‘The Conspiracy against the Human Race’: Humanity Was a Mistake
A review of ‘The Conspiracy against the Human Race’, by Thomas Ligotti; Hippocampus Press, 2010.
The good artists borrow, the great artists steal and all that; but it is still scandalous that the grim outlook set forth by Rust Cohl in HBO’s True Detective was taken (without credit, by the way) from the cult horror writer Thomas Ligotti. Whole chunks of dialogue are stolen from his slim work of philosophical pessimism, The Conspiracy against the Human Race, in which he advances the idea that human self-consciousness was a terrible mistake.
His argument runs dead against the common-sense understanding of human life, meaning and reality. His main contention is that our capacity for self-reflection is a cruel trick of evolution, for it merely allows us to see the pointlessness of our existence. He argues life does not matter and that due to our awareness of mortality and suffering, our experience borders on cosmic horror. Our need for purpose and hope is merely a defence mechanism in an indifferent universe. All our efforts to find meaning, says Ligotti, are ultimately hollow.
His argument runs dead against the common-sense understanding of human life.
Well, gosh. Of course, this all sounds intuitively wrong. Most of us think that the juice is worth the squeeze, so to speak: that love and all those other gooey feelings make up for the suffering and dissatisfaction that, as the Buddhists tell us, is intrinsic to life. But one has to admit: he is compelling. Ligotti draws on Peter Wessel Zapffe, Emil Cioran, Arthur Schopenhauer, and other famously gloomy thinkers (one, Philip Mainländer, promptly killed himself after writing about the pointlessness of life).
One might gently suggest in response to Ligotti that facts and meanings are different. We may well agree that suffering, mortality and cosmic indifference are scientifically true, but it does not follow that our existence is horrifying. We make meaning or find it in relationships; in goodness, beauty, truth. Life’s facts do not shape our experience: our perception and interpretation of events does, and this to a great extent is under our control. It is a theme we find in many traditions and fields, from Stoicism and Christianity to positive psychology.
What makes this book so readable other than its contrarian subject matter is Ligotti’s darkly poetic prose. He writes beautifully, evoking even Nabokov at times. He has a knack for articulating existential dread and nihilism with a lyricism and hollow humour that is profoundly unsettling. For readers who know his fiction, The Conspiracy against the Human Race feels like the philosophical bedrock, a system of ideas that undergirds the relentless pessimism of his stories.
He writes beautifully, evoking even Nabokov at times.
As fun as it is, one has to concede there is something juvenile about it. It is not new or perspicacious or even interesting, frankly, to say that we are clever primates on a big spinning rock, so what’s the point in waking up in the morning? This is garden-variety nihilism, and the stuff of Midgley’s ‘school of nothing buttery’: love is ‘nothing but’ chemical reactions in the brain; the Mona Lisa is ‘nothing but’ pigment on canvas, etc. etc. Far more interesting, in my view, is meaning and how we discover or create it: how human beings form groups that generate meaning, for instance, or how art or religion call us to rise to the full height our dignity demands.
But I maintain: it is fun. Ligotti is a brilliant writer. His stories are outstanding, and this slim volume is outstanding as a work of creative non-fiction, too. It asks us to examine our own wellsprings of meaning, to reconcile competing notions of truth and falsehood, to contemplate the problem of suffering and how we redeem our experience in the light of it. If nothing else, it is a memorable addition to the existential literature.
