I read a magnificent essay yesterday about apocalyptic thinking (including its ideological cousins, millenarianism and eschatology). I love it when a piece of writing or a podcast clarifies my own thoughts about something important, and this did that in a deeply satisfying way. Given its subject, the essay was far from uplifting, but it covered things so elegantly, adding so much depth and color to my own loose thoughts about the end of the world and what that phrase means.
For as long as I’ve had conceptions of the apocalypse as a real terrestrial possibility and not just as an exceedingly strange series of visions at the end of the New Testament, it has existed as a collection of conceivable futures that vary in probability and plausibility, as well as in catastrophic scale. Some apocalypse scenarios would impact humanity alone (pandemics, zombies), leaving the rest of nature to carry on and probably thrive in our absence. Other scenarios would destroy much of life as we know it for eons to come (nuclear holocaust, astroid collision). And then there’s climate change, which lies somewhere in between and will impact most living things but also create opportunities for new and different life.
Over the course of my lifetime, my sense of the likelihood of certain apocalypse scenarios has gone up or down. The threat of Nuclear holocaust hung over a stretch of my childhood in fairly palpable ways, but it’s not something I think about much anymore. I’m not sure the likelihood has actually decreased, but it feels like it has. On the other hand, climate change has gone from a risk to a virtual certainty during my adult lifetime. We already failed to do anything to prevent it. We’re mostly failing to slow it down. And now it seems we can only try to mitigate its effects as much as possible and adapt to whatever we ultimately fail to mitigate. I write this from San Francisco as we emerge from a nonstop string of nine straight “atmospheric river” storms that caused major flooding up and down the state and killed 19 people. This after a couple of multi-year droughts.
I feel like I used to hear about two opposite visions of the future in just about equal proportion: one a utopia of self-driving cars and conversant AI, where no one dies of cancer or heart disease anymore; the other a dystopia of deserts, dead oceans, and submerged cities, where roving bandits skirmish over scant drops of potable water. Companies like Google and Apple and Amazon have mostly focused on building the gadgets of the future, even as their executives invest in luxury survival bunkers and escape pods to Mars in anticipation of collapse. Though they are opposites, the billionaires don’t see these two visions of the future as incompatible per se. I agree, because I already live in a city that is home to a huge population of unhoused people but also Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg. It’s totally conceivable that in the future we will have cancer-free billionaires zipping around in driverless cars past clusters of us rabble brawling over scraps. More and more though, it feels like any taste of utopia will be fleeting if we get there at all. We are in a race to enjoy a few years of it before everything collapses.
Maybe it’s worth pausing to ask who exactly failed to address climate change. It’s an interesting question. There are certainly some bona fide villains: oil execs, oil industry lobbyists—this ilk, and those adjacent. They are some of the perpetrators, but that’s a different question. The question here is who failed to stop them?
Governments failed to regulate the industry, as well as the consumption of what the industry produces. The free market failed to regulate itself. Governments. The market. That’s us of course. We are the ones who failed.
I’ve heard it said that we are living in a state of collective denial about climate change. But it’s not denial when you understand what’s happening. It’s something closer to resignation. I feel a sense of personal culpability. At a point in my life I stepped onto the “corporate” train like lots of other people. I have never worked directly for any of the perpetrators of climate change, but indirectly I have done work that helped them. They have been among my various employers’ customers at times. I have also been a consumer and beneficiary of fossil fuels all my life, along with every other person living in the industrialized world. On the other side, I have done very little to slow or stop the train. Yes, I have donated money to various campaigns and organizations and people. I have written and called my representatives. I have marched a couple of times. Incidentally, almost all of the presidential candidates I have ever supported went on to lose (as a member of Gen X, I have become accustomed to losing political battles to the much larger boomer generation, which hasn’t stopped me from fighting, but it has dimmed my inner flame over the years).
Before I boarded the corporate train, I lived the starving artist life. I worked in bookstores and hustled on the side as a freelance photographer, house painter, chimney sweep, and more. I wrote and directed plays for a small independent theater company at one point. I swam among bohemians. It was wonderful, and on some level I still think of my own corporate turn as selling out, a betrayal of my true nature. If I’m honest though, I wasn’t doing anything very significant in the arts, and neither were the rest of the people around me. It felt more noble and principled and true than the corporate world does, but none of us was on much of an upward trajectory career-wise. We freaks and geeks were contributing less to the climate change problem than the corporate crowd perhaps, but we certainly weren’t going to stop it. Also, we were dependent on the corporate crowd. Relative to the corporate train, we were something like hobos, camped alongside the tracks in hopes that a few dollars or some still-edible food scraps would fly out the windows as the cars zipped by. Artists and bohemians have always had a love-hate (or resent-but-need) relationship with the bourgeoisie.
Life is a different kind of grind once you attach yourself to a mortgage and a family. Your priorities change. Your focus becomes much tighter because it has to. And it’s a good impulse to be as present and engaged and generous as possible with the people you love most. I do still ruminate on the question of what more could I have done about climate change, what more could I be doing. But then I wonder for example how to think about the man who set himself on fire in the plaza of the Supreme Court building to protest the climate crisis? His name was Wynn Bruce, and it happened less than a year ago. I Googled it just now to find those details, which tells you something about the impact his death had on the issue. He took things about as far as one person could, yet few remember him at all.
Somewhere in-between the perpetrators of the climate crisis and those of us who failed to stop them are actual deniers. They have done untold damage, but to some degree I don’t blame the regular people among them. There’s a whole denial industry (more perpetrators) whose sole mission has been to convince or at least confuse the public. The denial industry has been so successful that the media still acts like there is room for doubt and debate. In an article just this week about the recent storms and flooding in California, The NY Times doesn’t mention climate change until paragraph 26, and even then only as a claim about how “scientists say” climate change exacerbates extreme weather. They will defend their editorial stance on this, but does it make sense to frame things this way when we’re talking about nearly all climate scientists? They wouldn’t take the same “scientists claim” stance with respect to the moon landing or the shape of the earth, even though the ratio of deniers is probably similar. Explain that.
Speaking of the climate change deniers, it’s not as if they don’t worry about the end times at all. Sometimes it seems like the same people who deny climate change see signs of the apocalypse everywhere—in the existence of trans people, the COVID vaccine, globalism, The Great Reset, wokeness. They just imagine a completely different set of apocalypse scenarios than I do. Now we have dueling apocalypses, based on ideology.
Somewhere in the mix is the idea of apocalypse as a cleansing that leads to rebirth. Millenarianism imagines a transformation that will usher in a thousand-year era of blessedness. The Hindu goddess Kali represents the darkness from which everything is born—destruction and change, sometimes destruction of evil to protect the innocent. I found myself thinking about apocalypse along these lines towards the beginning of the pandemic, when I encountered various “nature is healing” articles. It seemed that just a few months of decreased human activity on the roads and in office buildings had measurably decreased atmospheric carbon. And it wasn’t just that. The pandemic made a lot of people rethink hustle culture and capitalism, and for people who’d been rethinking those things for a long time, it made radical transformation seem possible. There’s some appeal in the idea of an apocalypse that wipes out capitalism and the current political paradigm to pave the way for something brand new.
This train feels like it’s heading for an abyss, and it’s not likely we will stop it from our seats inside the cars. It’s still possible to jump off and join the hobos, but not without risking serious injury. There’s no persuading the people at the controls to apply the brakes. It’s not clear they know how. Maybe there’s no one at the controls at all. Maybe there are no breaks on this thing. More and more it feels like the best option, perhaps the only option, is to derail this train. Calling Kali...
When my wife and I were first trying to have kids, I experienced a lot of anxiety about the doom and gloom I believed they would inevitably face. It’s the only time in my life that I ever had actual panic attacks. My brain wanted kids but my body refused. It felt deeper than that. It felt like my soul was refusing. I sought therapy, and that helped a bit. What helped more was reflecting on my experiences traveling and volunteering, where I had spent time with kids living in the depths of poverty. They didn’t have justice, but they managed to find joy. They were as joyful as any kids I’ve encountered anywhere. I thought about inmates who described their prison time as a gift or who claimed to be as free in prison as they’d ever been outside. I also thought about the wealthiest, most pedigreed and well-connected people I know and how some of them are just miserable. In short, I remembered how it’s possible to do a lot with a little or vice versa, and how our inner lives can be so independent from our outer ones.
I came to understand more deeply that life itself is a gift. Consciousness is a miracle. This is a frightening time to be alive on planet earth, but it’s also hard to imagine a wilder, more interesting time to be here. Looming apocalypse or not, our own time here is short. Each of us will cease to be, and what does apocalypse mean in the face of that? Any person’s own individual nonexistence is equal to an apocalypse on some level, is it not?
Maybe not, but only because we don’t understand consciousness or the mind-body connection at all. We don’t know what underlies what. It’s possible that our consciousness continues on after we shed these particular meat suits. We don’t have concrete evidence for that, but we haven’t really looked for it. We don’t know how to look for it.
Fundamentally, it’s a mystery, an incredible mystery, and that is something I have learned to embrace.