The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Neither Positive Nor Equivocal: The Malignant Uselessness of Being

Fear is an instinctual response to threat common to all animals. Horror, the self-generation of fear without threat, is unique to human beings. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race is an extended meditation on this remarkable fact. And its conclusions are even more remarkable: that the faculty we call consciousness, and consider as the apotheosis of evolutionary genetics, is profoundly destructive, not because we possess it but because we attempt to temper it through delusion. (While at least half of Ligotti’s book is written tongue-in-cheek, it isn’t obvious which half that is. Therefore, in my remarks here I have chosen to ignore his irony entirely).

Ligotti is perfectly clear: “Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.” The conspiracy is one of humanity against itself. We limit our consciousness in order to survive in a world of unbearable suffering, both ours and other creatures. Consciousness exposes each of us to a “too clear vision of what we do not wish to see” and therefore must be hampered and downplayed lest it threaten our own survival through the horror it reveals.

That we are a threat to ourselves is factually incontrovertible. That we pose this threat because we are potentially aware of the overwhelming reality of existence, is the surprising but plausible significance in the Genesis tale of eating from the tree of knowledge. Through that metaphorical act, we became “a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with the undead.” We must deny what we are in order to be what we are.

Ligotti’s book is therefore a useful counterpoint to the likes of Yuval Harari’s rather more optimistic Sapiens (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Harari credits the genetic mutation that promoted representational language, essentially gossip, as the climactic breakthrough of our species. Presuming the close evolutionary connection between representational language and consciousness, Ligotti turns this triumph into a disaster. For him, “we live in a habitat of unrealities,” called stories. We are an evolutionary mistake which we have been trying as a species to overcome by minimising its influence both personally and socially through story-telling - literature as neurotic malady rather than therapy.

Ligotti‘s argument is neither tendentious or brash. He knows that the condition he is describing prevents acceptance of his entire line of thought. We want desperately to repress our knowledge of reality. But despite his originality in expression and his self-confessed minority view, his ideas have a long and intellectually sound pedigree. Ligotti has demythologised and established on a purely rational footing the ancient philosophical tendency of Gnosticism. His claim is not that Gnosticism is a superior view of the world, merely that it is respectable. And that its current lack of intellectual respectability is a consequence of the potentially disruptive power of the Gnostic position.

Gnosticism has always been the recurrent heresy of the intellectual in the Western religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is a heresy because it denies the essential goodness of creation upon which each of these traditions insist. But it denies this with good reasons that are supplied by the traditions themselves, primarily the acknowledged existence of evil in the world, both natural and that of human corruption. Where can such evil originate? And why is it not eliminated by the all-powerful force which created the world in which it exists?

The Gnostic answer to these awkward questions is that in fact the force which created our world is itself evil. There may be some higher divinity but our souls have been separated from this entity and enslaved in material bodies created by a Demi-God for precisely this purpose. Our real duty as human beings is to escape this materiality in order to be re-united with, re-integrated into, that higher divinity. Of course another way of stating this is that our real fate is to lose our own consciousness by being absorbed in the cosmic consciousness of the divine.

Gnostic influence has always been strong in the Western religions. The battle of the angels led by Lucifer and Michael, Satan taunting God in the book of Job, the competition in Egypt between Aaron and the Pharaoh’s magicians are examples of the assimilation of Gnostic ideas in biblical traditions common to all three Religions of the Book. From time to time Gnosticism has posed a real threat to established doctrinal order - from the Manicheans of Jewish and Christian antiquity, to the Bogomils and Cathars of the Middle Ages, to the Calvinists and Jansenists of the 16th and 17th centuries, to the Shakers of the industrial era, and to the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Camus among others in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Gnostic influence, its fabricated stories, has been persistent and insistent in its expression.

Ligotti‘s innovation is to establish Gnosticism as more than religious poetry or esoteric philosophy. Like Harari, he speculates not about the divine origin or metaphysics but the genetic evolution of the human species. By radicalising it, he turns Gnosticism on its head. Consciousness is not a quality of the divine that points to our origin and to our real home in some spiritual haven. It is the work of the satanic Demi-God within creation itself not above it, which dooms us to an overwhelming awareness of our inevitable fate and the pain to be endured along the way. There is nowhere to run, no safe haven. This bleak fate is in our genes not our souls. And we are aware of this in our saner, that is to say, more pessimistic, moments.

Neither Ligotti nor Harari can provide a good evolutionary reason for the emergence of language and consciousness. In fact even Harari considers that the development of his Cognitive Revolution was likely to have been initially unhelpful to the species. Indeed like all evolutionary changes, it must have been a mere blunder, a shot in the genetic dark. But what Harari thinks of as a fortunate accident in the long term, Ligotti sees as an eventual evolutionary dead end in the even longer term.

Neither view, of course, can be proven. This is Ligotti’s point. What he is really demonstrating is that the presumption, both culturally and scientifically, of anthropic evolutionary dominance is itself mythical. It is a conceit that is employed in various ways to justify exploitation of things and other people. It is also intellectually a means to justify power, the need for coercion, even evil, all in the name of the good. This is the ethical importance of Ligotti’s case, a case that is “neither positive nor equivocal” about how bad things really are.

Postscript: Ligotti was inspired largely by this man: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Postscript 8May19: And in terms of how bad things really are: Nature crisis: Humans 'threaten 1m species with extinction' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-en...

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