The New Apocalypticism
By: Andrew Thornebrooke
Tags: Culture, Philosophy, Rearguard, Society, Life

From climate change to global warfare to pandemic panic, apocalypse is en vogue as ever. End times thinking is not quite so warranted as many would believe, however. And our avidity for admitting such thoughts of world annihilation betrays a deeper yearning for historical validation.

The threat of COVID-19 is real, to be sure, but like so many threats of the 21st century, it is not what it at first appears to be. By this I mean simply that the pandemic is not world-ending, in the same way that climate change, though real and exacerbated by humans, is not world ending. Humanity faces innumerable terrible threats every year and each takes its share of lives. That every death is tragic in its own way is not in question. Nor is it in question that every disaster of the last century was preceded by a more destructive event somewhere in history. What is in question is why the deaths (or potential deaths) brought about by these new threats are considered to have world-ending potential, while the others are merely accepted as par for the course.

For example, Dr. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College was recently quoted in The New York Times as believing that the worst-case scenario of COVID-19 would result in as many as 2.2 million deaths in the United States and half a million in the United Kingdom. It is a remarkable, and horrific, scenario.

Aside from the knock-on effects for infrastructure such as hospitals though, what makes this new disease so terrifying? After all, flu kills over 600,000 people every year. Suicide takes another 800,000. Hunger and hunger-related diseases kill a staggering 8 million people globally every year. So the question remains, why do these new threats create such a panic?

In a word: Novelty.

In three words: Novelty and nihilism.

The world is not going to end presently, nor even in the near to middle-distant future. Unlike the cases presented in suicide and hunger and the flu, however, our species has not yet been presented with the demonstrable evidence that these new threats are mere threats instead of total threats. That realization can only be made with the passage of time.

We are in many ways as we were in our species’ infancy, huddled in a darkness of sorts, in which every new sound in the black creates a terror within our minds. That is the problem of novelty.

As to nihilism, one need not look beyond the emptiness of modernity in both culture and philosophy to recognize that there is a distinct lack of transcendental worth, or purpose in our lives. This loss has led to the perversion of how we view our place in history by distorting the perception of ourselves evermore toward solipsism. Indeed, one cannot help but feel that there is an element of collective roleplay to the whole affair that is crisis culture.

This bears some explicating.

There is some element inside of us, of course, that needs to see our own struggles reflected in the past. There is always a desire to view our struggles as the great struggles, our lives as the myths and the legends. There is a need for human beings to be able to transcend the immediate by imagining themselves across the backdrop of the past. It is not so surprising then that the Western response to COVID-19 invokes the stoic resignation of the British during the Blitz, or that the response to climate change is framed with the ardor of the Americans during Pearl Harbor. We all want to play our part, as is only natural.

We fail to ask, however, whether this scene is quite so important to the plot.

As Palahniuk’s Tyler Durden would say, “Our great war is a spiritual war.”

The fact that the character of Durden was an imaginary sociopath created to give an unnamed protagonist meaning through destruction only serves to further exemplify the point. Human beings have a desire to belong and a desire to act upon their environment. In an age characterized by hyper-abundance and the philosophic vacuity of consumerism, is it any wonder that we create struggles where there were none? That every molehill is a mountain? That any threat is the threat? Is it any wonder that we struggle to see ourselves as the great heroes of yore amid an age bereft of heroes?

Novelty and nihilism then, have combined in the 21st century to subvert that which is most precious to the human condition: The desire to do good.

It is this subversion that leads us to prophesying the end of all things now.

Our desire to do good and our yearning for meaning bring about only terror and uncertainty when we are confronted with the brutal reality that there is no great war to be fought nor black death to be survived. We must now consider that our capacity for greatness, when left without reason to be great, will struggle to create just such a reason ex nihilo. If we do not temper our innate nature with meaning and morality, we will forever see cataclysm in every crisis. We will forever be as Dante’s Satan, cursed to reflect on what we once were without ever realizing that the act of our reflecting is the very thing which freezes us in deepest hell.

Just as those in great suffering dream of a better world, we in a world of stability will dream of apocalypse. Let us not bring those dreams into the waking world.

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