Taking stock

This is a short book, but it has covered a lot of ground. It will be helpful briefly to go over some of this ground in order to provide a setting for the reflections in this final chapter.

In the Prologue, a disturbing experience of environmental devastation – though it could as well have been one of “man's inhumanity to man” – prompted a dark perception of the human condition. This perception helped to endorse the judgements on the human condition, discussed in Chapter 1, that are made by pessimists and misanthropists. The state of humankind as it has developed is, the pessimist recognizes, saturated by suffering, anxiety, unsatisfied desires or satiated boredom, fear of death, and much else that makes human life “unsatisfactory”. Nor is it realistic to expect any radical change in this condition. The negative assessment is compounded by a misanthropic judgement on the human condition as marked by deep, general and entrenched failings and vices. Indeed, that's one reason why no radical melioration of our condition can be envisaged. Pessimism and misanthropy, as we saw, typically reinforce one another.

Pessimism and misanthropy are judgements on the human condition, not mere feelings, but if they are judgements that are genuinely embraced or endorsed, they must be accompanied by a negative mood. I named this “disquiet” – a term that can cover more particular moods like despair, disgust and anxiety. The question addressed in the chapters following was how a person should live in the light of the pessimistic, misanthropic verdict. How should a person accommodate disquiet? This, it was emphasized, is indeed a personal question. The issue is not how “We” – human beings at large, “society” – should respond to pessimism and misanthropy. No such response – a global moral revolution, say – will occur, and that it won't is part of the context in which an individual person should reflect on how to live.