shadow i: the misanthrope (humanity)

I want to begin by acknowledging the biases of my authorship. I am a cisgender man with Eastern European, Jewish, and British heritage; I grew up in the middle class. I have had it easy, and that has undoubtedly skewed my belief in humanity towards goodness and decency.

Misanthropy, the hatred or distrust of humans and human nature, is a shallow and deconstructive worldview. Yet it is often leveled not at the human species but at what "man" has come to represent. Sylvia Wynter argues that "Man" has historically meant a specific Western bourgeois genre of the human, "overrepresenting" itself as the human as such. Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism speaks of a "pseudo-humanism..." that the rights of man have always been "narrow and fragmentary" in their application. He argues that colonization requires the "thing-ification" of the colonized, thereby removing them from the human community. Outrage only manifests after the brutal treatment of colonized peoples abroad is turned against whites at home. Franz Fanon closed in The Wretched of the Earth by calling not for humanism's abolition but for "a new humanism," to "set afoot a new man." Commensurate with Césaire, true humanism cannot coexist with system domination, forced labor, and cultural erasure.

The human category's fragility goes beyond race. Posthumanists like Donna Haraway argue that the borders between human/animal/machine are political fictions. The boundaries are policed to quash plurality and enforce homogeneity. Yet a belief in the human race spills over into the other wondrous life on Earth. In the grand scheme, "man" is an extremely new invention. As Foucault concludes The Order of Things, man is erasable "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." Misanthropy is an abandonment of the hard work of reshaping the human community. Recognizing its ephemerality and plasticity is empowering.