The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (4 page)

speed the extinction of humanity. Lusting to empower itself, the Church slacked off from the example of its ascetic founder in order to breed a copious body of followers and rule as much of the earth as it could. In another orbit altogether from the theologies of either Gnosticism or Catholicism, the German philosopher who wrote under the name Philipp Mainländer advocated chastity as the very axis for a blueprint for salvation. The target point of his redemptive plan was the summoning within ourselves of a “Will-to-die.” This brainstorm, along with others as gripping, was advanced by Mainländer in a treatise whose title has been translated as The Philosophy of Redemption (1876). Unsurprisingly, the work itself has not been translated into English. Perhaps the author might have known greater celebrity if, like the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger in his popular study translated as Sex and Character (1903), he had ruminated more about the psychodynamics deriving from the venereal goad rather against it altogether.10 He also made the cardinal error of pressing his readers to work for such ends as justice and charity for all. Mainländer was an unbridled visionary, although not of the inspirational sort that receives a charitable hearing from posterity. He shot himself in the foot every chance he got before aiming the gun a little higher and ending his life. The act was consummated the day of the publication of The Philosophy of Redemption. The author, who avouched his personal sense of well being and proposed universal suicide for a most peculiar reason (see footnote thirteen to this section), may have killed himself to plead his sincerity. But it is not possible for anyone to seal definitively their subjective bona fides by an objective gesture. We are too estranged from one another’s inner worlds for any such measures to be convincing unless we are predisposed, for whatever reason, to be convinced. Had Mainländer lived longer, he might have taken lessons from Friedrich Nietzsche on how to be irrational and still influence people.11

In “The Last Messiah,” Zapffe betrays no illusions about the possibility of defeating consciousness in the manner of Buddhism, nor is he so unworldly as to beseech a communal solution to snuff out the race as did the Cathari or the Bogomils. (He does critique the barbarism of social or religious maledictions in reference to suicide, but he is not a standard-bearer for this form of personal salvation.) His thought is a late addendum to that of various sects and individuals who have found human existence to be so untenable that extinction is preferable to survival. It also has the value of advancing a new answer to the old question: “Why should generations unborn be spared entry into the human thresher?” But what might be called “Zapffe’s Paradox,” in the tradition of eponymous formulations that saturate primers of philosophy, is as useless as the propositions of any other thinker who is pro-life or anti-life or is only juggling concepts to clinch “what is reality?” in part or in whole. Having said as much, we can continue as if it had not been said. The value of a philosopher’s thought is not in its answers—no philosopher has any that are more helpful than saying nothing at all—but in how well they speak to the prejudgments of their consumers. Such is the importance—and the nullity—of rhetoric. Ask any hard-line pessimist, but do not expect him to expect you to take his words seriously.

SOLUTIONS

Thinkers who agitate for pessimism are often dismissed with the riposte that their griping solves none of humanity’s chronic ills, all of which may be subsumed under the main 23

head of SUFFERING. It goes without saying, or should go without saying, that no one has any solutions for suffering, only stopgaps. But Zapffe does offer a “solution,” one that obviates all others—a solution to solutions. It may not be a realistic solution for a stopgap world, or even a novel solution, but it is one that would end all human suffering, should we ever care to do so. The pessimist’s credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and that conscious existence hurts everyone. Consciousness is an existential liability, as every pessimist agrees. It is also a mistake that has taken humankind down a black hole of logic, according to Zapffe’s Paradox. To correct this mistake, we should desist from procreating. What could be more judicious or more urgent? At the very least, we might give some regard to this theory of the mistake as a “thought experiment.” All galaxies grow cold and ghostly with the dying of their suns. All species die out. All civilizations become defunct. There is even an expiration date on the universe itself. We have already spoken of individuals, who are born with a ticking clock within them.

Human beings would certainly not be the first phenomenon to go belly up. But we could be the first to spot our design-flaw, that absent-minded engineering of nature called consciousness, and do something about it. And if we are mistaken about consciousness being a mistake, our self-removal from this planet would still be a magnificent move on our part, the most laudable masterstroke of our existence . . . and the only one.

“Fluke” or “mutation,” rather than “mistake,” would be more accurate designations, since it is not in the nature of Nature to make mistakes—it just makes what it makes. “Mistake”

has been used for its pejorative connotation in Zapffe’s “The Last Messiah” and in the works of other writers discussed herein. The American writer H. P. Lovecraft attributed the existence of humanity to a mistake or a joke on the part of the Old Ones, the prehistoric parents of our species.12 Schopenhauer, once he drafted his theory that everything in the universe is energized by a Will-to-live, paints a picture of a humanity inattentive to the possibility that its life is a concatenation of snafus: “Many millions, united into nations, strive for the common good, each individual for his own sake; but many thousands fall sacrifice to it. Now senseless delusion, now intriguing politics, incite them to wars with one another; then the sweat and blood of the multitude must flow, to carry through the ideas of individuals, or to atone for their shortcomings. In peace, industry and trade are active, inventions work miracles, seas are navigated, delicacies are collected from all the ends of the earth; the waves engulf thousands. All push and drive, some plotting and planning, others acting; the tumult is indescribable. But what is the ultimate aim of it all? To sustain ephemeral and harassed individuals through a short span of time, in the most fortunate cases with endurable want and comparative painlessness (though boredom is at once on the lookout for this), and then the propagation of this race and of its activities. With this evident want of proportion between the effort and the reward, the will-to-live, taken objectively, appears to us from this point of view as a folly, or taken subjectively, as a delusion. Seized by this, every living thing works with the utmost exertion of its strength for something that has no value. But on closer consideration, we shall find here also that it is rather a blind urge, an impulse wholly without ground and motive.” After toiling to explain in circuitous and abstract terms why the universe is the way it is, Schopenhauer is straightforward here in limning his awareness that, for human beings, being alive is an exercise in “folly” and “delusion.” He 24

also noted elsewhere in his work that consciousness is “an accident of life,” an epiphenomenon of a world composed chiefly of inanimate things and not of organisms.

Just as important, Schopenhauer anticipated Zapffe when he wrote: “Let us for a moment imagine that the act of procreation were not a necessity or accompanied by intense pleasure, but a matter of pure rational deliberation; could then the human race really continue to exist? Would not everyone rather feel so much sympathy for the coming generation that he would prefer to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate would not like to assume in cold blood the responsibility of imposing on it such a burden?” This was an understandable miscall by a nineteenth-century thinker. In his day, children were, as he says, a “necessity” to make a household into a going concern. He could not foresee what use hopeful couples would make of modern technologies which, while offering no intense pleasure, deliver babies to those who—as their first choice—want their own genetic material perpetuated; in others words, progeny in a proper sense rather than the adopted output of anonymous parentage. People get the biggest kick out of seeing the features of their faces plastered together onto one head.

Schopenhauer’s is a great pessimism, but it is not the last word. Lamentably, as noted above, his insights are yoked to a philosophical superstructure centered on the Will, or the Will-to-live, a blind, deaf, and dumb force that surfaced for reasons unknown, assembled a universe, and, once human bodies had shot up within it, irresistibly mobilized them to their detriment.13 This theory, while breathtakingly thought out, is ultimately unpersuasive and detracts from Schopenhauer’s commonsense pessimism. As a forefather of Zapffe, his defamations of human life as “some kind of mistake” or “a business that does not cover its costs” has brought satisfaction to millions who have figured out as much on their own but did not have the authoritative erudition and command of language to speak in public. That is all that any career pessimist can hope for—to put on show the horrors he has seen with his naked eye and the pain he has felt with his frail body. Constructing a quasi-logical basis for why this is the worst of all possible worlds is superfluous: neither this basis nor the terrible conclusion drawn from it can wring consent from those whose heads tilt in another direction. The question also arises as to whether a philosopher’s pessimism arises from his system or his system was retrofitted from his pessimism to give it a semblance of believability. The same may be said of any philosophy in which values—optimistic, pessimistic, or somewhere in between—are involved. Like so many other philosophical systems, Schopenhauer’s seems better suited to function symbolically in a work of fiction than to serve as an all-purpose explanation of the universe and human life.

Skipping the edifice of metaphysical theory that Schopenhauer erected, Zapffe explicates the gruesome rigmarole of all entity from an unqualified human angle and makes his point in language we can all understand without too much intellectual strain. He does not even ask us to evaluate what Schopenhauer called a “want of proportion between the effort and the reward” in our lives. That sort of rhetoric does not reach into the marrow of a people whose ever-advancing technology ushers them toward longer and faster lives.

Schopenhauer’s evaluation of a “want of proportion, etc.” may or may not be right. Either way, we are unmoved. The disproportion between effort and reward is a non-factor in our 25

existence. The only factor is our survival as fruitful and multiplying individuals, expendable modules that further the survival of our species. Any other accounting of cost in human life, of a disparity between “the effort and the reward,” is damnably hedonistic.

The twentieth-century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said or wrote, “I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”

Wittgentstein may or may not have been right. Either way his opinion does not go to the core of human life. Hedonism will not wash as a justification for our existence. No price is too high for our creaturely reward of just being here and knowing that others will be here after us. This is our “pleasure,” and no pain will lead our species to question it. If this pleasure began in biology, it now stems primarily from psychological satisfactions.

The survival of a family has long been an indulgence, not a necessity; a satisfaction of the ego, not of the body. Children are not insurance for one lone family but guarantors of a species-wide posterity undreamed before the silicon chip. And the one thing between us and that survival is consciousness—invader of our homes, intruder into our heads. We have more hours in a day to fixate on our mortality than did our antecedents. How many have not found their minds chasing off thoughts of death, or even of life in its more grisly phases, because they could not abide this consciousness (isolation)? How many have not felt themselves nestled in their church, country, or family bosom because they could not abide this consciousness (anchoring)? How many have not sought to divert their minds from any thought whatever because they could not abide this consciousness (distraction)?

And how many have deterred their minds from real torture by derealizing it in paintings, music, or words because they could not abide this consciousness (sublimation)? Zapffe’s achievement as a pessimist treads beyond Schopenhauerian plaints of how painful life can be. We—as an abstract mass—have no problem with pain. The problem for us—as concrete individuals—is the pyrotechnics of cogitation that issue from our consciousness of pain, of death, of life as a dance macabre into which we are always pulling new partners and lying to them as we lie to ourselves. Our problem is that we have to watch ourselves as we go through the motions; our problem is that we know too much that we are alive and will die. And our solution is in the turns we take in a world where we live as puppets and not as people.

Despite Zapffe’s work as a philosopher, although not in an occupational capacity (he earned his living by publishing poems, stories, and humorous pieces), he is nonetheless better known as an early ecologist who coined the term “biosophy” to name a discipline that would conjoin all future philosophy with the probing of biology. (Besides “The Last Messiah,” the only other translations of Zapffe as of this writing take up a few pages in a book on Norwegian ecologists (as cited in footnote number three to this section), even fewer pages in an interdisciplinary journal commingling literary and environmental issues, and some space on a Weblog.) Thereupon, he serves as an inspiration to the environmentalist agenda, the politics of the health of the earth. Here, too, we catch the human creature—and Zapffe himself, as he affirmed—in the act of conspiring to build barricades against the odious facts of life by isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation as it engages in an activity (in this case the cause of environmentalism) that is irrelevant to the perennial issue. Destruction of the environment is but a sidebar to humanity’s refusal to look its fate in the face. We live in a habitat of unrealities—not of earth, air, water, and wildlife—and cuddly illusion trumps grim logic every time. Some 26