how dark and uncertain its future—is that of how to proceed. How are we supposed to live, given the distinct possibility that our species, our civilization, might already be doomed?
Should we just ignore the end of the world?
Again, the question is not wholly ironic: on a personal level, I’m open to the suggestion that such a response—by which I mean no response at all—might well be the sanest one, given the situation. It’s certainly the easiest response, and therefore by some distance the most tempting. The problem, our problem as a culture—which, I may as well admit, neatly dovetails with my problem as a writer, and to some hopefully limited extent yours as a reader—is one of boredom.
Because let’s at least be honest about this: the apocalypse is profoundly dull. I for one am sick to death of the end of days. I’m sick, in particular, of climate change. Is it possible to be terrified and bored at the same time? Is it possible, I mean, to be bored of terror—if not of the kind of literal terror that privileged people like me rarely experience, at least the kind of abstract terror that is released like a soporific gas from the whole topic of ecological catastrophe?
The threat of nuclear war that hung over much of the twentieth century at least had the advantage of focusing the mind. Nuclear war, for all its considerable flaws, you at least have to admit was gripping. It adhered to certain established narrative conventions. You had near misses, global panics. You had mutually assured destruction, game theory, mushroom clouds, total and instant annihilation. You had plot, was what you had: you had drama. And even more crucially, you had characters. You had protagonists and antagonists, guys with fingers on buttons who either did or did not choose to push them. And when it came to protestors on the streets calling for complete nuclear disarmament, you had an entirely rational and achievable demand. As imminent as it surely seemed for so long, nobody actually wanted nuclear war. Everyone understood that it would have been an act of madness, an obvious moral grotesquerie, to punch in the codes, to launch the warheads, to cause annihilation of an unprecedented swiftness and scale.
And the important point in this context is that we ourselves were not among the protagonists and antagonists. We were not going to be punching in any launch codes either way. We were bystanders, whose role was limited to cowering in terror, maybe holding the occasional placard, partaking here and there in a chant if called upon to do so. We didn’t want to go to our graves, but at least we knew that if we did, we would do so more or less passively, more or less without blame.
“Once people saw in the apocalypse the unknowable avenging hand of God,” as the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger put it in an essay from the late 1970s. “Today it appears as the methodically calculated product of our own actions.” The apocalypse, he writes, “was also once a singular event, to be expected unannounced as a bolt from the blue: an unthinkable moment that only seers and prophets could anticipate—and, of course, no one wanted to listen to their warnings and predictions. Our end of the world, on the other hand, is sung from the rooftops even by the sparrows; the element of surprise is missing; it seems only to be a question of time. The doom we picture for ourselves is insidious and torturingly slow in its approach, the apocalypse in slow motion.”
This slowness is something new in history. The apocalypse, in both its religious and its secular modes, has always appeared in the form of a blinding flash, a sudden intercession of divine or technological power. There is no mythological template to help us make sense of the current mutated form of the end times. We don’t know how to think about it, how to give it the form of myth and story, and so it metastasizes and spreads, a blood sickness in the culture. The slow and insidious doom identified by Enzensberger takes multiple forms, insinuating itself into the most unlikely of places. There is no one cause, no single locus of apocalyptic unease. It’s all horsemen, all the time.
And there is a deeper register to this truth: I don’t know that I would have it any other way. I want my toilet to flush. I want streaming music. I want to