Misanthropy and Pessimism

From the opening pages

Misanthropy is usually treated as if it were a personality defect, somewhere between poor table manners and refusing to join the office birthday card. The misanthrope, in the popular imagination, is a sour person who dislikes parties, neighbors, humanity, and perhaps sunlight. This is convenient. If misanthropy is merely a mood, nobody has to ask whether the mood might contain an argument. One can prescribe fresh air and more social contact, as though increased exposure to human beings were an obvious cure for disappointment in them.

Philosophically, misanthropy can be a broadly negative judgment about human beings as a kind. It need not mean hatred of every individual, much less a wish for anyone’s suffering. It may begin with a colder question: what if recurring failures of human conduct are not exceptional malfunctions but stable features of the animal doing the conducting? Vanity, cruelty, tribal loyalty, stupidity, status hunger, and self-deception are among the oldest charges in moral thought. The awkward possibility is that humanity’s defects are not stains on an otherwise spotless portrait. They may be part of the portrait.

Diogenes of Sinope, the fourth-century BCE Cynic, became famous for treating social pretension as public comedy. Diogenes Laërtius, in Lives of Eminent Philosophers, preserves the anecdote in which Diogenes walks with a lamp in daylight, saying that he is looking for a human being. The streets were presumably not empty. The point was that biological membership in the species was easier to obtain than moral qualification for the title. It is a joke that has survived unusually well, perhaps because the supply problem has never been conclusively solved.