This conversation originally appeared in What Matters Most: Conversations on the Art of Living by Anthony Morgan (ed.) (Agenda Publishing, 2023)
Misanthropy – the moral condemnation of humankind – is very topical these days. There are many inspirations for a sense of the collective awfulness of humankind, from the failures to act on the global environmental crisis to the rise of far-right ideologies to the avoidable mass suffering of billions of humans and animals. But philosophers rarely talk about misanthropy as a doctrine. When they do, it is usually narrowly defined as a hatred of human beings or coupled to extreme proposals. In this conversation, Ian James Kidd offers an overview of philosophical misanthropy, including his own definition (“the systematic condemnation of the moral character of humankind as it has come to be”), addresses some common misconceptions, considers the shortcomings of Rutger Bregman’s “Homo puppy” brand of optimism, and clarifies how – and why – one may wish to be a misanthrope.
Anthony Morgan (AM): Let’s start with a simple question: why misanthropy?
Ian James Kidd (IJK): Misanthropy might not be an easy topic to get into, because the subject is of course intrinsically negative. I define misanthropy as the systematic condemnation of the moral character of humankind as it has come to be. For a misanthrope, humankind as it has come to be is morally atrocious. For all sorts of philosophical and psychological reasons, that’s not an attractive thesis for many people. I’m not temperamentally misanthropic myself. My engagement with the subject was through the work of my former Durham colleague, David Cooper. In 2018 he wrote a short book, Animals and Misanthropy, arguing that honest reflection on the exploitation and abuse of animals by humankind justifies a charge of misanthropy. Most people are familiar with misanthropy as a general concept or idea, but it has never been one that philosophers have really taken seriously. Moral philosophers might describe themselves as realists or sentimentalists or contractarians or utilitarians, but rarely as misanthropes. What was very interesting about David’s claims in Animals and Misanthropy was, first, that he was talking philosophically about misanthropy, and I’m always attracted to new ideas. But he also made an extremely compelling case that reflection on how we treat animals as a culture, as a form of life, justifies a misanthropic verdict.
AM: I imagine that there must be many different ways into misanthropy beyond reflecting on our treatment of animals.
IJK: Different critics will want to emphasize different aspects of our awfulness: whether it is the way we treat animals, or nature, or marginalized groups, and so on. Historically, misanthropes focus on different things. For example, for medieval Christians the moral failings that really worried people were spiritual failings like impiety, lack of faith, and so on. As that example suggests, some of these failings might be relevant or intelligible to some of us, which suggests, interestingly, that there are varieties of misanthropy that cannot be taken seriously by those with different moral visions or worldviews. For many contemporary environmental activists, the salient failings are wastefulness, violence to nature, unsustainable and wasteful ways of life, and so on. The doctrine of misanthropy I am developing includes a whole range of different collective failings.
AM: In common parlance, misanthropy tends to mean one thing: a hatred, or at the very least a dislike, of all humans or humanity, possibly even extending towards life itself. What is the affective economy of misanthropy? Is hatred or strong dislike the primary affect that drives the misanthrope?
IJK: If you consult the very few philosophical discussions of misanthropy, they follow the dictionary definition in characterizing misanthropy as rooted in hatred. My dictionary says a misanthrope is someone who hates human beings or hates humanity. Philosophers like Judith Shklar, who have written about misanthropy, tend to follow that definition pretty closely. But when I began to look into the topic of misanthropy and at some candidate philosophical misanthropes, it seemed to me that characterizing it as hatred is far too narrow. Nobody’s inner life is so simplistic that it is exhaustively characterized by one emotion – even a very strong one like hatred – and when you look at the attitudes of particular philosophical misanthropes, it is clear that there is a complex and dynamic interplay of different emotions, moods and feelings.
One of my candidate philosophical misanthropes is Confucius. If you read the Analects, there’s a clear moral condemnation of humankind for its entrenched greediness, laziness, treacherousness, moral indifference, arrogance, dogmatism, and so on. But when you look at how Confucius responds to this, both as a philosopher and as a human being, he has a whole range of complex responses. There are moments of anger and frustration at the state of humanity, and then there are surges of optimism when he thinks we really could turn it around for the better, and then there are moments of quietist acceptance. Part of the difficulty of being a philosophical misanthrope is coping with this constant, painful oscillation between frustration, optimism, despair, resignation, pessimism and gloom.
Depressing as it might seem, misanthropy does register a fundamental truth about humankind as it has come to be.
AM: You are clearly trying to expand the scope of the concept of misanthropy beyond the narrow definition you mentioned. But why would you want to expand it into broader spheres of human life? What is the motivation?
IJK: One common argument given by misanthropes is that, depressing as it might seem, misanthropy does register a fundamental truth about humankind as it has come to be – a truth so central to humanity that we really have to face it in the course of any serious reckoning with the moral realities of human life. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, for instance, was a self-confessed misanthrope. But for him, what’s really important about misanthropy is that it gives us a sobering perspective on the sheer scale of the moral challenges facing us. He was perfectly aware that there are good reasons to want to have a rosier, more optimistic vision of humankind. But he sees that as a temptation to look away from the realities of our moral failings. And, as with many areas of life, if you are not honest about the scale and extent of the problems, how can you ever hope to do something about them? I think that spirit runs through many philosophical misanthropes.
AM: At what level of analysis does philosophical misanthropy operate? I’m guessing that it can’t be at the level of individual humans, as feeling hateful or negatively inclined towards all individual humans is surely a vice. Where do you operate in your analysis of the concept?
IJK: It is certainly correct that misanthropy is not an evaluation of individual human beings. For a misanthrope, one reason that you like certain individuals is that they may be admirably free of the vices and failings that characterize the world. It’s very interesting that many philosophical misanthropes, like Michel de Montaigne, cling closely to friendship as the last and final guard against a slide into total misanthropy. Montaigne was misanthropic, but he considered his close friend Étienne de La Boétie to be a true person because he was free of those failings that characterize the mass of humankind. So, misanthropy is not a judgement on individuals, even if some individuals – like Donald Trump, perhaps – are especially exemplary of our moral failings.
But if misanthropy is not directed at individuals, what is the target? There seem to be two main answers: some misanthropes think that what is truly corrupt and vicious is our underlying nature. There are the older theological narratives, like Saint Augustine’s idea that human nature is corrupted by original sin, which can only be overcome through divine grace. And then there are the modern riffs on this theme that we associate with certain evolutionary thinkers, for whom we have evolved to be intrinsically selfish.
But not all misanthropes think you need to tell a story about human nature. Take Jean-Jacques Rousseau: corruption of humanity can be largely traced to the influences of collectivized, civilized life. If so, our underlying nature is largely beside the point. The source of our moral corruption is the social world, the ways that institutions – private property, social hierarchies and stratification – scaffold vices like enviousness, greediness and aggression. Like Rousseau, David Cooper argues that a misanthrope can remain entirely silent about human nature. We don’t have to make any suppositions at all about what we used to be like way back in the Pleistocene or the Garden of Eden, nor make claims about what we are like “deep down”. What is being condemned is humankind as it has come to be, the particular and contingent ways we have of organizing and arranging our lives.
AM: Where does pessimism overlap or separate from misanthropy? I take someone like Schopenhauer, for example, to be both a pessimist and a misanthrope, and people tend to conflate the two quite easily. Do you think there are important distinctions to be drawn between those two attitudes toward life?
IJK: The pessimist and the misanthrope both agree that human existence is, in a very deep sense, awful. But while the pessimist focuses on deep features of reality or human existence that preclude the possibility of happiness or flourishing – features like alienation, suffering, the inevitability of death, the cosmic will, and so on – the focus of the misanthrope is on human vices and failings, our moral corruptions. You can think that human existence is fundamentally one of suffering and insatiable craving, driven by a cosmic will, without also needing a story about our moral corruptions. The world could be dreadful, even if we are good. Conversely, you might think that life is cosmically meaningful, even if most human beings are awful. Schopenhauer and his inspiration, the Buddha, think that, as it happens, the full story needs both pessimism and misanthropy.
AM: In Straw Dogs John Gray, a pessimist and misanthrope in a Schopenhauerian mould, refers to humanity as Homo rapiens – rapacious, greedy, destructive. More recently Rutger Bregman has referred to humanity as Homo puppy (cuddly, lovable, domesticated, etc.). To riff on Iris Murdoch’s idea that “man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble that picture”, won’t narratives like Bregman’s encourage us to foreground our more puppy-like characteristics?
IJK: Bregman wants the idea that human beings are fundamentally Homo puppies to motivate an optimistic vision of our current moral performance and our moral possibilities going into the future. If human beings are by nature disposed to cooperativeness, playfulness, and other puppyish virtues, we can trust in our future moral progress. Bregman emphasizes that there’s work to be done, and he favours broadly socialist policies. Certainly many find his vision of human beings very attractive. But attractiveness and accuracy are quite different things. An odd feature of his book is that Bregman often sounds like a misanthrope: he will talk at length about the violence, the competitiveness, the jealousy, the envy, the violence, the dogmatism of human life before saying, “But don’t worry, because deep down we’re really puppies”. The obvious response to this is that deep down we might be puppies, but in our overt behaviour in our social communities we become wolves. Homo homini lupus, as the old Latin motto has it.
Let’s consider one example from Bregman’s book. He documents interesting data from military historians, indicating that in the majority of battles over the last 200 years, soldiers were in fact extremely reluctant to shoot at their enemies; rather, they would usually fire their guns upwards or not fire them at all. From this, Bregman draws the very optimistic conclusion that our resistance to killing our fellows is so strong as to validate the Homo puppy claim. But what he doesn’t mention is that the history of military technology is directed at helping people to overcome that resistance. Examples include the development of ranged weapons like bows and rifles, the use of dehumanization techniques to present the enemy as violent or corrupt or as insects or vermin, and, more recently, the turn to drone technology for which you don’t even have to be on the same continent as the people you kill. We may be reluctant to kill other human beings, but we’re also very good at overcoming that reluctance and at dehumanizing our fellows.
As we have seen with his talk of our evolution in a puppy-like direction and what we are like deep down, Bregman is keen to ground his analysis in facts about our underlying nature. But I consider these facts to be irrelevant. The focus should be on how human beings live and behave within the actual arrangements of the contemporary world. The optimism of Bregman’s narrative is achieved by playing down facts about the world or by encouraging us to think that change is just around the corner. Oddly for a socialist, Bregman also consistently ignores the structural constraints on human beings, all those temptations and pressures to be violent, divisive and greedy. Structures corrupt – that is a main theme of Rousseau’s account of our moral history. Bregman, despite making Rousseau the hero of his story, tends to ignore this point by focusing on human nature. But the problem, for a misanthrope, is not our nature but the corrupting realities of our world.
AM: It is interesting that Bregman tends to dismiss things like misanthropy and pessimism as clinical symptoms. Likewise, Steven Pinker has referred to certain pessimistic thinkers in clinical terms, like “psychopaths” or “sociopaths”. What is your response to this tendency to psychologize or pathologize the misanthrope or the pessimist?
IJK: That was one of the more disappointing features of Bregman’s book. He describes cynicism, pessimism and misanthropy as “clinical symptoms of a mean-world syndrome”. But pathologizing one’s critics means treating their rational judgements as signs of mental disorder or dysfunction, and that’s dreadful. It’s especially strange for Bregman to dismiss pessimism and cynicism as clinical symptoms of pathology, because elsewhere in the book he is very open about his socialist credentials. Would he tell feminist activists or the Black Lives Matters protestors that their pessimistic cynicism about the realities of a structurally racist patriarchal world was a symptom of some underlying pathology? I accept that some people’s gloomy visions of the world might be partially pathological; some people clearly exult in doom-mongering visions. But to dismiss the variety of critical moral verdicts on humankind as signs of pathology is crude and distorting. It feeds a dogmatic optimism that sustains itself through derogation of its critics, a sort of tone-policing that only allows cheery and upbeat accounts of the human world. The American writer Barbara Ehrenreich calls this “bright-siding” in her splendid book Smile or Die.
Take, for instance, the fact that the experience of becoming a feminist and becoming initiated into the realities of patriarchy is likely to make you pessimistic and cynical. I take it that this outlook should be respected as a disclosure of important facts about this world, rather than dismissed in a pathologizing way. If people are genuinely serious about understanding the world, they should really start by listening to those people who have painful experience of the realities of that world, rather than just dismissing them as pathological, hysterical, or overwrought.
A person can have misanthropic attitudes and moods without being a full-blooded, card-carrying misanthrope.
AM: Some people can exhibit a misanthropic strain in their thinking, but also hold onto a strong belief in new and enriched possibilities for humanity. By contrast, what we might call the “capital M” misanthrope tends to feel that we should not kid ourselves and nothing is really going to change. What do you make of these two misanthropic stances?
IJK: A person can have misanthropic attitudes and moods without being a full-blooded, card-carrying misanthrope. Schopenhauer is right when he says that people become misanthropes through “long, sad” experience of the world. If you have enough of these experiences, it can cultivate a certain mood that can eventually form itself into a doctrine of misanthropy. And I think that many people are really fighting against the tendencies of the misanthropic mood, so they then pull themselves back with more optimistic, bright-siding stories.
To take the pandemic as a case in point, there was a lot of talk of a forthcoming moral renaissance during the first lockdown in the UK. Commentators spoke of a newfound appreciation of the importance of neighbourliness, of compassion, of people pulling together. Personally, I am sceptical about that sort of moral rhetoric. I think that it is rarely the case that even dramatic events bring about this sort of fundamental moral change. I’m sure that many people genuinely enjoyed the sense of neighbourliness during the pandemic. Perhaps they chatted over the fence to their neighbours, pulled together as a street, and so on. But as soon as people feel safe again in their homes and can once again go out in the world, many of those things will simply fall away. If you really want to create positive moral changes that last, perhaps you have to fundamentally change people’s habits and the structures of their life.
After all, we’ve heard these uplifting stories of moral transformation before. You can take any series of catastrophic events in human history and a constant refrain is, “Never again, never again”. It was five years ago that the body of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian refugee, washed up on a Mediterranean beach. The image of a young child dead, face-down in the ocean, was so appalling that even anti-immigrant newspapers said it must never happen again. But you read those same newspapers right now and they are demanding that the Royal Navy be deployed to turn away desperate refugees. A student of mine was once asked to sum up the concept “despair” in three words and her offering was “Things repeat, always”.
AM: It seems to me that the “capital M” misanthrope is largely defined by their approach to action. They may either choose to dismiss or sneer at sentiments of the kind expressed by Bregman, Pinker, and the like. Or they may choose a form of quietism. But, either way, they would be extremely suspicious of any large-scale actions to bring about moral changes in humanity. What do you see as the consequences of misanthropy in terms of acting for change in the world?
IJK: There are different ways to be a misanthrope. I call these ways “misanthropic stances”. The misanthropic stance that everyone tends to think of is what Kant calls “the Enemy of Mankind”. The enemy is dominated by hatred or enmity, and their response is violence. They try to tear down the human world, to “unmake civilization”, as some radical eco-misanthropes put it. But Kant also describes a second stance, “the fugitive from mankind”, characterized by fear. They fear the violence human beings do, and they fear their becoming corrupted by the failings of humanity. As a result, their response is not violence, but flight – they pull away from the human world, retreating into monasteries or other isolated locations.
A misanthrope has other options than Enemy and Fugitive, however. Someone like Confucius is what I would call an “activist” misanthrope. He thinks that humankind as it has come to be is morally appalling, but also sees grounds for hope – there are things that can be done. For Confucius, this involves moral teaching, trying to influence rulers and initiate social reforms. Another stance is the “quietist”, who thinks human beings are collectively morally appalling, but because there is really very little that can be done to change this a quietist will try to accommodate to the imperfections of the human world by living inconspicuously and keeping their head down. A quietist is still morally engaged – they perform small local acts of care and compassion, for instance – but resist pursuit of ambitious moral projects.
AM: What kind of sceptical response might the quietist have to, say, the activist misanthrope? Why would they be sceptical about the activist’s faith in action, especially given that there is a long history of successful actions that have improved the human lot (morally and otherwise)?
IJK: There is a certain strain of argument that owes a lot to conservative political philosophy. It says that because the societies that we live in are organically developed over many, many generations and were not the products of systemic planning, there is always an inherent risk that moral projects might backfire. Big moral projects that aim at rapid and radical changes are dangerous – we cannot always anticipate their consequences, we don’t have the time to go slowly and consider them in detail, and so on. You might sincerely think that making radical changes will do things for the best, but how do you know that? No one has an overall view of the hugely complex structures and operations of our social world, so there is a precautionary principle: keep the changes small, modest and local. A related worry shared by many quietists is that radical ambitious projects will supercharge our vices – our vainglory, hubris, reckless and self-righteousness. We often see this in conservative philosophers like Edmund Burke, but it’s also there in the suttas of the Buddha. Monks should “keep to their own preserves”, he says, and stay away from social and political participation. Trying to change the world encourages attachments and worldly ambitions – precisely the things a Buddhist should be trying to dissolve – and, anyway, being a social activist means being assertive and demanding, which is in obvious tension with the sorts of virtues a Buddhist should be cultivating, like quietude, equanimity and tranquillity.
AM: We often ask ourselves what future generations will judge us for. The assumption behind this thought is that future generations will be morally better, more enlightened people than us. What do you make of that kind of stance towards the future?
IJK: Belief in the improvability of humankind can take different forms. Is it something we’re able to achieve through our collective rationality, or moral and spiritual practices, or would it require the support of Gods or the machinations of Fate? Does improvement mean overcoming our original sin, or purging ourselves of what Buddhists call the “unwholesome roots” (greed, hatred, delusion), or does it involve radical social reform, or some combination of these things? I suppose there’s a pragmatic argument: if we believe that we can be improved, we’re more likely to try and improve ourselves. And there’s also a good worry about pessimistic self-fulfilling prophecies: if we think we can’t get better, we’re more inclined to acquiescence in our failings.
However, I think there are big dangers in lazy confidence that moral progress is inevitable, that we just have to sit back and wait for it to happen. As a general rule, moral progress takes a vast amount of effort to realize in practice, and just as much effort to keep it in place. There seems to be some perverse law of social mechanics that moral progress takes a vast amount of energy to achieve, but very little energy to undo. Consider the fact that 80 years ago, it would have been inconceivable to the vast majority of people that National Socialism would ever return, whereas now, of course, we have open National Socialists and resurgent neo-Nazis in Europe and across the United States. It takes an enormous amount of constant moral work just to keep us where we are, and one worry I have about optimists like Bregman is that they make human progress seem much too easy. As the ancient Chinese philosopher, Xunzi, put it, goodness is “artificial” in the sense that it’s not a natural or inevitable feature of the world. Goodness requires hard work and a disciplined transformation of our dispositions and natural inclinations.
I think that early Buddhism is highly misanthropic, and they give very good reasons for being fairly circumspective about this.
AM: Even if misanthropy is true, should we broadcast the bad news about humanity? This question is partly inspired by Mary Midgley’s critique of Richard Dawkins’ “selfish gene” idea. She felt that this narrative of selfishness built in at a genetic level was just an extremely bad one to broadcast to humans, as it risks naturalizing, and thus deepening, our vices. In the case of spreading misanthropy as a narrative, it risks deepening, say, our despair, our indifference, our bitterness. What do you make of this kind of worry?
IJK: I think it would be crucial to ask two related questions. First, is a misanthropic verdict accurate? And, second, if it is accurate, is it useful to broadcast it to others? On the second question, misanthropes differ. Montaigne, for instance, clearly regards a misanthropic verdict as true, but he thinks it is unwise to broadcast it, except to certain select people. Other misanthropes take the line that if it’s true you should broadcast it regardless of the consequences (maybe Schopenhauer falls into that category). But I think the majority of the misanthropes that I’ve studied are of the much more circumspect Montaignian view that even if it is true, you need to be extremely careful about whether you broadcast it. This is in part because of the reasons you give. It could licence our viciousness. It could be corrupting. It could give people a get-out-of-jail-free card to indulge the worst of their vices. It could cast us into unbearable and destructive despair.
I think that early Buddhism is highly misanthropic, and they give very good reasons for being fairly circumspective about this. These tend to be pragmatic reasons: for one thing, if people recognize that Buddhism is fundamentally a misanthropic appraisal of human beings, it is going to be very hard to recruit people to the Buddha’s vision of life. This being the case, it may be wiser to open with happier things, like meditation, mindfulness and the cultivation of virtues. Once those practitioners are on board and psychologically and morally ready, they can then be presented with the truths of misanthropy. For the Buddha, misanthropy is not simply a paper doctrine; rather, it affects how we experience and engage with the world. It transforms how we live and think and feel. It is interesting that historical misanthropes, like the Buddha, have tended to be members of very small and intimate communities. They did not try to practise their misanthropy alone. I think one reason is that without friendship and collegiality and support people would find it difficult to bear emotionally the costs of misanthropy and would sink into a state of nihilism.
Further resources:
Andrew Gibson, Misanthropy: The Critique of Humanity. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Ian James Kidd, “Varieties of philosophical misanthropy”. Journal of Philosophical Research 46 (2021): 27–44.
Mara van der Lugt, “Pessimism”. The Philosopher 107:4 (2019).
Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.
Ian James Kidd is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. He is interested in intellectual virtue and vice, the nature of a religious life, illness and mortality, misanthropy, and South and East Asian philosophies. Website: https://ianjameskidd.weebly.com
Anthony Morgan is a managing editor at The Philosopher.
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