Misanthropy

• 1. Introduction

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  Jonathan Swift once declared that he hated and detested "that animal called man." Misanthropy is the name for the attitude behind that line. It is a hatred, dislike, or distrust aimed at the human species, at human behavior, or at human nature itself. Someone who holds such views is called a misanthrope or a misanthropist.

  The label sounds simple, but it covers an odd assortment of people. Some of them condemn everyone, themselves included. Others quietly exempt themselves, or a favored few, from the verdict. So what does it actually take to count as a misanthrope? What exactly do these people say is wrong with humankind? And what turns a person against their own species in the first place? Behind all of that sits a harder question. Is the attitude a defensible judgment, or a mistake that harms the person who holds it?

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• 2. What the Word Means

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  The word dates to the 17th century and was built from two Greek roots. Mīsos means hatred, and anthropos means man or human. Traditionally it meant hatred or dislike of humankind. Contemporary philosophers use it more broadly, for a negative judgment of humanity as a whole that rests on its vices and flaws. Hatred is only one way that judgment can show itself. Because it rests on an assessment, it is more than a blind rejection.

  Philanthropy is the usual opposite. It means love of humankind, expressed through good will, charitable aid, and donations. The two words do not strictly cancel each other out. The same person can be a misanthrope in one sense and a philanthrope in another.

  Misanthropy also differs from bigotry in its reach. Misogynists, misandrists, and racists aim their contempt at women, men, or particular races. The misanthrope aims at everyone. Even so, the misanthrope usually grants that vices are spread unevenly, and that some people are far worse than others.

  What sets the misanthrope apart is the verdict on ordinary people. The condemnation is not reserved for exceptional villains. Some misanthropes see the flaws as part of human nature. Others blame what humanity has become, including the side effects of modern civilization. Both groups call the flaws entrenched. Nothing short of a complete transformation of the dominant way of life would fix them, if anything could.

  Literature theorist Andrew Gibson adds that misanthropy need not mean disliking every living person. It depends on the person's horizon. A villager who loathes every other villager without exception is a misanthrope if the village is the whole of that person's world.

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• 3. Kinds and Ways of Living

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  Immanuel Kant offered one of the earliest ways of sorting misanthropes. Positive misanthropes are active enemies of humanity. They wish others harm and try to inflict it. Negative misanthropes practice a peaceful fear of people, which leads them to withdraw. They may even wish others well, but they prefer to stay out of social life. Kant tied this second type to moral disappointment after bad experiences with other people.

  A second split asks whether the misanthrope is part of the condemned crowd. Self-inclusive misanthropes judge themselves along with everyone else. Self-aggrandizing misanthropes quietly exempt themselves and feel superior to the rest. Joseph Harris, a literature theorist, thinks the second type is more common. He argues that it undercuts itself by being a form of hypocrisy.

  Irving Babbitt drew a related line. Misanthropes of the naked intellect write humanity off entirely. Tender misanthropes spare a few idealized people. Babbitt placed Rousseau in the tender camp because of his fondness for natural, uncivilized man. He set Swift against him as a thorough dismisser of the whole species.

  Philosopher Toby Svoboda sorts the attitude itself into four kinds: dislike, hate, contempt, and judgment. Dislike is simple distaste. Hate is dislike intensified, with a wish for others to suffer and sometimes an attempt to make it happen. Contempt is theoretical rather than emotional and treats others as worthless while excusing the self. Judgment is also theoretical, but it holds that humanity is bad without placing the judge above anyone. Svoboda considers only judgment a serious philosophical position. He finds contempt biased, and he finds dislike and hate hard to assess because feelings rarely respond to evidence.

  Misanthropy usually asks for a practical response, and writers describe several lives it can lead to. They stress that these archetypes are crude sketches of common attitudes, not portraits of individuals. The destructive misanthrope is driven by hatred and wants to tear humanity down, with violence if need be. The fugitive misanthrope is driven by fear and retreats to a secluded place to avoid the corrupting touch of civilization.

  Newer writing describes less familiar types. The activist misanthrope keeps a hope that humanity can transform itself and works toward it. A weaker version settles for gradual improvements that avoid the worst outcomes. The quietist is pessimistic about what any one person can achieve and settles for quiet acceptance and small-scale avoidance. Another response is humor, which mocks the absurdity of a species that hurts itself and risks self-destruction over something as trivial as a marginal gain in profit. In that role, laughter is both a mirror held up to the terrible truth and a painkiller for it.

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• 4. The Charge Sheet

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  Misanthropes have compiled long lists of what is wrong with people: cruelty, greed, selfishness, wastefulness, dogmatism, self-deception, and insensitivity to beauty. Contemporary writers sort these into moral, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual flaws. Moral flaws are usually treated as the gravest.

  Moral flaws are habits that break moral norms or distort a person's sense of the good. The list includes indifference to suffering, moral laziness, cowardice, injustice, and ingratitude. The resulting harm falls into three groups. Some is done directly to humans, some directly to other animals, and some indirectly to both through damage to the environment. The usual examples are the Holocaust, factory farming of livestock, and pollution that drives climate change. The charge is not only that people cause such harm. It is that they are responsible for it, because they can foresee the consequences and could act differently. Too often they trade the long-term well-being of others for a short-term personal gain.

  Intellectual flaws are the ones that produce false beliefs, block knowledge, or break the rules of good reasoning. Arrogance, wishful thinking, dogmatism, stupidity, and gullibility all belong here. So do cognitive biases such as confirmation bias, self-serving bias, hindsight bias, and anchoring bias. These flaws can team up with the others, because they hide a vice from the person who has it. That person never gets the chance to fix it. Self-deceit, wilful ignorance, and denial work the same way. Some traditions go further and treat ignorance as the root of all evil.

  Aesthetic flaws get less weight, but they still count. They include the ugly facts of bodily life, such as defecation and aging. They also cover the ugliness people create, like pollution and litter, and the failure to respond to beauty.

  Proponents then build their case in different ways. Some point to the extreme cases, such as mass killings ordered by dictators. Others stress that ordinary people share the guilt by supporting the leaders who commit such crimes. A related argument holds that the same flaws live in everyone, even if only a few act them out fully. Another approach skips the grand atrocities and looks at daily life, with its lying, cheating, and broken promises. Still other arguments rest on damage already done, such as ecological catastrophes that caused mass extinctions.

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• 5. Roads to Disillusion

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  In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates describes how a person can become a misanthrope. Someone trusts and admires a person without knowing them well, then discovers serious flaws. The disappointment spreads from that one person to everyone, and trust turns into general distrust and contempt. Socrates says this is likelier if the person was a close friend and if it happens more than once. The more idealistic and optimistic someone starts out, the harder the reversal tends to be. The result can come with a feeling of moral superiority.

  Andrew Gibson applies the same logic to philosophers. He links Thomas Hobbes to a politically unstable world with frequent wars. He links Arthur Schopenhauer to being forced to flee home at an early age and never finding a true home afterward. A different personal factor is a negative attitude toward the human body, especially a general revulsion from sexuality.

  Wider social conditions matter too. Political scientist Eric M. Uslaner argues that economic inequality, meaning an unfair spread of wealth, makes misanthropy more likely because it erodes trust in government and in other people. He suggests that policies building trust and sharing wealth more evenly could weaken this source. Authoritarian regimes that repress their people with every available means are another suspect. One argument holds that the severe repression of the Ancien Régime in the late 17th century pushed people toward misanthropy by denying them freedom. Democracy may have the opposite effect, since it grants more personal freedom and takes a more hopeful view of human nature.

  Empirical researchers usually measure misanthropy by asking about trust, in particular whether people expect others to be fair and helpful. In a study of American society, Tom W. Smith found misanthropy higher among people of low socioeconomic status, among racial and ethnic minorities, and among those who had recently suffered something bad. It was also higher among fundamentalists and among people who do not attend church. Gender, divorce, and never having married seemed to make no real difference. Morris Rosenberg found a link to political attitudes, notably doubt about free speech and support for authoritarian policies that suppress political and religious liberties.

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• 6. Objections Raised

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  Critics who take the case seriously often begin with the worst examples. They grant that some people commit extreme brutality, such as the dictators and forces behind mass killings, or perpetrators who are mentally ill. But a list of atrocities, they say, cannot justify condemning humanity at large.

  A second objection grants that people are flawed and then points out that this is one side of the ledger. People also have virtues of equal weight, and an honest evaluation must count both. Histories that fix on great wars, cruelties, and tragedies leave out the achievements of the sciences, the arts, and the humanities.

  A third objection redirects the anger. Capitalism, communism, patriarchy, racism, religious fundamentalism, and imperialism are all candidates for the blame. A person who holds one of these social forces responsible would oppose that force, not humanity.

  Some critics ignore whether the attitude is accurate and look at what it costs. Hatred can turn into violence against institutions and against other people. Even without violence, misanthropy can strip away most pleasures and leave a person miserable and friendless.

  The sharpest objection says the position contradicts itself. Misanthropes denounce the social world yet stay entangled in it and cannot fully walk away. This charge lands hardest on those who exempt themselves and look down on others from an inflated ego. A related claim calls misanthropy unnatural, an aberration or even a pathology. Defenders reply that these charges hit only some forms of misanthropy and not the attitude in general.

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• 7. Philosophers and Believers

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  Heraclitus is one of the earliest figures tied to misanthropy. He is often pictured as a solitary man with little taste for company. His complaint was that people stay ignorant of the true nature of reality even after a thorough explanation.

  The Cynic school kept returning to the theme. Dio Chrysostom, a philosopher of the first century, argued that people multiply the very evils they flee. They crowd into cities for protection from outsiders, and the cities then breed more violence through crime. Diogenes is the best-known Cynic misanthrope. He judged other people hypocritical and superficial, and he provoked them by deliberately breaking conventions and behaving rudely.

  Thomas Hobbes held that humans are egoistic and violent, pursuing their goals at others' expense. In the natural state this produces a war in which, in his words, "every man to every man... is an enemy." His remedy was a strong state with strictly enforced laws.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau admired the harmony of nature and contrasted it with the disorder of society and its institutions. His famous line is "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." He lived by that outlook, staying solitary and preferring the company of plants to people.

  Arthur Schopenhauer is often called a prime example. He saw the world, humans included, as the expression of one blind will that struggles futilely. In human life it "presents itself as a continual deception," driven by pointless desires that breed injustice and suffering. Each satisfied desire only gives birth to another. He dismissed romantic love, individuality, and liberty as less precious than people think. His preferred response was asceticism, which denies the will, and he said that only rare people manage it while "the dull majority of men" does not.

  Friedrich Nietzsche, strongly influenced by Schopenhauer, called man a decadent "sick animal" that has made no progress over other animals. He even disliked apes, because they resemble humans in traits such as cruelty. He accused humans of building moral systems that favor the weak and suppress greatness. For him the human being is something to be overcome, and he used the term Übermensch for the ideal individual who has moved beyond conventional moral and social norms.

  Religion has its own versions. In Christianity the seven deadly sins describe everyday failings, among them pride, lust, greed, and envy. The doctrine of original sin goes further and says everyone inherits a tainted nature from Adam and Eve's rebellion against God. Some theologians have called John Calvin's doctrine of total depravity misanthropic. Buddhist teaching lists lust, hatred, delusion, sorrow, and despair as common failings, rooted in craving, called taṇhā, which causes suffering, called dukkha. They can be overcome through enlightenment, but the path is hard, so most people remain stuck.

  Religious traditions also push the other way. Christianity's agape is a selfless, unconditional love that includes compassion and a readiness to help. Buddhists treat loving kindness, called metta, as central, and it extends goodwill to all sentient beings.

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• 8. Fiction and Extinction

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  Shakespeare's Timon of Athens shows how a generous man can turn. Timon is a wealthy gentleman whose friends prove ungrateful. His philanthropy collapses into an unrestrained hatred of humanity, and he leaves society to live in a forest.

  Molière's play The Misanthrope centers on Alceste, who thinks little of the people around him. He seizes on their superficiality, insincerity, and hypocrisy and says so openly. He rejects social conventions so completely that he will not even make polite small talk, and he offends people constantly.

  In Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the hero visits an island of tiny people and a land ruled by intelligent horses. Comparing humans with other species, he sees more and more of their flaws. He ends up with a revulsion toward his own kind. Charles Dickens gave readers Ebenezer Scrooge, the cold-hearted, solitary miser of A Christmas Carol who detests Christmas. Gustave Flaubert and Philip Larkin are two more writers associated with the theme. In popular culture, DC's Joker, an enemy of Batman, believes people are selfish, cruel, irrational, and hypocritical. He is usually shown as a sociopath with a twisted sense of humor who uses violence to expose and bring down organized society.

  Misanthropy has close neighbors in philosophy. Philosophical pessimism, exemplified by Schopenhauer and Philipp Mainländer, says that life is not worth living or the world is a bad place. The two views can come apart. A non-misanthropic pessimist may see humans as victims of a terrible world rather than its cause. Eco-misanthropists reverse the picture, holding that nature is valuable and humanity is the destructive force.

  Antinatalism, the view that people should abstain from procreation, has a misanthropic version. It points to wars, genocides, factory farming, and environmental damage as reasons not to create more humans. Philanthropic versions focus on the suffering of the person who would be born. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and the Church of Euthanasia are well-known movements in favor of antinatalism and human extinction. Among the possible threats to humanity are nuclear wars, impact events, self-replicating nanorobots, and super-pathogens. Some misanthropes read such scenarios as grounds for hope. Bertrand Russell wrote that human life and its misdeeds are "a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return."

  The link between misanthropy and ecology has caused real controversy. Deep ecology stresses the inherent value of nature and calls for a radical change in how humans treat it. Critics call it misanthropic for privileging other species over people. The deep ecology movement Earth First! drew severe criticism after its newsletter praised the AIDS epidemic in Africa as a solution to overpopulation.

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