Nietzsche and Olaf Stapledon both had a vision of the last humans ...
I.
For Nietzsche, der letzter Mensch is the antithesis of a superior being.
And yet, despite all his flaws and shortcomings, the last man is self-content and represents the culmination of humanity's desire to become the perfect domestic animal: passive, apathetic, averse to risk taking or living dangerously, in favour of all those things beginning with the letter C that Zarathustra so despises; comfort, convenience, and conformity, for example.
The last man simply wants to earn a reasonable living and secure his own health and safety; i.e., self-preservation not self-overcoming is his goal and he cares more about walking the dog than exercising his will to power. He is small and he makes everything around him feel smaller. All that is different from himself - everything alien, queer, or superior - appears to him as criminal, insane, or obscene (in a word, evil).
And yet, for all his profession of happiness, the last man is full of resentment and the lust for revenge; he is compelled to seek out those individuals who manifest this difference so that he may cut them down to size and bring them into line, thereby negating the chaos which generates dancing stars in the name of love, peace, equality, and justice.
The last man's dream is of belonging to a one great reconciled herd of humanity in which everyone wants the same and is the same and whoever thinks otherwise goes voluntarily into the madhouse. Or, indeed, to the Vernichtungslager.*
II.
For the British philosopher and sci-fi writer Olaf Stapledon, on the other hand, the Last Men - whom he imagines living on Neptune 2000,000,000 years from now - are very much Übermenschen (though not in the Nietzschean sense).
As the eighteenth and final species of human being, these Neptunian Last Men are a perfected version of the relatively short-lived Seventeenth Men (created by the Sixteenth Men to succeed them and with an ability for mental fusion between individual minds resulting in an altogether new mode of consciousness).
Essentially, the Last Men are a race of genderfluid polyamorous philosophers and artists with a penchant for ceremonial cannibalism. They are also potentially immortal; that is to say, whilst they can still have fatal accidents, be murdered by others, or die via suicide, they needn't worry about sickness or old age.
Stapledon writes:
"If one of the First Men could enter the world of the Last Men, he would find many things familiar and much that would seem strangely distorted and perverse. [...]
Among the familiar things that he would encounter would be creatures recognizably human yet in his view grotesque. [...] Some of these fantastic men and women he would find covered in fur, hirsute, or mole-velvet, revealing the underlying muscles. Others would display bronze, yellow or ruddy skin, and yet others a transluscent ash-green, warmed by the underflowing blood. As a species, though we are all human, we are extremely variable in body and mind, so variable that superficially we seem to be not one species but many. [...] The traveller might perhaps be surprised by the large yet sensitive hands which are universal, both in men and women. [...] The pair of occipital eyes, too, would shock him; so would the upward-looking astronomical eye on the crown, which is peculiar to the Last Men. [...] Apart from such special features as these, there is nothing definitely novel about us [...] We are both more human and more animal. [...] Yet our general proportions are definitely human in the ancient manner. [...] Moreover, if our observer were himself at all sensitive to facial expression, he would come to recognize in every one of our innumerable physiognomic types an indescribable but distinctively human look, the visible sign of that inward and spiritual grace which is not wholly absent from his own species."**
These multi-racial and bestial-bodied god-men with faces that remain (depressingly) all-too-human, habitually wander around in the nip, only wearing clothes for special occasions or for when they wish to fly (made possible thanks to a pair of overalls fitted with gravity-defying radiation-generators). They live a happy communal form of life, growing vegetables, observing the stars, pottering about in their garden, or home decorating.
What really sets them apart from all earlier human beings, we are told, is their unique love life; the Last Men are futuristic swingers in small multisexual groups that form the basis of super-individuality in which single brains become mere nodes within a giant network of mind:
"Of course the mental unity of the sexual group is not the direct outcome of the sexual intercourse of its members. Such intercourse does occur. Groups differ from one another very greatly in this respect; but in most groups all the members of the male sexes have intercourse with all the members of the female sexes. Thus sex is with us essentially social. It is impossible for me to give any idea of the great range and intensity of experience afforded by these diverse types of union. Apart from this emotional enrichment of the individuals, the importance of sexual activity in the group lies in its bringing individuals into that extreme intimacy, temperamental harmony and complementariness, without which no emergence into higher experience would be possible." [272]
Ultimately, Stapledon's Last Men, rather like Nietzsche's letzter Mensch, form theselves into a perfect herd and the individual discovers his truest self as part of a transhuman collective made up from a million million brains and bodies. I don't know if any one objects to this process - or if there would be any point, for one suspects that resistance would be futile:
"Ours is in fact a society dominated [...] by a single racial purpose which is in a sense religious [...] in each mind of man or woman the racial purpose presides absolutely; and hence it is the unquestioned motive of all social policy." [280]
Stapledon regards this as the ultimate form of democracy: free of all serious conflict, as individuals learn to increasingly trust in the judgements and dictates of the hive mind. Nietzsche would despise such mystical-spiritual-utopian twaddle. And I despise it too: such cosmic idealism is just another form of fascism at last: Ein Volk, ein Welt, ein Geist ...
Notes
* See Nietzsche, 'Zarathustra's Prologue' (5), in Part 1 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85) on which I base this summary.
** See Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, (Gollancz, 2004), pp. 262-63. Further page references to this text will be given directly in the post.
For a related post to this one, contrasting the thought of Nietzsche and Stapledon on the death of man, click here.
