this gift could be placed in their hands, and more will die before On the Tragic is translated into their language. But these readers know better than to think that something indispensable to their existence, hyperbolically or literally speaking, must be received by them before their demise. They do not think that anything indispensable to one’s existence is a natural birthright. Strictly speaking, nothing may be claimed as a natural birthright, since—to digress for a moment—every birthright is a fiction, something we dreamed after straying from a factual world into one fabricated by our heads. For those keeping track, the only rights we have are these: to seek the survival of our individual bodies, to create more bodies like our own, and to know that everyone’s body will perish through a process of corruption or mortal trauma. (This is presuming that one has been brought to term and has survived to a certain age, neither being a natural birthright. Rigorously considered, our only natural birthright is to die.) No other rights have been allocated to us except, to repeat with emphasis, as fabrications.4 The divine right of kings may now be acknowledged as such a fabrication—a falsified permit for prideful dementia and arbitrary mayhem. The unalienable rights of certain people, however, seemingly remain current: whether observed or violated, somehow we believe they are not fabrications because an old document says they are real. Miserly or munificent as a given right may appear, it denotes no more than the right of way warranted by a traffic light, which does not mean you have the right to drive free of vehicular mishaps. Ask any paramedic.

The want of any natural rights on earth is not a matter of tragedy but one of truth. In Zapffe’s estimation, tragedy entered the human scene only after our wayward heads began to gyrate with consciousness and self-consciousness: “I think, therefore I am and will one day die,” as René Descartes’ formulation might have read if he had gone the whole mile with it. They, our heads, then began turning traitor on us, dredging up enough why’s and what’s and how’s to make us drop to the ground in paroxysms of bewilderment, threatening to crucify us with consciousness. This potentiality necessitated that certain defense mechanisms be exercised to keep us balanced on the knife-edge of vitality as a species. While consciousness may have had survivalist properties during an immemorial chapter of our evolution, it seems more lately to have become maladaptive, turning our self-awareness into a seditious agent working against us. As the Norwegian philosopher concluded, along with others before and after him, we must preclude consciousness for all we are worth from imposing upon us a too clear vision of the brute facts relevant to the “great matter of birth and death,” to borrow from the jargon of Zen Buddhism. We are the species that knows too much to content ourselves with merely surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: consciousness has forced us into the 17

paradoxical position of uselessly striving to be something other than what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on crumbling bones. (This fortuity is rather the best we can hope for, given the array of disasters that are superadded by consciousness to those for which we are naturally destined.) For other organisms, bumbling along from here to nowhere is well managed. For us, it is a messy business and often intolerably horrific. To end all this paradox and horror, as per Zapffe, we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.

Perhaps it is precisely because On the Tragic is not globally accessible that “The Last Messiah” seems precious as a terse and limpid epitome of Zapffe’s thought. This short essay has no drawn-out and obfuscating elaborations, no detours into the kind of metaphysical song and dance that makes, for example, The World as Will and Representation (two volumes, 1819 and 1844) by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer so wearing on those of us who have no head for such things. Zapffe’s thesis is crystalline, uncluttered by metaphysical gibberish and worked through to its ineluctably dismal conclusion. With minimal novelty of thought, “The Last Messiah”

succinctly codifies ideas that, in view of the works of his philosophical predecessors, were already well covered. The real thrust of his message does not emanate from insights that are as astonishing as they are irrelevant to anyone who is not a career academic or is fooling himself about the consolations of philosophy. For Zapffe, as for all pessimists, insistence on what is commonplace but taboo is his stock in trade. The expression of outlawed truisms, however, is unfailingly obscured by philosophy’s arcane brain-twisters, which are supposed to “teach us how to think” as we amble toward the grave. Thinking and living are irreconcilable. If we must think, it should be done only in circles, outside of which lies the unthinkable.

The Norwegian’s two central propositions as adumbrated above are as follows. The first is that consciousness, that glory of awareness and self-awareness unique to our species, makes our lives miserable, and thus we thwart it in four principle ways: (1) by isolation of the dire facts of existence from our minds, denying both to ourselves and to others (in a conspiracy of silence) that our condition is inherently disconcerting and problematic; (2) by anchoring our lives in metaphysical and institutional “verities”—God, Country, Family, Laws—based on charters issued by an enforcing authority (in the same way as a hunting license), imbuing us with a sense of being official, authentic, and guarded while shunting aside the feeling that these documents are not worth the paper they are written on (in the same way as a passport establishes one’s identity even though it may be forged); (3) by distraction, a widespread conspiracy in which everyone keeps their eyes on the ball—or a television screen or fireworks display—and their heads placidly unreflective; (4) by sublimation, the process by which thinkers and artistic types recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in which the worst fortunes of humanity are represented in a stylized and removed manner for the purposes of edification and entertainment, forming the conspiracy of creating and consuming products that provide an escape from our suffering in the guise of a false confrontation with it—a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering, for instance. (Zapffe uses himself as an example that one’s awareness of writing about actual horror does not raise the resulting opus above the status of copy, just as a movie whose centerpiece is the romance of two young people, one of whom dies of leukemia, cannot rend its audience with the 18