Imagined doom ... an acclaimed writer confronts ideas of the end of civilisation, meets those preparing for it, and manages his anxiety The apocalypse needs to end. Anyone who writes about apocalypse today is bound to acknowledge that humans have worried and theorised about it for as long as they have worried and theorised about anything; at some point, the writer is guaranteed to employ the word “eschatological” as a nod to the fact that apocalypse is an essential principle of major and minor religions. Yet for a foundational concept it’s quite hard to pin down. Just as “reality” is elusive in a once-fragmented world that has (very creatively) reassembled itself online, the apocalypse can apply to whatever you want it to: the Greek root means to uncover or reveal, hence the Book of Revelation, hence the hard truths we learn about humanity’s consequential inaction in every apocalypse story. Marxist revolution can be an apocalypse; relationship experts speak about the “Four Horsemen” of divorce. Apocalypse is a shifting abstraction, a deceptively neat encapsulation of cascading associations and ideas. The End is endlessly debatable, everywhere and nowhere, relative, adaptable, accommodating to many levels of interpretation. As the funny refrain in Bong Joon-ho’s apocalyptic film _Parasite_ goes, it’s “so metaphorical”. This is not how many people see it. Along with evangelical Christians, doomsday preppers, and bored Silicon Valley billionaires scheming to colonise Mars or flee to New Zealand, the popular imagination has a pretty intuitive grasp of the apocalypse: it refers to the end of the world, or at least human civilisation. The destruction of everything, or enough of everything that it is impossible to rebuild anything good. According to a YouGov poll conducted in February of this year, 29% of Americans believe an “apocalyptic disaster” will occur at some point during their lifetime; given Greta Thunberg’s popularity, it’s fair to say that many more believe one will take place within their children’s lifetimes. (A majority of those polled by YouGov believed they could survive a week or less after apocalyptic disaster, a self-awareness I find heartening.) Continue reading...
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