The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (9 page)

meaningless. To wail adamantly that a god exists is to kill that god or turn it into a plastic idol. To say that a god might exist is to vivify it with the meaning of mystery.

16. Borges’s essay “The Doctrine of Cycles” both cites and conceives several refutations catastrophic for the ancient concept of the eternal return, which posits the unending and identical recurrence of all beings and events. In the words of the bookish Argentine, the

“eternal return of the same” is “the most horrible idea in the universe.” To Borges, this idea was a nightmare born of bad philosophy; to Nietzsche, it was a nightmare fathered by his need to be joyful, or to believe he would be joyful no matter what horror befell him. In Nietzsche’s world, coming to terms with this idea as a reality was a must for affirming one’s life and life itself, thus recalculating the horrors of existence into a fate, or an unceasing series of fates, that would somehow inspire love rather than alarm.

Given the antimony on this issue between Borges and Nietzsche, should one writer be heralded over the other as genuine, authentic, or whatever term of approval one cares to wield? The question is moot to the highest possible or impossible power. Each man was handling the stress of a hyper-diligent consciousness in his own style and not in one pressed upon him by cognitive meddlers.

17. Lovecraft is perhaps the most felicitous example of someone who knew ravishments that in another context would be deemed “spiritual” or “religious.” Yet from childhood, he was undeterred from a precocious atheistic materialism (or nihilism, pessimism, cosmic indifferentism). In his lectures collected as The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James offers an individual’s sense of “ontological wonder” and “cosmic emotion” to argue for the legitimacy of religious faith. As sincere and existentially well grounded as any philosopher or psychologist who ever lived, James believed that overstepping logic was all right if there was a practical “cash value” return on one’s intellectual gerrymandering. This belief is perceptibly valuable for those who will suck upon anything to nurture their oneiric belief in a universe that has an overarching purpose or meaning of a religious nature. In both his creative writings and his letters, Lovecraft’s expression of precisely the feelings James describes cancels out the philosopher-psychologist’s argument. (Such an impeachment of James’s defense of the faithful must naturally been met with a counterpoint. See “William James on Cognitivity of Feelings, Religious Pessimism, and the Meaning of Life” by Ellen Kappy Suckiel in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2004.) For Lovecraft, the experience of cosmic wonder, even as it partook of a sense of horror, was elemental to his interest in remaining alive. He saw the universe as nothingness in motion and lived to tell about it.

Sublimating this awareness into works such as the poem “Nemesis,” cited in the main text of this work, he also mitigated the boredom that plagued his life by distracting himself with the thrills of “cosmic horror.” On the other side is a famous utterance by the seventeenth-century scientist and Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal concerning his sense of being “engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me; I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread” (Pensées, 1670). A man of tender sensibilities, Lovecraft was almost certainly filled with a similar dread, the difference between him and Pascal being that he also beheld the dreadfulness of his place in the universe with fascination.

(See the discussion of Rudolph Otto in the section “Creating Horror.”) This is not an unnatural response to what most would consider a discomfiting situation, if they ever consider it in the first place and are not happy with revealed truths right off the rack.

18. To this shortlist of hokum should be added one of the wilder prognostications of

“futures studies.” According to one gang of futurists, a breakthrough event pompously 43

ennobled as the “the Singularity” will occur. What the fallout of the Singularity might be is unknown. It could begin a dynamic new chapter in human evolution . . . or it could trumpet the end of the world. The prophesized leap will be jumpstarted by computer gadgetry and somehow will involve artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and other habiliments of high technology. According to another gang of futurists, the Singularity will not happen: we will go on with our lives as stumblebums of the same old story, puppets of a script we did not write and cannot read.

Understandably, the former view is more exciting than the latter, the more so in that an apocalypse has been inserted as a wild card. In this sense, the Singularity is the secular counterpart of the Christian rapture, and its true believers foresee it as happening within the lifetime of many who are alive today, as the earliest Christians, not to mention those of subsequent ages, believed in the imminence of Judgment Day. Whether heaven or hell awaits us, the critical aspect of the Singularity is that it provides a diversion for those among the technological elite who are ever on the lookout for twinkling baubles to replace the ones with which they have grown bored. The Singularity encapsulates a perennial error among the headliners of science: that there has never been nor will ever be the least qualitative difference between the earliest single-celled organisms and any human or machine conceivable or not conceivable in a world whose future is without a destination. That we are going nowhere is not a curable fate; that we must go nowhere at the fastest possible velocity just might be curable, although probably not. Either way, it makes no difference. (Zapffe deplored technological advancements and the discoveries to which they led, since those interested in such things would be cheated of the distraction of finding them out for themselves. Every human activity is a tack for killing time, and it seemed criminal to him that people should have their time already killed for them by explorers, inventors, and innovators of every stripe. Zapffe reserved his leisure hours for the most evidently purposive waste of time—mountain climbing.) Like Scientology, the Singularity was conceived by someone who wrote science fiction. One of its big-name proponents, the American inventor Raymond Kurzweil, established a regimen of taking 250 nutritional supplements per day in hopes of living long enough to reap the benefits of the Singularity, which may include an interminable life-span among its other effects. It is as easy to make fun of religious or scientific visionaries as it is to idolize them. Which attitude is adopted depends on whether or not they tell you what you want to hear. Given the excitements promised by the Singularity, odds are that it will collect a clientele of hopefuls who want to get a foot in the future, for nobody doubts that tomorrow will be better than today. More and more it becomes clear that if indeed human consciousness is a mistake, it is the most farcical one this planet has ever seen.

19. When gods and their true believers come into the picture, the rhetoric of insolence is an unsatisfactory exercise in self-gratification for an infidel, much as the sarcasms of a literary critic are thrown away on a book that everyone agrees is a bad job. Only the blasphemies of the faithful who feel themselves ill-used by their deity carry the music of hatred that the unbeliever attempts in vain. Take the Book of Job. Were its protagonist an actual man and not a lesson in fearful obeisance, or whatever his story is supposed to convey, the Old Testament might contain a symphony of rancor greater than any this world has known. But Job turns legalistic rather than abusive; he wants to argue why he should be spared his hellish trials. No good can come of that. Any argument can go on interminably . . . or until one party gives in, which is what Job does for no intelligible reason. One thing that Job’s tale has conferred upon worshipers down through the ages is a work out in rationalization, a front-row seat at a seminar in masochistic logic—the whole bag of theodicy, the defense of God’s ways. Job’s taste for consistency and 44

coherence in his god could have been easily put to rest by affirming that neither justice nor any other kind of worldly order is the birthright of humanity.

20. In Zapffe’s “The Last Messiah,” the titular figure appears at the end and makes the quasi-Delphic, biblically parodic pronouncement, “Know yourselves—be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye” (emphasis not added). As Zapffe pictures the scene, the Last Messiah’s words are not well received: “And when he has spoken, they will pour themselves over him, led by the pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails.” Technically speaking, he is not a messiah, since he saves no living soul and will be erased from memory by a vigilante group whose kingpins are “the pacifier makers and the midwives.” Zapffe elucidated why humanity should not further tarry on earth, but he had no illusions that his insights would be welcome by others. Due to the note of hopelessness in the coda to Zapffe’s essay, we are discouraged from imaging a world in which the self-liquidation of humanity could ever be put into effect. The Norwegian himself did not take the trouble to do so. No reason he should, since first he would have to imagine a new humanity, which is not ordinarily done outside of fiction, a medium of realism but not of reality. Conscious that this assignment is impossible and thankless, nothing prohibits us from attempting it. Perhaps the new humanity would be a race in which everyone is a becalmed visionary who has recognized an unwavering retreat from the worldly scene as a benevolent proceeding. This task, as Zapffe indicates, need take only a nicely limited number of generations to complete. While their numbers tapered off, these dead-enders would be the most fortunate in the history of our species. Rightly pleased with themselves as the unsurpassed conquerors of human suffering, the last survivors could universally share material comforts previously held in trust for the well-born or money-getting classes of world history. With ample food and housing already at hand for this short but decisive epoch, the nature of labor could radically change. Since mere survival or personal economic gain would be passé as motives for the new humanity, there would be only one defensible impetus to work: to see one another through to the finish. Euthanasia would be offered to all without being imposed on any. What a relief, what an unburdening to have closed the book on humankind. Yet it would not need to be slammed shut. As long as we progressed toward a thinning of the herd, couples could still have children and new faces could be brought into the fold as billions became millions and then thousands. New generations would learn about the past, and, like those before them, be glad they never lived in those days, although they might play at cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, management and labor. The last of us could be the very best of us who ever roamed the earth, the great exemplars of a humanity we used to dream of becoming before we got wise to the reality that we would never make it as a mob always on the make for new recruits. Quite naturally, this depiction of an end times by a collective suicide pact will seem abhorrent to those now living in hope of a progressively better future, one that will exculpate them from a depraved indifference to the suffering predestined for their young. It may also seem a romanticized utopia, if not a front for a tyrannical oligarchy run by fanatics of extinction rather than anything like a social and psychological sanctuary for a species harboring the shared goal of delimiting its stay on earth. If Zapffe had uselessly exerted himself by formulating the theses of “The Last Messiah,” he was astute in giving it a hopeless finale. Without an iota of uncertainty, humankind is and will always be unsuited to engineer its own deliverance. The delusional will forever be with us—they will forever be us—thereby making pain, fear, and abnegation of what is right in front of our face the preferred style of living and the one that will be passed on to countless generations. There is nothing remarkable about people wanting to continue into perpetuity in this way and to shrug off anyone who is in noncompliance. A minuscule 45

exemplum of this bias is the fact that a book like Michelstadter’s Persuasion and Rhetoric took almost a century to be translated into English. Contrarily, Emile Coué’s Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion (1920) was translated into English in 1920, which apparently preceded its publication in French. Chiefly an advocate of self-hypnosis who had a philanthropic desire to help others lead more wholesome lives, Coué is best known for urging believers in his method to repeat the following sentence:

“Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better,” a string of syllables so fantastically trite that in all probability their sentiment of pushing oneself forth in life ante-dates language itself. On his lecture tours, Coué was greeted by celebrities and dignitaries around the world. Hordes turned out for his funeral in 1926. Schopenhauer could not fill a classroom with students who wanted to hear his lectures. By these occurrences, we are again reminded that humankind has always displayed a vigorous immunity to the morally injurious disillusionment that attends new ideas. As Lovecraft justly observed in the first paragraph of his story “The Call of Cthulhu,” science (knowledge) has never posed a serious imperilment to humanity’s concept of itself, a post-Darwinian insight that is as true in the twenty-first century as when Lovecraft penned it in 1926. All revisions of our “place in the universe” have served only as a partial antidote for religion, everyday superstition, and certain schools of philosophy.

Scientists do not set out to shake up the status quo. Their purview is that of trifling matters relating to the physical workings of the world. They also seek payment and maybe notoriety for their work. What prods a scientific head does not affect ordinary people, who by and large take their marching orders from their social environment and their bodies rather than from a compulsive desire for “truth” in a material, which is so often immaterial, sense. Knowledge of the origins and ornamentations of the universe, including those of organic life, changes nothing about how we live and how we die.