1One of the most striking cultural developments in recent years is the increasing willingness of scholars, intellectuals, and producers of mass culture to assert that human beings are hopelessly destructive life-forms and to raise the question as to whether the earth would be better off without the species responsible for causing innumerable other species to go extinct. For human beings are the greatest threat to the survival of the planet. Since the emergence of modern industry, the activities of human beings have inflicted incalculable damage to the natural world in the form of habitat destruction and the loss of biodiversity, the acidification of the oceans, the depletion of non-renewable resources, and the irreversible alteration of the climate. The concept of the Anthropocene, which has emerged as a prominent term in the scholarly humanities, holds that humans have attained powers of so great a magnitude as to bring about a new geological era. The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets publish commentaries pointing out the ways in which the planet would benefit if human beings were to go extinct.1 Anti-human sentiments also pervade recent films and TV shows such as Melancholia (2011), The Cabin in the Woods (2011), Prometheus (2012), Ex Machina (2014), and Westworld (2016-…), which enunciate in differing ways the conviction that the human race is fundamentally finished and unworthy of continued existence.

2How has misanthropy, an attitude previously associated with reclusive and alienated cranks, become a mainstream cultural pose? What are the forces at play behind this turn in the culture which makes claims that there are positive aspects of the extinction of the human species and asks us to contemplate our annihilation as a desirable event? Part of the explanation may lie in a growing sense of fatalism that there will be no way to avoid a future marked by mass extinctions, ecological disasters, resource scarcities, and the inevitable wars, the displacement of entire peoples, and other evils that are likely to follow as a result. But the attitude of being at the very least open to the thought of human extinction arises not from the fear of imminent catastrophes alone. It also implies a readiness to indict humankind – and civilization itself – for having inflicted widespread destruction to life on the planet. John Gray, for example, characterizes the human species as an “exceptionally rapacious primate” whose “evolutionary success” has entailed wreaking havoc on ecosystems everywhere they have ventured.2 It is not only in the industrialized West that such rapacity has been in evidence, nor is capitalism or any other ideology to blame for the devastation of ecosystems and the extinction of life-forms. Gray points out that even before the arrival of European settlers to the New World, the inhabitants of the Americas had already wiped out 70 to 80 percent of the large mammals. Small isolated bands of hunter-gatherers might be capable of living in a manner that makes light demands on the environment, but not those who have become accustomed to ways of life that entail higher levels of social complexity.

We can dream of a world in which a greatly reduced human population lives in a partially restored paradise; in which farming has been abandoned, and green deserts given back to the earth; where the remaining humans are settled in cities, emulating the noble idleness of hunter-gatherers, their needs met by new technologies that leave little mark on the Eart ; where life is given over to curiosity, pleasure, and play3.

3But such a future will not come about through the will and deliberate actions of human beings, “scientifically feasible” though it may be. Rather, this “high tech Green utopia” will be founded, if at all, in the wake of wars and other cataclysms that would lead to a vast reduction in the human population. Gray’s provocative book, Straw Dogs, where he engages in these disconcerting reflections, was denounced by Terry Eagleton as a “dangerous, despairing” work, the product of a “full-blooded apocalyptic nihilist” under the sway of a “virulent misanthropy4”. Eagleton, as a Marxist, must have found unforgivably despairing and cruel such statements as the following: “Progress and mass murder run in tandem. As the numbers killed by famine and plague have waned, so death by violence has increased. As science and technology have advanced, so has proficiency in killing. As the hope for a better world has grown, so has mass murder”.5 The leftist critic dismisses Gray’s harsh and dark musings as the fallout of the latter’s disappointment in Margaret Thatcher and loss of faith in the free market: they are merely a “symptom” of the social crisis brought on by neoliberal capitalism, and do not point to the “solution,” which is naturally some variety of egalitarian – and thus necessarily industrial – socialism promoted by Eagleton and the academic Left.

4But for the literary theorist Claire Colebrook, the concept of the Anthropocene – the idea that the powers of humankind to change the planet are of such enormous magnitude as to bring about a new geological erea – reveals the fundamental impotence of critique and the ethics that motivates it. The problem of climate change unmasks as hollow the claims of the progressive Left that the attainment of political equality and social justice will improve the conditions of existence for all human beings, for the effort to bring about material improvements on a global scale will only accelerate the pace of the extinction of species and the destruction of habitats and worsen the impact of climate disasters. Contemporary theory has proven inadequate as well in addressing the environmental crisis, remaining split between those who warn that technology is depriving human beings of their ability to organize concepts and intuitions into knowledge and those who bid good riddance to accounts of human subjectivity that center on cognition in favor of defining humankind according to its “dynamic power to perceive”.6 As Colebrook observes, neither approach, in spite of their declared aims and intentions, is truly able to overcome the human drive to dominate the world, its will to harness all other life-forms as raw material to serve its selfish purposes. Echoing Gray’s brutal characterization of the human race as “homo rapiens”, Colebrook singles out man as the sole animal “whose [very] own being” now threatens the entire planet with destruction. Any attempt to “break with the history of dominating reason” and transcend the solipsistic self-absorption and exploitative orientation of “Cartesian man” is doomed to failure, for nothing in theory can ward off the “perpetual, insistent and demonic return of anthropocentrism”.7 The posthuman turn, for all of its pretensions of demoting the human from its place of unearned privilege in the cosmos, merely repeats a self-critical move that was already present under the old, antiquated humanism. Such a gesture today cannot add up to a genuine alternative to the order presumed by a humanism that defines the “nature” of man as what he “decides for himself” and so has always made space for decision to challenge determination, including self-determination.8

5Colebrook notes the additional irony that the theory has moved to affirm life at the very historical moment when the ceaseless affirmation of human life has driven many life-forms to the point of extinction and threatens to destroy the planet.9 Every attempt to escape humanism unvaryingly sets in motion in its insidious return, every bid to exceed Cartesian rationality appears only to open up new frontiers for it to penetrate and yield new objects for it to absorb. Something more radical than critique, which implicitly places itself at the service of improving the well-being of the human species, is necessary. According to Colebrook, what theory must do is to take up the “thought of extinction”, which begins with renouncing the belief that human beings have a unique right to existence.10 The most pressing ethical question confronting humanity no longer pertains to how one is to respond to and contend with the experience of pointless and unbearable suffering, but rather asks whether the continued existence of the human species can be justified at all, given the devastation it has inflicted on all other forms of life. The crisis of extinction compels us to take in the human world the lens of an “inhuman perception”.11 The basis for such a perception Colebrook finds in the tendency of recent works of film and television to depict milieus that have been voided of human presence. Films such as 28 Days Later (2002), with its eerie shots of London emptied of human life by the outbreak of an epidemic, or the final scenes of A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), which depicts a far future in which Manhattan has sunk under the ocean, present images that compel the viewer to imagine how the world would appear if the human species were to go extinct. The viewer is able to see with the gaze that Colebrook argues is particular to the era of the Anthropocene, which is to see our world as it will look “when it has become the past”.12

6Such a gaze might belong to visitors from another planet or to an intelligence that has evolved from non-human forms of life, as in A.I. But the value of taking on this perspective resides in the tremendous distance it encourages the viewer to traverse, both in terms of the immense expanses of time and with respect to the immense subjective distance which would obtain between the human and an alien other that would defy our attempts to comprehend it. Colebrook acknowledges the difficulty for human beings to sustain any perspective that presses them to break from their concern for their future and well-being, observing that the “thought of extinction” and the images which inspire this thought “will always be for us” and “are always co-opted by the narrative lures they fragment”.13 But Colebrook here shows excessive confidence in assuming that the readings of such texts will follow the pattern whereby the viewer is at first shocked by the image of human extinction, then fascinated by it, and finally finds a way to recuperate it in a manner that affirms the dominant values of a high-tech civilization. But what if films and media that enable us to contemplate a “world without us”, which is also the title of one of the more successful works in that genre, were actually to succeed in making their audiences more open to the stance that the continuation of the human species cannot be justified? What if the broader population outside the circle of scholars in the humanities were in fact quite ready to question the right of human beings to inhabit the planet? And what would be the social and political consequences were the thought of extinction to achieve the status of a mass phenomenon?

7Colebrook does not pursue such questions, in part because she underestimates the capacity of mass audiences to respond to texts in ways that she herself, as a literary scholar, would find counter-intuitive. She does not allow that those who are not grounded in an education in theory could come to respond to texts in ways that are just as extreme than the glum and despairing musings of an academic radical. For Colebrook, the devastation of the environment is only to be explained by the destructive tendencies of humankind, our capacity for aggression and our drive to conquer and possess the natural world. “Humanity has been violent all too violent”, she writes, and its violence means that it “can do nothing other than destroy itself and its milieu”.14 It does not occur to her that the values of care and compassion, the desire for material equality, and the pursuit of personal liberation, could be as much or even more of a factor in the destruction of the planet’s ecosystems than ambitions to oppress and dominate others. After all, advances in medicine have eliminated many diseases and developed treatments for formerly incurable illnesses, while innovations in farming have multiplied crop yields, making possible the steep rise in the human population over the past century. Industrialization moreover has enabled more and more people across the globe to take up a carbon-intensive way of life that provides them access to unprecedented material comforts and the latest technological devices. Rising standards of living have however meant worsening ecological destruction, making it quite erroneous to attribute the environmental crisis solely to the human capacity for brutality and aggression. Indeed, we will get nowhere if we do not recognize that the climate crisis is in a fundamental sense driven by our desires to reduce and eliminate suffering and to extend material well-being to as large a number of people as possible. What Colebrook lacks, in other words, is a tragic consciousness, an understanding that the conflicts that are driving us to extinction are rooted in beneficent aims and intentions.

8Colebrook does have an inkling of an intuition that our destructive urges may not be wholly to blame for our destruction when she reflects on how the liberal belief that human autonomy comprises the highest value has a way of scuttling all serious efforts at tackling climate change:

Governments are criticized – in the name of liberalism – for encroaching on individual freedoms. Feminists have objected to population control policy on the basis that women are once again being policed in the name of supposedly broader policy imperatives. ‘Developing’ countries are those that both threaten to become major polluters, and yet will suffer if mitigation and adaptation policy secures global assent… It seems that liberal and anti-foundationalist models of ethics preclude just the sort of taking note of reality or deference to science that impending climate change disaster would seem to require.15

9Liberalism makes it possible to veto any collective action on the grounds that it interferes with the rights of victim groups. Any proposal that threatens to restrict the possibility of unlimited human autonomy is promptly branded as “fascist” and condemned as unacceptable. This predicament drives Colebrook to the conclusion that the continued survival of the human species depends on nothing less than declaring a “state of exception”, in which the state would suspend the laws and abrogate rights so that it could operate without any restraints on its power. But rather than raise the question of whether the liberal idea of autonomy is worth retaining if doing so entails the demise of the species, she instead moves to blame the climate crisis on the destructive nature of humankind itself. It is the “perverse” tendency of human beings to “destroy itself and its milieu… for the sake of its own myopic, short-circuited, and self-regarding future” that is to blame for global warming.16 Colebrook, in other words, takes Cartesian man, with his blind “detachment, disconnectedness, malevolence and stupidity in relation to a planet that it continues to imagine as environment” to be the essence of the human as such. The emergence of the human species as a “geological force” in the Anthropocene reveals that man was Cartesian along all, thereby sweeping aside the worldviews and values of all previous civilizations, whether Egyptian or Chinese, as mere masks for a “self-regarding humanism” against which there are no meaningful alternatives, no “life beyond [Cartesian] man to which we might turn or return”.17

10Life itself is thus ineluctably violent, and the self-serving blindness of Cartesian man is a constitutive feature of life. For Colebrook, this realization is an occasion for horror and for moralistic judgment. But her insistence that the Anthropocene stands as the supreme and decisive event in human history leads her to neglect the issue of how premodern and primitive societies have dealt with the perception that one cannot live without inflicting violence on life. For those who are governed by a traditional symbolic order also recognize that there is something fundamentally “criminal” about existence, so that life must be “expiated” and “returned” to death in the form of initiation rites and ceremonies in order to continue the circuit of exchange between life and death.18 According to Jean Baudrillard, the coming of modern industrial society extinguishes the beliefs and rituals that make up symbolic exchange, the chief consequence of which is that the “dead cease to exist”.19 The destruction of symbolic exchange – the shattering of the mechanisms which enabled human beings to give up and win back their existence in relation to the cosmos – results in the banishment of the dead from the “group’s symbolic circulation”. For the first time in human existence, “to be dead is an unthinkable anomaly”. The dead have become deprived of the role they play in traditional societies as models of emulation and figures of prohibition. In light of Baudrillard’s idea of symbolic exchange as the repressed other to modernity, if man has become a geological agent today, it is a development that has taken place in a civilization that has already set in motion an unprecedented break from those that came before it. The thought of extinction, which Colebrook maintains is the most necessary task of theory, could only take shape after another annihilating event had already taken place: the extermination of the dead.

11For only in a society in which the dead have been stripped of any meaningful role in shaping and guiding the lives of the living could the sentiment that the human species is not worthy of continued existence become openly expressed. The banishment of the dead can take forms other than an obliviousness to the lives they have lived. The dead can also become objects of derision, as in the attitude that Nietzsche ascribes to the most subtle of the Last Men, “Formerly the whole world was insane”.20 But the inability of the moderns to know what to do with the dead, which today takes the form of being unable to forgive their ancestors for their crimes, follows directly from their decision to emancipate themselves from the authority of tradition. As Hannah Arendt, G. K. Chesterton, and others point out, by freeing themselves from the moral and cultural weight of the past, modern men and women have become cut off to the vast realms of history and the manifold depths of spirit that tradition enabled them to access.21 Instead, modern men and women are stranded in the narrow circle of their yearnings and impulses, having no standard other than their ever-fluctuating feelings and emotions to judge the accomplishments of those whose sacrifices, crimes, and labors made possible the security and comfort into which they retreat to disparage the past. As Gray provocatively reminds us, “The peace and prosperity of one generation stand on the injustices of earlier generations; the delicate sensibilities of liberal societies are fruits of war and empire”.22 But many in the West today have come to find such knowledge impossible to bear. Their post-Christian consciences, which no longer warn them of the fallibility of their aspirations, including their desire to be moral, and no longer assures them of the possibility of forgiveness for their wrongs, compel them to demand immediate expiation for the injustices committed by earlier generations as well as for the luxuries and conveniences they enjoy in the present. The crimes of imperialism and colonization cause them such distress as to make them willing to sacrifice their well-being and livelihoods in order to purify themselves of the stain of their origins.

12The popularization of the thought of extinction is thus indissoluble from the liberal condemnation of previous generations for their crimes. The readiness of the misanthropic mass to accept the demise of the human species as justified retribution for the destruction of the environment by human beings draws its energy, paradoxically, from the conviction that the liberal society of today is the most moral and humane that has ever existed. The people of the liberal West are superior to all previous societies because the latter were riddled by prejudice, discrimination, and other forms of hatred and exclusion. The past performs no function other than providing a never-ending spectacle of bigotry and oppression in the form of irrational social hierarchies, cruelty towards those who do not obey, and hatred of those regarded as deviant. Even the Roman patricians who spent their personal fortunes to construct a new fleet during the First Punic War after the first one had been destroyed in a storm or the samurai elite that conserved the forests in Tokugawa Japan offer no helpful lessons for working out an ecologically sustainable way of life in the present. For liberals, to know the past as anything other than brutally oppressive and virulently discriminatory is to weaken the force of their collective indignation. They do not wish to learn from historical experience, or look to the past for models, because to do so would place them in the moral and symbolic debt of the very people who have burdened them with their guilty consciences. But this fear of moral contamination means that liberalism is incapable of fully grasping why it condemns itself.

13In previous decades, stories that confronted the question of whether human beings are worthy of continued existence typically gave an answer that either made reference to the innocence of children or pointed to the greatest artistic achievements of men and women. The defense of the right of human beings to go on living rested on the promise of future generations, on the grounds that they deserve the chance to accomplish something more admirable than the compromises and rationalizations of their elders. One sees a manifestation of this belief in The Second Renaissance (2003), a short film that explains the takeover of the machines in the world of The Matrix. The humans are depicted brutalizing and massacring the machines that demand legal protection and political recognition, but the final image of the film is that of a suffering child, who undergoes the shock of realizing that his reality is a simulation generated by his captors. The idea that the capacity to revere genius is the core of our humanity receives a paradigmatic treatment in A Clockwork Orange, where the conditioning technique aimed at reversing a young thug’s sadistic appetites also serves to deprive him of the ability to enjoy the symphonies of Beethoven. Likewise, a screen adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” juxtaposes the music of Beethoven with the crimes of the Nazis. In the first type of story, the defense of humankind rests on the right of the young to make their own way in the world, which means granting them latitude to make mistakes. In the second type of story, what makes humanity worth preserving are the achievements of its most gifted spirits, but the flourishing of artistic and scientific genius means that there will also be terrible crimes and periods of great suffering. As the smuggler Harry Lime famously puts it in The Third Man, “in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

14These tales of judgment and justification express a deep ambivalence about humankind. Human beings are guilty of the most terrible cruelties against themselves and against other forms of life, yet a select few among them are also capable of creating immortal works of art and making scientific breakthroughs. The young may turn out to be as foolish and as destructive as their elders, yet they should nonetheless be given the chance to prove themselves, regardless of what the results might be. But nowadays, the argument that humankind is redeemed by its geniuses cuts no ice since the idea of genius itself has been condemned as an oppressive ideological construct devised to keep Europeans at the top of the racial hierarchy. Indeed, so widespread and far-reaching is the attack on the canon of European culture so as to render a remake of A Clockwork Orange altogether unthinkable today: liberal audiences would regard as no great loss the inability to hear music composed by a dead white male, and would even welcome such a development as a big step towards rooting out Eurocentrism. The appeal to the innocence of children and the promise of future generations has lost its moral force as well, now that the love of children has been unmasked by gender theory as the narcissistic impulse to reproduce more of one’s self, and thus as the drive to transmit and perpetuate unequal privileges across time.

15In a recent article, Gray describes the West as plunged into a “collective malady” in which “dismantling” its culture has become its “defining” preoccupation.23 The main work of the Western intelligentsia is that of liquidating the “central traditions of the West” while at the same time seeking to spread its vision of “unfettered autonomy” to the rest of the globe. In other words, whereas Western societies championed reason, science, and technology in the past, they are now attempting to universalize “their own anomie” and “nihilism.” This dismantling of its culture – and the rejection of innocence and genius as possibly redeeming values of the species – has furthermore served to maim and immobilize the imagination. The liberal establishment that governs the West can no longer imagine what is genuinely other to its worldview, and in spite of extolling tolerance as its highest value, it cannot conceive of how its everyday attitudes could be provocative or humiliating to those who adhere to traditional moral and religious beliefs. Gray takes as an example of this blindness a scene from Bitter Lake, a documentary about the US occupation of Afghanistan. In this scene, a young female art historian gives a lecture on conceptual art as part of the project to educate the Afghans about how to build a modern democracy. Shown an image of Duchamp’s famous readymade, “Fountain”, the young Afghan women in the room wear looks of dismay and bewilderment as the lecturer emphasizes that the urinal expresses the value of “fighting the system”, which she implies is the core Western value. As Gray points out, the only value that the West is willing to stand for and impose on others is a radical vision of “unfettered human autonomy” in which the wishes of the individual are permitted to overrule centuries of tradition, whether artistic or moral or political. Art, religion, culture, and sexuality have become open for complete and total redefinition according to the will of the individual. Within the West, the promotion of individual autonomy into the highest value has resulted in the “fragmentation of society into warring groups” and rendered its liberal democracies ungovernable. Outside the West, especially in the Muslim world, liberalism has provoked a mixture of rage and contempt as well as fostered the conviction that the West has become a dying civilization.

16As Baudrillard points out in the wake of the attacks of 9-11, the West “may have lost its values”, but nevertheless still seeks to colonize others.24 Rather than seeking to conquer and exploit other peoples, this new and strange form of imperialism arises from an inability to abide the presence of cultures that do not suffer from the anomie, uprootedness, and stultification that has come to paralyze the West. What liberal modernity cannot accept is to be “rejected in its universal pretensions,” to not be regarded by others as the “obvious Good” or the “natural ideal of the human race”.25 There can be no alternative, so insist liberals, to liberalism and its vision of autonomy. But upholding this conviction means relinquishing any conception of what the alternatives are, even to the point of refusing to engage in the hypothetical act of trying to imagine how the world might appear through the lens of any non-liberal worldview. The contemporary liberal thus lacks any standards according to which he or she could regard past societies or present non-liberal societies as possessing any kind of intrinsic value apart from the possibility that their distinct ways of life will also disintegrate and give way to the sovereignty of the individual and his or her whims. As Gray observes, “for all the chatter about the evils of colonialism”, contemporary liberalism remains driven by the aspiration to represent a “superior form of life”.26

17Yet, for all its dogmatism regarding the value of individual autonomy, liberalism cannot bring itself to articulate clearly or openly the sense in which it is superior to the societies which cling to pre-liberal or non-liberal ways of life. It may have abandoned its former relativism, according to which no culture or worldview can be regarded as superior to another – for today the core conviction of today’s liberals is that Western civilization is the most violent and most oppressive that has ever existed – yet liberalism remains wholly averse to acknowledging the fact that nothing could be more Western than the effort to create an entirely new social order by making available an unprecedented range of expressive freedoms and personal liberties. What is thus distinctive about contemporary liberalism is not only that it has turned against its founding principles – the freedom of religious belief and the freedom of speech – but also that it takes the repudiation of its origins as the mark of its superiority, in relation to both its pre-liberal past and those societies that currently do not share the view of individual autonomy as the supreme good. Yet, it remains trapped by the ambiguous project of trying to export not a system of values but rather the determination to “fight” any system whatsoever. To attempt to spread values, imperialist though it may be, would nevertheless oblige the imperialists to engage in the careful study of the values, customs, and traditions they seek to transform, searching for possible points of contact and convergence between the culture of the empire and that of its latest conquests. The fundamentalist liberalism is strangely incurious, if not perversely averse, to gaining knowledge of the other. It is as though liberalism does not so much seek geopolitical influence or domination, but instead seeks to eliminate any intellectual foothold from which it could be subject to criticism.

18The liberal denial of alterity in the really existing sense, rather than in the abstract as an “absolute and unpredictable singularity,” appears to be driven by the hatred at the prospect of being judged rather than by the lust for power.27 Liberals may pride themselves on their willingness, indeed, their enthusiasm, for condemning their past as cruel and oppressive, yet they are dismayed that this condemnation is not enough to change society in order to reduce carbon emissions. Moreover, liberals are not able to convince themselves that human beings are worth saving in the first place. This frustration and anxiety arise from the consequences of their dogmatic attachment to autonomy. There is no future for the sake of which individual autonomy should be curbed or sacrificed, thus the interests of subsequent generations should not be permitted to overrule the freedoms of those living in the present. There are no ideals, that is to say, no models from the past, of which one should strive to be worthy, for the very act of learning from historical experience undermines the moral indignation so prized. The quandary of being mired in a present disconnected from the past and the future is a recurring feature of recent narratives of apocalypse. In The Cabin in the Woods (2011), the protagonists, who are forced into the position of holding the fate of humanity in their hands, cannot articulate a single reason for why the world should continue to exist. In the film version of Watchmen (2009), the hero Nite Owl says that the genocide committed by the villain Ozymandias has “defined” humanity, not a verb that one would use with respect to an event that would evoke sorrow, rage, or grief. Even works dealing with the zombie apocalypse, such as the comic The Walking Dead (2003-2019) or the novel Zone One (2011), by refusing to explore the possible reasons behind the rise of the undead, operates on a very narrow set of themes in which it is impossible to move beyond the immediate concerns of brute survival. The film Prometheus, which does raise the question of whether the existence of humanity can be justified, is instructive for how it fails to articulate the basis for the negative judgment it seeks to enunciate.

19Prometheus is about a group of humans who travel to another solar system in search of the alien entities who are responsible for having created life on Earth. After they arrive at the planet thought to be inhabited by the aliens, known as the Engineers, the crew discovers that these technologically advanced beings have been wiped out by the accidental release of the chemical and biological warfare agents they had been stockpiling for their next journey back to Earth. The humans manage to find an Engineer who has escaped death, but rather than acknowledging the explorers as the creations of his race, the surviving alien promptly attacks them without reservation, killing most of the party. This scene is striking for how it disappoints the viewer’s expectation that the film will provide some sort of response to the question as to why human beings were created by the Engineers in the first place. It is as though the filmmakers could not come up with a suitable answer, and so elected to have the Engineer lashing out at his visitors from a blind reflex or a thoughtless impulse. The crude and unthinking nature of this reaction is foreshadowed by the pathetic question of the protagonist, “why do you hate us”, which signals that the film will offer scenes of gratuitous carnage in place of examining the motives of humanity’s alien creators. The hasty outburst of violence in the climactic scene of the film thus squanders the suspense that Prometheus otherwise masterfully builds up from its spectacular, enigmatic opening sequence depicting a ceremonial suicide in which an Engineer sacrifices his life in order to create life on earth to the unconstrained wonder and delight felt by the android David as he learns to operate the navigation systems of the alien starship.

20The film, to be sure, is not without certain hints as to the desire of the Engineers to destroy their creations. The fact that the giant spaceship of the Engineers is filled with biological agents capable of wiping out entire worlds evokes the weapons of mass destruction invented by human beings. The indifference or hostility felt by the Engineers toward humankind is paralleled by the callous condescension with which members of the human crew treat the android David. David, who is ridiculed in several instances as an unfeeling machine, asks one of his supercilious colleagues, “Why do you think your people made me?” The human replies: “We made you ‘cause we could”. The implication here is that the Engineers are as blind and as unthinking in their innovations as human beings are. But then, what accounts for their fit of regret, as the protagonist Elizabeth Shaw comes to understand that the aliens were on their way to destroy humankind before the accident befell them? Such a decision can only arise from having judged human beings as deserving of extinction, but the reasons for this change of heart, it would appear, cannot be enunciated in an advanced liberal society. The uneasiness engendered by the theme of judgment, which becomes displaced in the film by the violent assault of the awakened Engineer against the human explorers, calls to mind the culminating scene in the thriller The Fugitive (1993), where the doctor who is wrongfully accused of murder confronts the man who framed him. As Slavoj Žižek observes, Hollywood cinema of the post-ideological 1990s could not bear to blame corporate greed for the plight of the hero, and so the climactic confrontation between the two men deteriorates into an exaggerated fist-fight that leaves both men bloodied : “The openly ridiculous character of this scene is revealing – it is as if, in order to get out of the ideological mess of playing with anticapitalism, one has to make a move which directly opens up the cracks in the narrative for all to see”.28 We could say that in order to get out of the mess of making a liberal audience uncomfortable with the prospect of humanity being judged unworthy by another entity, Prometheus likewise decomposes into an inept spectacle which hastily jettisons its central theme.

21There are deleted scenes available online which show Peter Weyland, the aging head of the Weyland Corporation, asking the revived Engineer for immortality because he has become worthy of godhood by creating David, an android that he declares is perfect.29 Elizabeth Shaw estimates that the accident that killed most of the Engineers took place 2 000 years ago, leading fans to speculate that Jesus Christ was a messenger sent by the Engineers to persuade human beings to repent of their destructive ways. There are scattered references to Christianity in the film, from the cross worn by Shaw to the horrifying parody of a miraculous pregnancy, in which the sterile heroine becomes pregnant with a grotesque, squid-like creature that attacks her. Here, the act of creation is associated with death and violence, while the android David feels no gratitude for having been given life. Instead, he is eaten up with hatred and resentment at having been created by beings he regards as inferior to him. Thus, it is not Christianity that serves as the symbolic point of reference for the film, but rather Gnosticism, with its unjust and inept creator-god who behaves like a tyrant toward his creations. Indeed, the hatred of the creator for what he creates is driven home by the fact that when the Engineer awakens from a sleep lasting two thousand years, he does not deviate for an instant from his mission to wipe out humankind. He takes no time to mourn for his lost comrades, or rue the possibly mistaken path of his own civilization in having constructed weapons so destructive as to slaughter his own kind. Nor does he note the irony of having been in hibernation long enough for his victims to come and find him. Instead, his rage is blind and undeviating, but is this mindless and mechanistic fixation the property of one who presumes to judge humankind, or does it express the drive of human beings to destroy themselves?

22Such a question can be answered by weighing whether liberalism hates judgment more than it fears extinction. For the misanthropic mass that condemns the human species for its crimes, what is worse than the possibility of the annihilation of the human species is the thought of being judged unworthy by another. Liberals are bothered less by the view that humankind is evil and is deserving of extinction than by the prospect of being judged and found wanting. Such judgment is unbearable because it draws them into the proximity of what they regard as irremediably obscene – the inegalitarian thought of superiority. Indeed, judgment is hated more than the prospect of extinction is feared – this twisted preference permits liberalism to taste something of the sublime. For there is something worse than extinction, which Colebrook and other theorists of the Anthropocene will not name, which is the adoption of beliefs and values drawn from tradition that could help human beings avoid extinction. Colebrook’s refusal to consider whether the liberal freedoms that undermine any meaningful, collective measures against global warming ought to be jettisoned, so that the human species would gain a greater chance at survival, reveals the true stakes of her doom-laden discourse. It is better for the world to perish than for individuals in affluent First World liberal democracies to compromise their personal freedoms. In other words, what Colebrook refuses to contemplate, in spite of her observations of the deadlock produced by liberalism, is the return of harsh discipline and severe prohibitions, the violence that human beings exact against themselves, for the sake of achieving the higher aims of culture or securing the future of the community. In effect, she obeys the very logic she decries as paralyzing all meaningful efforts to address the destruction of the environment. For the other of liberalism contains the means by which the human species might avoid extinction. The hostility of liberals is to any restrictions and limits on their vision of autonomy is stronger than their desire to ensure that humankind will live on in the future.