Some time back I wrote a few bits and pieces online about Thomas Ligotti's extended essay, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. There was, for instance, a thread I started on Thomas Ligotti Online, and one or two blog posts. The essay is, ostensibly, one dealing with the origins and development of the horror genre. It also carries in it, quite explicitly, an argument, or plea for, the voluntary extinction of the human race, not for the sake of the planet, or anything like that, but simply in order to reduce human suffering. I suppose it could be called something like the case for genocidal euthanasia, but that would be misleading, since the main solution to the problem of human suffering that is put forward is simply not to perpetuate that suffering by procreation.
At the time I was ambivalent towards such a conclusion and the arguments upon which it was built, and I suppose I still am. However, I feel like making a certain qualification now to the remarks I made then.
In as far as anything ever is right or wrong, I think that Ligotti is probably right here. Or to put it another way, unless there is such a thing as mass-enlightenment, there will always be a sense of intolerable suffering to human existence, and the only way to end this will be through extinction. Some means of extinction will be gentler than and preferable to others.
To state that even more simply: Yes, I agree; it's always better not to be born.
That wasn't the qualification I wished to make, actually. But before I make my qualification, I should perhaps qualify my qualification by saying, I think I am far less consistent in my views than Ligotti, and likely to vacillate wildly.
At one point in the thread – I believe at more than one point – a poster calling himself 'The Yellow Jester', who is, in fact, Thomas Ligotti, if, in fact, such an entity exists, makes a distinction between emotional pessimism and cerebral pessimism, claiming as his own the latter:
In my own case, I can say that my pessimistic outlook is a matter of cerebral introspection and not "emotional thinking." No matter how I felt on an emotional level, I would still say, "It would be better not to be born." That is a constant which could only change should I become the victim of a brain tumor or something of the sort that would derange my thought processes.
At the time I noted, but did not quite appreciate this point. I'm not sure that any thinking can ever be free of emotion, or at least, of something like 'personality'. My own pessimism (not that I especially want to own it) I have always thought of as emotional, of consisting in a sensation that no one else would ever understand, because I could never put it into words. It was an almost physical entity, as reasonless as any object on Earth, like a ball of fear and loneliness inside me.
Now, however, I appreciate this point much better.
At the time that the essay came out, my strong reaction to it was probably due to the fact that it was 'too close to home'. Now my reaction to it is less powerful. It seems little different to any other accumulation of letters that I may read or ignore at will. For the past few months I have not had the intense depression that I suffered for many years before. I feel relatively detached now, and it seems to me that, no, you do not need to be depressed to think that it's better not to be born. You might even be enjoying an ice cream – as I believe Ligotti himself remarked – and still think that to be born is a curse that should not be visited upon anyone. I agree.
What, after all, is everybody looking forward to? What have they been looking foward to throughout history? Why has it taken so long without finding that thing – which cannot even be conceived – and people still go on and on reproducing? I do not understand.
In the meantime, Thomas Ligotti has joined H.P. Lovecraft, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis in their riotous and strangely touching adventures with Korean sex symbols Jeon Ji-Hyun and Kim Hee Sun, iiiiin, Thomas Ligotti and the Strange Case of the Orange-Flavored Lifesavers.
Justin Isis writes:I don’t know if the human genome would allow us to stop reproducing. If it got to the point where it looked like it might actually happen, I think the genome, in its desperate quest to perpetuate itself at all costs, would start activating previously unused gene sequences that would transform people into non-rational sex zombies who would go around raping everyone in sight. Richard Dawkins would lead them. The only people who could stop them would be Zen monks with amazing levels of self-control and detachment, and wu xia superpowers.
“I think the genome, in its desperate quest to perpetuate itself at all costs, would start activating previously unused gene sequences that would transform people into non-rational sex zombies who would go around raping everyone in sight. Richard Dawkins would lead them.”That is an image I shall gently shelter in my heart, and take upon a contemplative walk in about fifteen minutes.
Peter A Leonard writes:
“in its desperate quest to perpetuate itself at all costs, would start activating previously unused gene sequences that would transform people into non-rational sex zombies who would go around raping everyone in sight.”No change there, then.:jester:
Ah, it’s true, there is no stopping it.
I don’t see a clear distinction between emotional and cerebral pessimism. Its just a matter of emphasis. In Collapse, Ligotti discusses how he can’t communicate the full experience of his viewpoint and that seems the same as what you wrote.I understand why he makes the distinction. Ligotti is probably meaning that his beliefs aren’t dictated by his moods. How I see it is that may be true for any given mood but untrue from a larger perspective. Ligotti may have a good day and it doesn’t change his pessimistic outlook. But if his life had been filled with more happiness and contentedness than not, then its unlikely that he’d ever have come to a pessimistic viewpoint in the first place.Ligotti’s argument ultimately isn’t rational. He admits that logic can only go so far. His notion of cerebral pessimism isn’t about intellectuality. I’d guess he thinks of it as detachment and in that sense objective. Also, as he is on bi-polar medication which evens out one’s moods, I’d also guess that he feels emotions less intensely than he might’ve in the past. However, he apparently has suffered from dark moods in the past and his whole argument centers on the feeling of suffering. Of course, in his non-fiction writing, suffering is more of an idea than a feeling but that doesn’t change the origin of it in his own emotional experience.I’m basing my conjectures on having read the Collapse excerpt of his writing and all of his interviews. I must admit that its hard to tell where Ligotti is coming from. He doesn’t share that much of his personal experience. He seems like the type of person that separates the private and public aspects of his life. That might relate to his desire to separate the emotional and the cerebral in his pessimism.
Those are all good points and I broadly agree. For instance, after I wrote my entry, I realised it was misleading to suggest that my depression had been entirely reasonless, even though the constant sensation was something that seemed somehow beyond reason. I also think that there’s no such thing as objectivity. As I implied or stated, all thinking is shaped or limited by personality.It’s occurred to me, though (only really a rewording of what I’ve said before) that Ligotti is perhaps one of the clearest examples of ‘the voice of reason’ that I’ve ever heard. That is, it is impossible to affirm life through reason alone. Ligotti mentions that even intellectuals fall back on ‘what the heart knows’, as if this were a failing. Certainly it means that reason is never complete. Thank god. Ligotti, I am sure, is entirely aware, as you say, that his own outlook, also, rests on an ultimately irrational foundation. For some reason, the irrational in Ligotti’s case is not manifest as a direct affirmation of life, or I should say, as an explicit affirmation of life. As he has said, even suicide is an idealistic, positive act. Therefore, so is his writing of pessimistic fiction etc. He knows this full well and has said as much.However, what he expresses in something like The Conspiracy Against the Human Race is the voice of reason, about as pure and neat as it can get. There is no rational justification for existence, and he does not trust irrational justifications. This is the line I would expect any consistent rationalist to take. But they don’t. The reason why people like Richard Dawkins and A.C. Grayling end up looking like such buffoons, or, to put it another way, like all our cariacatures of the idiot savant, is not because they are so consistently rational – if they were they would express views more like those of Ligotti, rather than belief in progress and so on – but because they lack the self-awareness to realise how irrational they are. I think part of my motivation for writing this entry is that it seems to me, if Ligotti is serious about wishing people to stop breeding, that it would help his cause greatly if people didn’t get the impression that they had to be depressed and hating life in order to agree with him. He does hint at this here and there, but it’s mainly drowned out in the white noise of cosmic dread that is the background of his writing. I think it might be good to put about the idea a bit more that you can have a fantastic life and still wish to curtail the suffering that inevitably forms its edges (if nothing else) by ceasing to take part in the biological, philosophical, emotional etc., procrastination known as procreation. Ultimately, however, all crusading is absurd. Ligotti, I believe, has a well-developed sense of the absurd, and I’m sure he must know this, too.
I found it quite interesting that Ligotti was pushing rationality to its furthest extent. I’m also annoyed by people like Dawkins because they limit their rationality to a belief system. Its somewhat like Catholic theologians who create these convoluted logical arguments to uphold Church doctrine. Ligotti, on the other hand, seems very self-aware in his use of rationality. He realizes that the criticisms he makes equally apply to himself. He knows that he is irrationally affirming life in his act of writing. One of the points of Zapffe that Ligotti mentions directly applies to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Rationality is as idealistic as anything else, and as you say I’m sure Ligotti has a good sense of the absurdity of this.You make a good point about Ligotti’s challenge in actually convincing others. He’d probably say he isn’t trying to convince others, but I’d guess that some part of him desires to convince because that is partly what it means to communicate well and afterall writing is about communicating. I’m thinking that Ligotti might be resistant to your suggestion. I suspect that he might believe that the cosmic dread aspect is more central than any arguments he makes about the discontinuance of life.Despite Ligotti using Zapffe as a main inspiration for his own pessimism, my sense is that there is a big difference between them. Ligotti is obsessed with the whole cosmic dread thing. From my brief readings of Zapffe, he appeared to have a different focus. Zapffe seemed like this super-happy guy who climbed mountains because he knew it was absurd to do so. The sense of the absurd apparently gave Zapffe a kind of freedom to act without worrying about meaning or purpose. I didn’t get a feeling that Zapffe was weighted down by doom and gloom.
You make a good point about Ligotti’s challenge in actually convincing others. He’d probably say he isn’t trying to convince others, but I’d guess that some part of him desires to convince because that is partly what it means to communicate well and afterall writing is about communicating. I’m thinking that Ligotti might be resistant to your suggestion. I suspect that he might believe that the cosmic dread aspect is more central than any arguments he makes about the discontinuance of life.Perhaps I should add that, aesthetically speaking, at least, I like the white noise of cosmic dread. But there is, as you suggest, some conflict or ambiguity over whether or not Ligotti wishes to convince others. I think this is one of the paradoxes of his work. I’m reminded a little of Burrough’s phrase, “I’m not running for public office, I don’t have to respect anybody’s stupid opinion.” (I think I’ve got that right.) I think I can sympathise with the paradox in Ligotti’s case because perhaps I have a similar one. I can’t stand people who think they’re right (wish to persuade) but a great deal of what I write had underlying it a kind of crusade against those who wish to persuade. What is that if not persuasion? I get around this by saying that thought cannot stand still. It is of the moment. By which I mean, I do not claim anything I say to have any validity or meaning beyond the moment or context in which I say it (if that). Or, to put it another way, even if I repeat myself, each repetition should be something I thought up at that moment as if it were new. I’m not trying to build a solid structure of thought, but, since I can’t help thinking, do, with some reservations and caveats, express those thoughts.I’m not sure if I’ve got off the point. Basically, I think I understand the philosophy or attitude behind constantly shooting yourself in the foot. Ligotti, for instance, tells us that to write pessimistic fiction or philosophy is to write your own ticket to obscurity.