A provocative book for readers willing to engage.
A professor of philosophy reflects on whether or not humanity should continue to exist.
The early 21st century has been defined by manmade global crises—ecological, political, and economic—that show few signs of abating. In the face of so much suffering and devastation, May, author of A Decent Life, A Fragile Life, and other books of philosophy, dares to ask a disturbing question: Would the end of humanity be a good thing for the planet? He searches for answers in moral philosophy. Some thinkers, including anti-natalist David Benatar, believe that the inevitability of death and suffering cancels out the pleasures of existence, a position against which May argues: “Most humans have lives with more happiness than suffering.” More optimistic philosophers like Sarah Buss believe that though not inherently good, human beings still bring value to the world through the sentience that allows them to appreciate things like art "that are good in themselves.” In other words, “human beings are valuable, but our value is only instrumental.” The stubborn facts remain that happiness is not equitably distributed and that humans, despite their ability to engage with and create the higher goods of “beauty [and] truth,” have ravaged the Earth, caused the suffering of other living things—especially the farm animals that sustain them—and created social inequalities that have brought misery to other humans. May posits that population reduction would help the planet and balance the moral scales, as would ending deforestation of rainforests and putting an end to factory farming. Otherwise, “the world might be better off without us,” no matter how brilliant the cultures we bring into existence. Thoughtful and accessible, May’s book will appeal to anyone seeking ethical insights into the nature and impact of human life in the modern world.
A provocative book for readers willing to engage.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798720
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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