The Book:
Seven Types of Atheism
By John Gray
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2018
The Talk:
In December 2022, a Twitter user named Gali tweeted “i think @elonmusk getting too political is a mistake.” To which Musk replied:
Must be done for the future of civilization, without which nothing matters
Much of the praise heaped on Elon Musk over the past decade has been due to his visionary idealism. All his projects, he claims, are for the good of humanity. This has attracted talent to his companies and headed off criticism about his business practices and management style. He may have rough edges, his defenders admit, but he’s doing it all for humanity. The salvation of humanity surely must cover a multitude of sins.
But what if humanity doesn’t exist?
In his 2018 book Seven Types of Atheism, atheist John Gray claims it doesn’t. There is no observable “humanity” out there in the natural world.
Unless you believe the species to be an instrument of some higher power, ‘humanity’ cannot do anything. What actually exists is a host of human beings with common needs and abilities but differing goals and values. If you set metaphysics aside, you are left with the human animal and its many contending ways of life.
The idea of humanity developed out of historical accident, argues Gray, as Christian theology posited a special relationship between God and Man. “For God so loved the World…” was an original idea based on the idea that humanity had fallen, humanity was in judgement, and humanity needed salvation. Not just a special group of humans but every human as a collective.
I understand Gray’s view to be something like this: Imagine all the lions that have ever existed or ever will exist. We don’t expect these lions are all working together on something. We don’t think they have a collective will. We don’t think lions have a destiny. If their global numbers grow or shrink, we don’t think it’s all part of a plan for lions. We don’t think there’s a singular “lion dream,” an ideal way of organizing lions that is just out of reach, that all of them are gradually working towards. We don’t believe the life or death of a single lion is in service to or in the advancement of all lions or lionhood.
What do we actually see in the world? It’s just a bunch of lions. Lions that are in rivalry with each other as often as they cooperate. Lions that change their focus from moment to moment. They aren’t building toward something. They aren’t part of a story. If they go extinct tomorrow, that’s simply the end. Lions existed. Now they don’t.
For Gray, humans are animals, just like lions. Humans have never, as a species, been on the same page about anything. We aren’t all working together, building toward something. We do not speak with a single voice. We are similar, but we don’t share the same goals or values.
You might think that human consciousness creates an utterly new category. Of course, there’s no lionkind—but if lion’s had consciousness, there would be! If lions had consciousness, they would care about all lions and the future of all lions.
But human consciousness only seems to complicate the problem rather than resolve it. At least for lions, the goals are relatively narrow, focused on status seeking, eating, etc. But human consciousness and culture only multiply the stories humans can tell. It allows Socrates to say, “I am not Athenian or Greek, but citizen of the world.” But it also allows Hume to say, “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”
Instead of unifying humanity, consciousness fractures it. Some build rockets for Mars, others die in a cult for a UFO hidden behind a comet. Both are thinking about the future of humanity, but they have wildly different views about what that future ought to be and how to get there.
From this perspective, lionkind actually seems more believable than humankind. There is no human will and no story (or plan or goal) that all humans agree on or that all humans are working towards. Increasing consciousness, culture, technology, or population only multiplies the problem of unity.
Oscar Wilde once wrote, in the voice of Mr. Erskine in The Portrait of Dorian Gray:
Perhaps, after all, America has never been discovered; I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
Humanity, John Gray might say, has not been discovered or detected, only imagined.
And even then, only imagined by some. For most of human existence, nobody believed in humanity. In fact, it’s taken a long while to include all humans into humanity. (For example, see I Am a Man by Joe Starita.) It’s a value that must be shored up and reinforced constantly, though speeches and declarations and courts and sanctions. As the evil vicar says about church as a place of peace, “That’s a very recent idea and not one that’s going to catch on.”
But the real kicker is this: The mass extermination of humans is nearly always justified under the rationale of improving humanity.
Which brings us back to Musk. The ideal of serving, even sacrificing one’s self for, humanity’s long-term progress and survival has been lifted up in our culture as the highest possible ideal, the most altruistic way of life, in a universe without religion.
Musk’s vision of human salvation has endeared him to his followers and made him a messianic hero-figure who doesn’t even need to treat actual humans well. (Not even Jesus had it so easy.)
But that distinction between humanity and humans matters. What happens when the ultimate value of humanity conflicts with the belief in the dignity and value of actual people? Paradoxically, the humans of “humanity” can stand in the way of “humanity.” In fact, they always do. As Musk tweeted the day after his previous tweet:
The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters
(Note the repeat of “nothing else matters.”) So what happens to people then? What are their lives worth when weighed against “humanity?” Gray writes:
The progressive thinkers of [C.S.] Lewis’s day thought little of the average run of human beings. Like Trotsky, they believed they could design a better version of the human animal. After all, if most human beings are not just backward but obstacles to progress, what is the point of them? Surely it would be better to sideline these inferior specimens. The future belonged to a post-human species.
I see two problems with believing in “humanity” over humans:
The first problem is the naiveté (or hubris) around thinking that humans have a unified essence (an identity, will, direction, story, destiny) that is both knowable by the insiders and unknown by the masses. We live in a world of 8 billion people, each with their own interests. Yet it’s all too easy to confidently sum up what humans are and what’s best for them, while remaining in near-total ignorance. And to know the true nature and future of humanity, while other humans do not, is to give one’s self the permission (the obligation!) to lord it over the rest.
The second problem arises when humanity is raised up as a moral absolute above all others. Consider the value of family. Many think family is important, but we can also imagine situations when family goes wrong by becoming everything. Think of the mafia, where “going against the family” means you get whacked. Or think of families that function almost like cults, where secrets and abuse are justified in order to protect the family against the outside world. Or the ways in which loyalty to family can lead to corruption in the public sphere.
Once humanity is “all that matters,” there seems to be no good reason not to use longtermism or effective altruism or any other rationale to override decency. At the extreme, it justifies sidelining, silencing, or eliminating “enemies of humanity.”
This thinking is, of course, the seed of the bitter tragedies of the 20th Century—a century of horrific lessons about improving “humanity” we may have already forgotten.
As for me, if it comes down to humanity vs humans, I’m on the side of humans.
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(Note: Special thanks to my friend Daniel for helping me refine this piece.)