Menand zooms in and out between individual egomaniacs and the milieus that facilitated their ascent and profited from their publicity. The results—group biographies, in miniature, of the existentialists, the Beats, the action painters, the Black Mountain School, the British Invasion, the pop artists, and many coteries more—are enchanting singly but demoralizing as they pile up. All of these enterprises look like hives of social insects, not selfless quests for truth or beauty. Menand is a world-class entomologist: He can name every indistinguishable drone, knows who had an oversize mandible, who lost a leg, who carried the best crumbs. The caution is that you must not seek lasting value in their collective works. From this vantage, the monuments really are just anthills.
Mark Greif, “The Opportunists”
(This is where the pragmatist approach, with its superficial human warmth, always leads—to humanity as anthill. But the pragmatist’s nihilism lacks even the chilled sublimity of a Schopenhauer, a Lovecraft, a Burroughs, a Ballard, or a Ligotti, because the pragmatist mixes his condescension with an oleaginous Chekhovian pity—aren’t we all just trying our best?—that is the obverse of his all-commanding vantage. Everyone is an ant but him, since he can anatomize the anthill rather than merely hauling crumbs on his laden thorax or rutting terminally with the queen. As I observed of Justin E. H. Smith’s anti-humanism, and as Walter Kirn more wittily showed a fucking-love-the-sciencer, there is always a performative contradiction when the theorist revokes true intellectual autonomy from the human race, as if this very gesture were not barred by the insistence that all our actions are exhausted by functional or autonomic explanation. From where does the theorist derive his power of exegesis if not from the very disinterest he claims the human pismire can’t attain? And where, anyway, does this tiresome misanthropy come from—why are we so embarrassed to be, as Shelley said, “the eye with which the universe beholds itself”? I have some idea of where it comes from, but it is, as they say on social media, a conversation we’re not ready for yet. I will give one hint in the form of a question: why has the scientific consensus for the better part of a century been that a total environmental collapse is both imminent and inevitable, to be staved off if at all only by a curtailment or culling of the human herd, even as the scientific consensus about the mechanism of this collapse—overpopulation, global warming, global cooling, etc.—has changed several times over? Could it be that some in power are motivated by something other than a magnanimous concern for the flora and fauna, that Social Darwinism has merely been rebranded as a moral crusade to appeal to well-intentioned children? Finally, could it be, too, that a cultural historiography whose method denies imaginative independence to artists and thinkers is the humanities’ corollary to a scientistic aspiration toward population management? Too paranoid, I’m sure; I disavow, I’m sure.)
