Light On Dark Water

Inhumanism and the End of Ethics

I once said to my boss, by way of making an excuse for a long and rambling email I had just sent her, that sometimes I don’t really know what I think until I’ve written it down. Sometimes the act of writing takes me a step beyond that, to an idea I hadn’t had before and might not have had if I hadn’t been engaged in the act of writing. This happened to me a couple of weeks ago when I was composing for the Caelum et Terra blog, in response to a reader’s comment, a brief explanation of what is commonly meant by the phrase “the culture of death.” Suddenly there on the screen were the words “The end of the human is the end of the moral.” I read them as if they had been written by someone else, and felt that I had learned something.

Now, I don’t flatter myself that this is a new thought. It is, to pick the instance that comes quickest to mind, at least implicit in C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man. But I had never had it put to me quite so simply and starkly.

There is abroad in Western societies today a curious and, if I may say so, a sinister desire to establish as fact the idea that there is no such thing as a human being in the old accepted sense: a creature of mixed body and spirit, part animal and part angel, and thereby placed on the other side of an abyss from the rest of creation (so far as we know it). This rejection of “human” as a unique category is a simple inference from the Darwinian belief that man is only a particularly advanced mammal, not different in kind from a dog or a mouse, and it seems to be embraced with something close to glee by some people. It might seem that the dejection and discouragement with which many greeted Darwin’s work in its time would be more appropriate, but to those whose primary metaphysic is a rejection of all authority outside themselves it came, and apparently still comes, as a message of liberation. And it might seem paradoxical that those who embrace it most loudly and fervently often call themselves humanists, but that, too, makes sense if one thinks of the term as labeling one of two cosmic parties, the other of which is commanded by God.

Up to a point that position has consistency at least to recommend it. If humanity is only one artifact thrown up into separate existence by meaningless physical forces, then it is a silly mistake for us to flatter ourselves that we are anything else. But this “humanism” falls apart intellectually as soon as it begins to use moral language.

No one in his right mind holds a dog or cat or an oyster morally responsible for its actions. At most, in the case of a pet or a domestic animal we might expect obedience and use rewards and punishments to obtain it, but we do not expect a pet to have principles. There are alligators in my part of the country. Every now and then one of them causes trouble by attacking a person or just being in the wrong place. As far as I know no one has ever suggested putting one on trial and attempting to judge its guilt or innocence. The categories do not apply, anymore than they apply to hurricanes or falling rocks.

In a purely material world driven by mechanical forces alone, what meaning could words like “right” and “wrong” possibly have? They can only be synonyms for “desirable” and “undesirable,” and perhaps thereafter “lawful” and “unlawful,” but the reasons why a thing might be one or the other can only be matters of subjective preference, never of fact. If a human being is really not different in kind from a squirrel, or for that matter a stone, then moral language is simply nonsense, and any proposed scheme of ethics is but a way of one person or group saying “I want.” Or, if possible, “I command.”

If I remember correctly, Nietzche saw this and charged with sentimentality those philosophers who would reject God and yet retain an objective basis for moral judgments. To be consistent our modern inhumanists would have to agree with him. Though he aspired to the superhuman and they to the sub- or simply non-human, the ethical destination seems to be the same.

Der Uberhund: Beyond Good and Evil?