Good morning, beloved -
Today I am going to bypass any discussion of the Current Unpleasantness(es), and see if I can’t take a deeper cut at the questions I’m going to be worrying at in some way across both of my next two books.
What I’m trying to get at in what follows is nothing less than a reasonably concise statement of values, framed in a way such that they might be actually useful as a guide to daily conduct. In other words, this will be an attempt to articulate some things I actually believe about the universe and our place in it, more or less so they might serve as practical aids to navigation — markers of commitment that might help me make my way through the moral and policy thickets contemporary reality forces us to reckon with, on what feels like an accelerating basis. This feels like a healthier and more productive response than just sniping incoherently at something like, say, Ezra Kleinian “abundance” or the latest fascist provocation, and my hope, of course, is that this exercise will be helpful for you, too.
If this seems like a quixotic, nigh-Aspergerian effort to derive an ethics from first principles, of the precise sort that leads a Yudkowsky or a Yarvin into error most grievous, well, maybe it is, and maybe that’s why I’ve chosen to release this as a subscribers-only post. I have no defense against that charge. But indulge me for a little bit as I unwind this line of thought, and let’s where it takes us.
§ The way I’ve been framing the challenge to myself recently is that of articulating a defensible, contemporary humanism, bracketed by a corrective antihumanism, nestled inside an ahumanism that encloses both. It’s a given that everyone who uses these rather loaded words will mean slightly different things by them, so let me clarify what it is that I mean when I use them.
By “humanism,” I mean to invoke an ethical frame and a guide to conduct that affirms the dignity of the human person, and upholds the fundamental justice of our claims to care, universally. I qualify the humanism I’m trying to articulate as “defensible” for a few reasons, though. The first is that this position is generally understood to involve the affirmation of human beings as the central locus of meaning, value and agency in the world, with some universal human “essence” centered in our approaches to knowledge, ethics and politics, and that’s not what I’m getting at. This might have been intellectually and practically tenable in the Enlightenment period, as the affirmation of an autonomous, reasoning human subject against the received dictates of high theological authority; certainly it can still be electrifying, at least for me, to consider the gorgeous faith in our capacity for reason bound up in artifacts like the French Republican calendar, its proclamation wonderfully accompanied by an edict that “the vulgar era is abolished for civil usage.” But it just won’t bear any load now.
Twentieth-century thought decisively undermined and overmined the notion of human centrality, attacking it from both below (psychic drives, affects traversing the body, neurotransmitter flux; understandings of biological life as fundamentally compositional, or of consciousness itself as an epiphenomenal “user interface”) and above (the notion that agency vests in discourses, immaterial legal or linguistic structures, assemblages, actor-networks, or even the causally-locked, entrained and predetermined shape of reality itself).
As contemporary left thought would have it, too, we’re not supposed to make universal claims. This is so because — much like those perspectives upholding science as ostensibly furnishing a dispassionately objective “view from nowhere” — universalism has for the better part of half a century now, and in my opinion rightly, been understood as a conscious or unconscious smokescreen for the reproduction of values and interests associated with the white, male, capital-owning, heteronormative, cis- and able-bodied, etc., etc. individuals proclaiming it. As our disgust for the seemingly unobjectionable (but functionally grotesque) slogan “All Lives Matter” suggests, as well, this kind of universalism can also be a bad-faith way of shouting over the reasons why particular claims are advanced at particular moments.
So, in short, we can’t affirm some “universal reasoning human subject” as our sovereign benchmark for meaning and value because, A, there clearly never was any such person; B, we acknowledge that there are sharp limits on reason as a way of knowing the world; and C, even to the extent that any one of us could stand in for that person, we’d necessarily be excluding other perspectives equally or still more valuable. But this generates a new problem for those of us who are interested in developing heuristics that might guide right action in the world, a set of guidelines for conduct that isn’t simply so situated and relational it effectively has to be worked out anew each time, on a case-by-case basis: all of these objections may be valid, so far as they go, but accepting them in whole largely deprives us of any ground on which we might make normative claims. We’re deprived of any way to say what we think should be the general case, that is, and have it be anything but just, like, our opinion, man. If we want to be able to make normative claims, we have to be able to anchor them in something, and after 1968 or so it’s clear that this spectre of “the human” just will not do.
Here we enter the epoch of antihumanist thought. When I say “antihumanist,” I mean something that, it seems to me, comes in three distinct flavors, which we might call “theoretical,” “philosophical” and “empirical.” Theoretical antihumanism is that stance wrapped up in the “death of Man” proclaimed by Michel Foucault in Les mots et les choses (retitled The Order of Things in English translation, 1966), and has to do with all the objections to universalism I laid out above; in fact, we could say that this variety of antihumanism stands in dialectical opposition to universalism. Philosophical antihumanism gestures at a still deeper, ontological instability in the construction of the human, and stands in dialectical opposition to anthropocentrism: the categorical primacy of “man” as subject or ground is contested here by the redistribution of agency (or even being itself) across systems, language, assemblages. And finally there is what we might think of as a scientific or empirical antihumanism, built from incrementally-arriving experimental data about life, consciousness, self-organizing systems, etc., and which stands in dialectical opposition to exceptionalism — the idea that humans occupy some kind of privileged or discontinuous position in nature/“nature.”
Levying these three varieties of antihumanism at humanist thought would seem to reduce it, in the strict military sense. It’s not destroyed after 1968, precisely. But it’s no longer really capable of functioning as a base of operations. You’d be hard-pressed to build a functioning ethics on its wrecked foundations. As central and devastating as all these lines of critique might appear to be, however, antihumanism’s power to place brackets on humanist thought pales before that of ahumanism.
§ I think of “ahumanism” as the quality of indifference-manifesting-as-hostility that derives from the mismatch between the scale of the universe and its prevailing regimes of intensity and the facts of our own embodiment.
In 1966, Stewart Brand famously asked why we haven’t “seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?,” even though the production and dissemination of such a photograph had by that point been well within the bounds of technical possibility for almost a decade. Brand’s feeling was that the contemplation of such an image would evoke “a sense of shared destiny and adaptive strategies” among all those exposed to it, and the fervor of this belief was such that the quest to depict the Whole Earth lent its name to the profoundly humanist project that would consume most of his own attention for the two decades that followed.
But as it turns out, seeing the Whole Earth wasn’t enough to catalyze some thoroughgoing transvaluation of values among members of the human species. And neither was seeing the Pale Blue Dot — an image of that same whole Earth as seen from nearly four billion miles away, reduced to the size of a single pixel. In fact, these images seem to have produced another affect in their viewers, something other than a sense of solidarity or common purpose: as Carl Sagan’s well-known expansion on the meaning of this image suggests, people wound up feeling as though everything they knew or ever would know occupied nothing more than “a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.” That’s ahumanism: a decentering still more profound than the Copernican. Ahumanism vests in the recognition not merely of our own personal complete and total insignificance when set in a ground that appears to be fourteen billion years old and 93 billion light-years across — that’s a given — but of the complete and total insignificance of our entire species, along with the planet it and all other species presently known to us evolved on, the star that planet orbits and the galaxy whose outer reaches that star occupies.
Consider, of all things, William Shatner’s surprisingly eloquent reaction to his brief suborbital excursion, a reaction he characterized as one of “overwhelming sadness.”
When I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold...all I saw was death.
I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing...It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.
Shatner’s own response to this grief appears to have been, at least temporarily, chastening. At least in public, he has since upheld the urgent necessity of our developing an ethos of planetary care, in a way that would seem to bear out Brand’s and Sagan’s fondest hopes. But we can’t all ride to space on a centibillionaire’s whim. And barring the massification of such epiphanies, it seems implausible that we might somehow derive an ethics legible to us from the naked circumstance of residing in a universe as imponderably hostile to life as the one Shatner experienced on his brief pop above the atmosphere. In fact, what seems more likely to me, given the prevailing currents, is that the ethical pendulum might swing the other way: if the universe is really so cold — if a gamma-ray burst ten thousand light-years away can instantaneously sear an entire hemisphere down to the mantle, without warning and at any time — of what issue could genocide possibly be, let alone the murder or sublethal torture of individuals? Why not indeed do just what thou wilt, whatever the cost to others? Doesn’t a fully metabolized ahumanism precisely license the most Sadean interpretations of the will to power?
Well. That’s not any world I want to live in. So let’s climb back down from this cryogenically chilly ahuman perspective, however unimpeachably grounded in the real it may be, and see if we can’t rebuild a humbled but functional humanism with the means we have left at hand.
§ Let us first grant the justice of the various critiques of humanism lodged by interlocutors like Edward Said, who identified it as a fundamentally colonial discourse; Gayatri Spivak, in her demand that we attend to the existence of voices which aren’t merely decentered within universalism, but actually erased from its accounts of being; and Donna Haraway, who insists on our entanglement with both other species and with nonliving technologies. Let’s concede that operations conducted under the sign of the human have generally involved the effacement of difference, and the substitution of the particular interests and perspectives of a tiny, privileged shard of the population for those of the general run of the species.
Let us, similarly, embrace the humbling insights offered to us about how much of our ability to think the world resides outside the brain, the difference between our own perceptions of intention and the functioning of the system that constitutes us, and so on. Let’s stipulate that each of us is partial, porous, composite, open — a snapshot, as it were, of a single moment in the history of the material, energetic and informational (i.e. genetic, linguistic, memetic) processes flowing through us, and constituting us as they do.
Let’s own that, to a first approximation, the weight of all human thoughts, words and deeds in the aggregate, since the first dawning moments of our species-being until now, is precisely zero.
Let’s accept what everyone from Lao Tzu to Sartre was trying to tell us, in their own distinct ways: that there’s no external warrant for meaning in the world, and that whatever meaning any one of us finds there can only be something we’ve projected onto it.
Why cling to the human at all, then, as a frame of reference or an anchoring point for assessments of right conduct? The universe is not about us, after all. We are not its protagonists — and definitely neither its telos nor some kind of hapless deep-historical launchpad for same, whatever the more Promethean among the longtermists would have us believe. Again, even for those who don’t wish to affirm the Heart Sutra’s insistence on the emptiness of all things, on the strictest material grounds we are nothing before the mind-blasting reaches of space and deep time.
And yet we unavoidably live our lives at human scale, for a human span, inside a regime accessible to human senses, to the degree that this experience shapes our construction of those very mind-blasting reaches. In fact, any attempt to reconstruct the consciousness, perspective, or prerogatives of something other-than-human — Harambe, a rock, Highway 61 Revisited, Cygnus X1, a lambda phage, the Dutch East India Company — is just that, necessarily: our attempt, our imaginary, our projection, using our own situated and embodied reckonings as the only yardstick at hand. And this, for me, feels like a sufficient justification to at least start from the human, using the very humility of our extension in space and time as a way to begin feeling outward.
In other words, so long as this set of circumstances remains the case, it feels to me that an ethical project has to encompass humanism, antihumanism and ahumanism. And over the past few months, that’s just what I’ve been trying to do. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about this question in terms of where value resides, across three distinct registers whose language and framing are adapted from Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet:
- Value-for-us, the human register, is where moral language, norms, social sanction and deliberative justification operate. It supplies whatever institutions of responsibility we devise with their furniture: law, customary norms, mutual recognition. Warrant here is social: we appeal to reason, reciprocity, empathy, solidarity, and the prospect of an unavoidably shared future. This register feels to me like the necessary site for articulating duties, rights and mutual obligations, if that’s the sort of thing you wish to uphold (and I do).
- Value-in-itself, the material/thermodynamic/biotic register, is the province of the first few sections of The Tetrad, one of the two books I’m currently on the hook to deliver in the first part of next year. It gives us a frame for the human, consisting of objective constraints and dependencies derived from the Sun, the geo- and hydrological properties of the Earth system, and the domain of life — the energetic surplus that drives photosynthesis, lithospheric functions like the early modulation of atmospheric oxygenation, biosphere services like soil formation and pollination. These are not moral reasons per se, but they are normatively constitutive: they make certain actions possible, and others catastrophic. Warrant here is what we might think of as pragmatic-constitutive: if you value life, or really any durable practice on Earth, you’re bound therefore to respect the material processes that enable those things. That respect becomes a norm, implemented in choices like care for the soil, respect for hydrological cycles, and avoiding actions that foreseeably degrade the commons.
- And finally we reach the ahuman horizon of value-without-us, or what I think of as the abyssal register. This register supplies scale, indifference and a perspective that is simultaneously dizzying and grounding — or, more properly, is guaranteed to be dizzying, but can also be grounding if we let it be. Its warrant is negative, in that it tells us what not to presume: no cosmic privilege, no rescue from without, no promise that we’ll even be here from one moment to the next. It provokes humility, awe and — if we’re paying attention — a considerable amount of grief. Reckonings of value-without-us are not, and cannot be, a source of prescriptive norms in themselves. Think of them as a corrective to our hubris, not under any circumstances a lawgiver.
This next move still feels a little dicey to me, but what the heck? We’ve come this far together. It consists of an act of synthesis: an assertion that something resembling the ethical warrant I’m looking for emerges when human normative capacity (value-for-us) internalizes or metabolizes value-in-itself, and is disciplined by the humility and ultralong-horizon perspective of value-without-us. That threefold integration is what produces a robust, affirmative guide to right conduct.
In fact, we arrive specifically at something that begins to look very much like a Buddhist ethics.
§ Buddhism, of course, speaks with many voices, and not a one of them has any claim to primacy, or to speak in any way for all the rest. I think it’s fair to say, though, that some of the flavors it comes in are more congenial to me than others. Here’s a concise statement of the ethics upheld by one of those lineages — the version I was taught upon taking Five Precepts in the Kwan Um School tradition of Korean Zen, way back in 1994:
I vow to abstain from taking life. I vow to abstain from taking things not given. I vow to abstain from using others to gratify my lust. I vow to abstain from lying. I vow to abstain from seeking heedlessness through intoxication.
Note the feature of these precepts that commended them to me, then and now, as having emerged from a spiritual tradition fit for adults: they explicitly do not say “Be celibate” or “Don’t drink,” because it isn’t sexual pleasure or the sense of getting your buzz on it itself that constitutes the bar to enlightenment. What they do say is, know why you’re doing these things, and don’t get attached to them. And there was one final, unspoken facet of these precepts that felt really bracing, something that resides not internally to the words themselves but externally, in the community of practice that upheld them. I’d phrase it like this: The choice to break any of these precepts is always yours. But know that there will be consequences of that choice — and that the ownership of those consequences, too, will be yours.
What nobody made explicit at the time, and what only became clear to me much later, is that these precepts have the form they do because they are an exercise in the pragmatics of maintaining human community. In other words, the practitioner observes these tenets not because they are consistent with Goodness, or because they themselves want to be a Good Person, but because they conduce toward something approximating long-term harmony. The tacit logic is that, ceteris paribus, a community in which people acts according to these precepts will over the long run produce better outcomes (for itself as a whole, for its members individually) than one which does not.
There’s certainly plenty of room to argue here, particularly about the value of perfect and unbending honesty. (What child has not been taught the face-saving power of the little white lie, what person on the spectrum has not been forced to learn just how unpopular one becomes by telling the full truth at all times?) But maybe these precepts offer us the seed of an affirmative, more-than-human ethics, an agreement that would furnish us with normative warrant that is neither anthropocentric nor nihilistic. And we might begin from this criterion that, again, ceteris paribus, a community in which people acts according to whatever set of principles for conduct we devise will over the long run produce better outcomes (for itself as a whole, for its members individually, for all those systems of such a gauge that they experience the effects of its being) than one which does not.
And yes, I know how Rawlsian that sounds, but I can’t see a way around that — not without letting this simmer for awhile, at least. If such an agreement could be decomposed into precepts, though, I might phrase them like this:
1. The precept of humility. Act always with awareness of limits and contingency; resist all claims of absolute entitlement, sovereignty or dominion over life, matter, energy or information.
2. The precept of mutual care. Recognize interdependence with nonhuman agents, and structure obligations that protect those agents beyond the ways in which their work furthers human ends. Provide for the maintenance and regeneration of those material systems on which value-in-itself depends.
3. The precept of prudence. Where actions risk irreversible harm to value-generating systems or processes, default to restraint; always prefer reversible, small-scale experimentation.
4. The precept of justice. Within these limits, translate ecological constraints into political claims that prioritize the protection of vulnerable people, species, systems and processes; address historical enclosure and unequal exposure to harm.
5. The precept of temporal responsibility. Extend moral concern along depth of time. Care for succession and future contexts; plan for both the durability of lifeways and their necessary, eventual dissolution.
6. The precept of situation. Value situated knowledge and wisdom derived from direct experience alongside more synoptic perspectives; devise adaptive processes of governance that are capable of incorporating the insights they furnish.
7. The precept of plurality. Accept that no one party has or ever will have privileged access to the real, or a comprehensive understanding of the situation and what it requires. A valid perspective is one that inherently incorporates multiple points of view.
These principles are mutually reinforcing: perspective prevents hubris; mutuality gives content to care; precaution protects the conditions of reciprocity; justice distributes burdens and protections. Each of these tenets is justified simultaneously by human norms of solidarity and responsibility (value-for-us); by the material necessity of preserving enabling flows (value-in-itself); and by the humility demanded by being guests in an indifferent cosmos (value-without-us).
Isn’t this just an mask for unreconstructed liberal humanism, something that says all the right things and immediately passes them by in its rush to congratulate itself? I don’t think it is — not if the value ethic is constrained by the in-itself and disciplined by that which was here before we were and endures after- and without-us. What it is, instead, is an attempt to, in Timothy Morton’s words, “think the human without recourse to reactionary essentialism.” The embodied, porous, temporary human remains a moral actor, but not the ontological center of being. What emerges at the interface between ourselves and the world we dwell in is a relational, profoundly material and necessarily provisional ethic.
Again: the abyss gives us humility; the Earth and its biosphere give us material reasons to care; the human register gives us the mechanisms to translate those reasons into duties and institutions. Affirmative ethics in this schema is not an optional add-on; it is the practice that concretizes our (my) otherwise abstract understandings of value, and allows us (me) to operationalize them. This set of precepts refuses nihilism, rejects cruelty, and grounds action in reciprocity, care, precaution and justice — all of which are intelligible both to human moral sensibility, and to the material needs of an enduringly livable planet for all who call it home, or might.
In the end, though, to return to where I began: I don’t necessarily articulate these precepts in the thought that anyone else might find them resonant. I articulate them so I can make explicit to myself what I believe is tenable for me: what I consider it necessary to uphold, how I might bind all the kaleidoscopic shards of my temporary-situated-contingent-and-local understanding in a set of clarifying principles robust enough to carry into the fray of contested life.
§ OK, that’s it for now. Right now I’m reading Francis Spufford’s still somewhat-newish novel Cahokia Jazz, which I didn’t even know about day before yesterday, and which I was thrilled to learn existed; listening to three whole discs of new Jeff Tweedy, like the Hackniest Dad who ever Hackney Dadded (NB: one does not need to have kids to be a Hackney Dad); and watching No, a film about the plebiscite that brought Pinochet’s rule in Chile to its end.
As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 148 of Monday, 29 September 2025, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊