Apocalypse How. Plus some news!

Good day dear reader! This is a bit of a mixed post, with lots of new writing and some news to share. My last post took up the politics of anxiety, and this week’s installment delves into a related topic, what I’m calling Apocalypse How. This is a genre of both aesthetic production and sober, real-life policy that images some catastrophic, world-ending event on the horizon, often in minute detail. These reflections stem from the new book I’m writing on risk, and in particular, my interest in what it does to us socially and politically to always be on the lookout for danger. I’ve termed this the culture of constant vigilance, and, well, let’s just say that the etymological overlap between vigilance and vigilante should give us pause.

Michelangelo’s Last Judgment

But first, I have a few updates and information about two events that may be of interest to the Dr. Small Talk universe (feel free to skip to below the break if you’re only here for the apocalypse). I’m very excited to share this new essay on the economic visions of the New Right that I wrote for the kind folks at Strange Matters, a magazine that launched in 2020. I can’t overstate what a pleasure it is to write for smart people who allow you the freedom to explore a topic like this in depth, and let you sneak a Taylor Swift lyric into a critique of Peter Thiel. “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me.”

The piece takes up the seeming contradiction of Thiel supporting two oppositional parts of the New Right “rebel alliance” — the National Conservatives with their traditional values and big state support for families, and the Neo-Monarchists (yes, you read that right) headquartered in Silicon Valley. The leading intellectual of the latter group is Curtis Yarvin—described as Thiel’s in-house philosopher—who views the return to a new form of monarchy as the only hope for the West. This is not your traditional royal family affair, but rather a call for a CEO-king who runs the country like a startup. If you ever sensed that there was something authoritarian lurking within the corporation, and that maybe capitalism and democracy are in tension rather than complimentary forms, this one’s for you.

Next up, I’m pleased to announce that my new course, “Risk Society: Crisis, Power, and Neoliberlism” is now enrolling. It will be held on Sundays online, July 7-28, from 2-5 pm EST (7-10 pm GMT). If you’re interested in how risk became the dominant framework for thinking about security, what differentiates contemporary risks from those of past centuries, or the sort of political and social values that are embedded in risk analysis, this is for you!

And finally, those of you in and around NYC are cordially invited to join me and other Brooklyn Institute faculty for the Annual Social, which will be on the evening of Thursday, May 30 at the Urbane Arts Club in Brooklyn. The Social is our biggest fundraiser of the year, and we depend on it to support programming staff, provide course scholarships, and literally keep the lights on. Sliding scale tickets come in a variety of price points, starting with “From Each According to their Ability” ($25) all the way up to “To Each According to their Needs” ($10,000). There will be great food, an open bar, sparkling banter and karaoke. Will I be belting out country classics? Absolutely.

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As I am reminded every time I survey the stack of dystopian fiction on my teenage daughters’ bookshelves, the apocalypse is much in vogue these days. According to my very reliable 13-year-old source, in most of these books the action picks up in the aftermath of some sort of apocalyptic confrontation, when an evil dictator has assumed power and the children must somehow overthrow him. There is a bleak recognition that returning to how it was before the catastrophe is impossible but hope nonetheless persists of creating a better post-apocalyptic world. We encounter a slightly different, perhaps more unsettling spin on this theme, in The Promised Neverland, a Japanese manga series by Kaiu Shirai and Posuka Demizu. Here the human world has reached a ghastly compromise with the demon world that threats to conquer it. An agreement stipulates that children will be raised in idyllic orphanages within the demon world—walled off from reality and never knowing the truth of their condition—until they are fed to the demons. This conveyer belt of child sacrifice is the cost of security in the human world: the apocalypse is both present, and managed.

A different example of Apocalypse How comes comes in the form of ConPlan8888, a “zombie survival” planning exercise undertaken by the U.S. Department of Defense in 2011. A bright disclaimer on the first page states that this scenario was entirely fictitious by design; still, the department had found that fantasy provided “a very useful and effective training tool” for gaming out tactics, the likely responses of both friends and rivals, and the resulting political and environmental fallout from the zombie apocalypse. The plan includes sentences like the following:

There are eight classes of Zombies addressed within this plan. Chicken Zombies pose no threat to humans and actions to counter CZ's are the responsibilities of the US Depts of Justice, Homeland Security, Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration. The Zombie threat classes are: Pathogenic Zombies (PZ); Radiation Zombies (RZ); Evil Magic Zombies (EMZ); Space Zombies (SZ); Weaponized Zombies (WZ); Symbiant-Induced Zombies (S IZ); Vegetarian Zombies (VZ).

A few lines down, in a section dedicated to the chain of command for commencing a nuclear strike, we read that “nuclear weapons… are likely to be the most effective weapons against hordes of the undead.” It makes for amusing reading, of course, but also reflects the real anxieties, priorities, and preferred courses of action that underlie American military power. Among these is the idea that the core purpose of risk assessment and mitigation is to preserve the status quo:

Zombies are horribly dangerous to all human life and zombie infections have the potential to seriously undermine national security and economic activities that sustain our way of life. Therefore having a population that is not composed of zombies or at risk from their malign influence is vital to U.S and Allied national interests. While the U.S currently enjoys several asymmetric advantages against zombie infections originating in the Eurasian landmass, these advantages can easily be negated by air and sea traffic that could transport the source of a zombie infection to North and South America. Further, asteroids and nuclear space radiation that can convert people into zombies can affect any landmass or population on earth. Given the rapidity at which zombie outbreaks spread, decisive, overwhelming, and possibly unilateral military force may be required to negate the zombie threat.

How do we explain the allure of the apocalyptic form in twenty-first century life? In my work on the Islamic State, I offered a broadly materialist interpretation of this question that encouraged readers to consider the ebbs and flows of apocalyptic fever dreams alongside real-world crises in the Middle East and beyond. Rather than mining classical Islamic theology to comprehend the 21^st century actions of ISIS, I argued we needed to ask why it has become so difficult to conceive of a better life, not after death, but right here on earth. In this way, we can connect the salience of the apocalypse to the forebodings that prevails well beyond the jihadi set, and establish them as a nihilist foil to the neoliberal project in particular: What is the apocalypse if not an alternative to a world that supposedly has none?

I still think this is more or less correct, but looking at things a few years on, I would like to call attention to a different aspect of the apocalyptic allure. I wonder if I have focused too much on the incapacity to imagine a different future—along the lines of the famous quip that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”—and not enough about what these apocalyptic visions say about the present: namely, that it is intolerable, evil, beyond repair, hopelessly lost. Post-war Iraq provided an extremely fertile breeding ground for thinking about the end times precisely because the catastrophe was already present: not something on the horizon, but the condition of people’s actual lives. Dystopian Arabic novels like Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013, Ahmed Saadawi) are not set in some near or far-off future, but the present or even the past—in this case, Iraq of 2005, where a junk dealer inadvertently creates a monster by stitching together pieces of various corpses ripped apart by car bombs.

This was the immediate context in which the eschatological strain became more prominent among ideologues of the new jihad like Abu Musab al-Suri (the nom de guerre of Mustafa bin Abd al-Qadir Setmariam Nasar), who merged millenarian expectations with jihadi practice. In contrast, al-Qaeda very rarely appealed to apocalyptic themes – which its leadership associated with a disreputable sort of mass market Islam. Yet for the Islamic State, signs of the Hour were everywhere: the corruption of leaders and clerics, acts of sexual impropriety, and of course the invasion of Iraq by American and allied forces. The animating impulse is disbelief that things could possibly go on like this much longer.

It was a similarly grim diagnosis of the present that caused Martin Luther to long for the end times. In a 1535 letter he wrote, “The period when the Gospel first became known among us was rather respectable. Now there is almost no fear of God, our shortcomings grow daily, and false prophets are even making their appearance. . . The more closely the world approaches its end, the more it is overwhelmed by penalties and catastrophes.” Here we see how the act of faith is joined to the conviction that the present course of events could not possibly continue, with the world deteriorating and growing ever-more wicked and corrupt. As he relayed in another letter to a friend, “It looks to me as if the world, too, has come to the hour of its passing and has become an old wornout coat which soon has to be changed.”[1] The final cataclysm must soon be at hand because a just God would not allow his creatures to suffer indefinitely.

The apocalypse promised an end to the suffering of the righteous and final victory over the wicked – but importantly, the register in which these things are achieved is literally other-worldly. Consider the link between salvation and novelty in these verses from the Book of Revelation:

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.

The Christian apocalypse sets the world in order, not by remaking it but by replacing it. To use the language of home improvement shows, the world is a tear-down project, not a restoration. There will be no careful stripping away of layers of paint to reveal original beauty lying beneath decades of poor design choices. No, the apocalyptic confrontation offers the chance not only to destroy, but to build a whole new house from scratch, unrestrained by the preferences of former owners.

In many quarters today, the apocalypse has been secularized: environmental collapse, nuclear catastrophe, the singularity. Averting apocalypse in its varied forms becomes a key global concern, but—as Ajay Singh Chaudhary has recently argued in his new book about climate politics—it is usually understood as a coming confrontation instead of a crisis that is already here. Consider the news articles that are published in the aftermath of every UNFCCC report: “Window to reach climate goals ‘rapidly closing,’ UN report warns” (Euronews); “‘Baby Steps’ Will Not Avert Climate Catastrophe,” UN Warns (Common Dreams). The structure of climate discourse is focused on the fateful lead up to the great confrontation, with far less attention paid to what life would look like after the cataclysmic event occurs, or even more bleakly, to the places where the catastrophic is already here.

In this sense, I think the secular apocalyptic imaginary has not fully shaken the finality that characterizes both the Christian and Islamic predecessors: great struggle precedes a cataclysmic event after which we cannot even think. We either win or we succumb, victory or death, salvation or eternal damnation. And there is, however counterintuitively, something seductive about this idea of finality because it obviates the need for struggle. I think a more critical assessment would lead us closer to the view expressed nearly a century ago by Walter Benjamin: “That things ‘go on like this’ is the catastrophe. It is not what currently stands before us but what is currently given.” Tom Vandeputte has termed this position “continuity as catastrophe,” and it is a vision in which the world-ending event is already here – at least for some.

I cannot help but wonder how teenagers living in Gaza would regard the dystopian fiction my own daughters are reading: what use is the zombie invasion when the sky is already falling? It is the work of historical and political analysis in this moment to clarify for whom the catastrophic is regarded as acceptable, inevitable even – to reveal, in short, the fissures that run through the risk society.

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[1] As cited in Michael Parsons, “The Apocalyptic Luther: His Noahic Self-Understanding.” JETS 44/4 (December 2001) 627–45.