Andrew McMurry

Indiana University, Bloomington
jmcmurry@mach1.wlu.ca

 

The startling calamity.
What is the startling calamity?
How will you comprehend
what the startling calamity is?

 

-- Al-Qur'än

 

Were you expecting the sun to wink out, the heavens to open, the beast loose upon the earth? Or maybe you imagined a Ragnarok of more cosmopolitan origins: nuclear war, bioengineered plagues, alien invasion, supernova. In any case, it’s pretty clear the last days are upon us, but given the laggardly pace at which this doomtime is proceeding we simply haven’t yet grasped its contours. We adapt well to changes not sudden, swift and terrible, and just as we come to terms with the incremental decay of our own bodies and faculties, we learn to overlook the terminal events of our time as they unfold, gather, and concatenate in all their leisurely deadliness. We have wrongly expected the end of the world would provide the high drama we believe commensurate with our raging passions, our bold aspirations, and our central importance to the universe — we are worthy of a bang, not merely a whimper. And let me be blunt: by holding out for that noisy demise, we can pretend we haven’t been expiring by inches for decades.

 

Clearly, this accommodation to the ongoing apocalypse is in large measure the result of our limited temporal perspective. In terms of recorded human history, the span of a few progressive centuries since our medieval torpor is brief indeed. On the geological clock, the whole of Homo sapiens’ rise and spread over the earth is but a few ticks of the second hand. Yet how seldom is this belatedness to the cosmic scene granted any significance! How, in our ephemerality, is it even comprehensible? Does a mayfly grasp that its lifetime lasts a day? From our blinkered, homocentric perspective the decade of the eighties is already a bygone era, the fifty years since World War Two an eternity. Our neurological incapacity to hold in our minds with firmness and freshness anything but the near past and the now allows to us to file away history as rapidly as we make it. Thus, absent a hail of ICBM’s or seven angels with trumpets, the apocalypse can have been upon us for some time, may abide for another lifetime or more, and not until those final, tortured moments may it dawn on us at last that the wolf has long been at the door.

 

But how does one tell the tale of an apocalypse that was so long in coming and promises to be as long in going? Where to begin and, more importantly, where to end? Given its impalpability, its lubricity, can this protracted apocalypse be grasped, or only sensed faintly as we slip listlessly through it? Oh, and by the way, is this apocalypse real, or merely a rhetorical device to be activated by millenarians, debunked by critics, and ignored by everyone else? Is “Apocalypse” but a way to connect a vast constellation of other metaphors, whose referents are themselves finally just the vague grumblings and grim presentiments of a culture perennially fixated on the chances of its own demise?

 

Oddly, this apocalypse seems harder to deny even as its metaphoric dimension expands. Might it thus be real and constructed at the same time? That would be the most interesting possibility: an apocalypse so profoundly wrapped in its own apocrypha that it remains unrecognized even as its effects become massively known. A stealth apocalypse, then, plodding camouflaged among us, hiding in plain sight. Inured to its many signs and omens, the risk is that we can never be sure when the hard substance itself has heaved into view, and even as we peel away the rumors and lies that disguise it we fear our own voices may only be adding new tissues of obscurity. So before we speculate as to why some await so serenely the new millennium, while others hunker down bravely, smugly, or resignedly, let us gather together some of these discourses of doom, and then consider as best we can the indications that indeed we are already living in, and living out, the slow apocalypse.

 

Prophecies

 

Traditional interpretations of the various scriptural revelations of apocalypse have drawn on millennial expectations, notions of inexorable decline, the implicit moral bankruptcy of humankind since Adam and Eve, or linear or cyclical visions of history. Projected across the basic model of the human life, human civilizations have been seen to manifest the attributes of infancy, maturity, decline, senility. The apocalypse could be likened to the death of civilization, ominous to be sure, yet also the beginning of an “afterlife” when history is completed, all contradictions resolved, profane human time replaced by the sacred time of God. More recently, “apocalypse” is the name applied to any global catastrophe, with the idea that out of the rubble emerges a new and better order de-emphasized or abandoned. The apocalypse becomes in its secular manifestation just The End of The World as We Know It.

 

The specific features of the apocalypse have been explored in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theology, in Norse and Nazi mythology, by Edgar Allan Poe, Oswald Spengler, Ingmar Bergman, and David Koresh. Ronald Reagan, too, made frequent references to the end days. He once explained, “You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if — if we’re the generation that’s going to see it come about. I don’t know if you’ve noted any of the prophecies lately, but believe me, they certainly describe the times we’re going through” (quoted in Brummet 5). Well, Reagan said many things the left took as signs of an impending apocalypse (especially since he had the power to put theory into practice), but this statement shouldn’t have been construed as one of them. Reagan had merely put his finger on the pulse of the times, the fact that the portents pointed to a clear and present decline. Of course, his reliance on a mish-mash of Christian literalism, Nancy’s zodiacal bent, and the cold war rhetoric of the “evil empire” led the already confused former G.E. pitch-man to get his timetable and mechanisms all wrong. The apocalypse wasn’t just around the corner — it was already proceeding apace, furthered no doubt by the retrograde foreign and domestic agendas of his own administration.

 

With a more nuanced rhetoric than Reagan’s, and like Arnold, Yeats and Lawrence before him, Robert Frost had some things to say about the end of the world:

 

Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. (220)

 

Actually, Frost’s meditation on the caloric coefficient of the final cataclysm registers an ambivalence that has echoed on down through the ages. Fire, ice, famine, flood, man against man or god against god: it hasn’t mattered so much how the world ends, but rather that there are plenty of ways it can go, all nasty, and all fitting, considering the wide range of human moral failures that apocalypses always serve to punctuate. For example, science fiction has developed an entire sub-genre to explore the myriad shapes the apocalypse might take, and not surprisingly, these books and movies about TEOTWAWKI form a catalogue of disaster scenarios that replicate perfectly the seven deadly sins: nuclear “anger” in A Canticle for Leibowitz and The Day After; the “lust” of overpopulation in Soylent Green and Stand on Zanzibar; “coveting” nature’s power in The Stand and The Andromeda Strain; ecological “gluttony” in Nature’s End and The Sheep Look Up; “slothful” unmindfulness of the alien threat in Footfall and Invasion of the Body Snatchers; “prideful” technological fixes which go wrong in Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day; and the “envy” which causes speciesist Chuck Heston to blow up the world in a fit of sour grapes in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Add to these the idea of cosmic contingency (ignorance) in When Worlds Collide and The Day of the Triffids and entropy (powerlessness) in The Time Machine and The Dying Earth, and the litany of human frailties as embodied in the apocalyptic narrative is pretty much covered.

 

It may seem passing strange to learn that science fiction has devoted so much verbiage and footage to doom and gloom, especially since some people still think of it as a genre comprised of clean, shiny surfaces, gleaming towers and silent monorails, authored by dreamers, utopians, and Trekkies. But most SF authors seem well-versed in the Greek concept of hubris: it’s not what you don’t know but what you think you know that will kill you. Take the work of William Gibson: embraced as a prophet of cyberspace and virtual reality by everyone from William S. Burroughs to Wired, Gibson has repeatedly made the point that his novels describe a future he himself hopes never materializes. Corporate thuggery, techno-onanism, ecological breakdown, and a high-security, class-based information economy: Neuromancer or Virtual Light come across not so much as “scientifictions” but as simply the technical embellishment and literary intensification of the current contradictions of late capitalism and the limits of instrumental reason. Robert Silverberg also sets his recent novel, Hot Sky at Midnight, on a near-future Earth when corporations have effectively superseded the nation-state, and where the ability to add to the profit margin has become the only criterion for social advancement (hardly science fictional yet!). Global warming has drastically altered weather patterns, ice-bergs provide the only source of potable water; the American hinterlands are a dead or dying moonscape, and the entire planet appears to be a few years away from total biotic meltdown. The only optimistic note is sounded near the novel’s end, when the protagonist draws on the Gaia hypothesis to imagine a recuperated world of a hundred thousand, maybe a million years, in the future. “The planet had plenty of time. We don’t, Carpenter thought, but it does” (325). The future histories Silverberg and Gibson convincingly construct trace the last gasps of a dying world. According to the gradualistic theory of apocalypse, we’re in our middle gasps already.

 

This idea that the world is already moribund gets picked up in mainstream writer Paul Theroux’s disturbing futuristic novel, O-Zone, which once again is really just a hypertrophic version of today. When the billionaire Hooper Allbright thinks about his own era, and then waxes nostalgic about ours, we realize that if the future is ill-fated that’s because it’s merely a playing out of the present:

 

It was a meaner, more desperate and worn out world. It had been scavenged by crowds. Their hunger was apparent in the teethmarks they had left, in the slashes of their claws. There was some beauty in the world's new wildernesses, of which O-Zone was just one; but its cities were either madhouses or sepulchers. Fifty years ago was simply a loose expression that meant before any of them had been born. It meant another age. And yet sometimes they suspected that it had closely resembled this age -- indeed, that it was this one, with dust on it, and cracks, and hiding aliens, and every window broken: smoke hung over it like poisoned clouds. (13)

 

In the America of O-Zone what is more frightening than the routine round-up of economic refugees, the death-squads, the degraded environment, and the national “sacrifice zones,” is the casual acceptance by everybody that this is the way the world must be, perhaps has always been. In Theroux’s vision, the real horror lies in the way the slow apocalypse is normalized, the Unheimlich made Heimlich, murder and mayhem become healthful pastimes.

 

There are other writers who are sketching out the details of the end of the world, and they aren’t even fabulists. A recent spate of articles in no less liberal organs than The Atlantic and Harper’s take the first tentative steps down a road that should soon make earth’s deathwatch a mainstream topic of journalism. Robert Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy” looks at the Third World’s accelerating social, political, and environmental breakdowns, and their potential effects on the First World in the coming century. The scenario of O-Zone might have been drawn from Kaplan’s analysis: resource wars, massive migrations, climate change, tribalism and disease. Kaplan’s case study is west Africa, where these stresses, clearly exacerbated by the legacy of Western imperialism and post-colonial development policies, are producing “criminal anarchy.” “The coming upheaval,” he suggests, “in which foreign embassies are shut down, states collapse, and contact with the outside world takes place through dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts, will loom large in the century we are entering . . . Africa suggests what war, borders, and ethnic politics will be like a few decades hence” (54). Not just Africa will be affected, of course, for many of the problems there are endemic to the Balkans, Latin America, and much of Asia. As the state disintegrates in the Third World, the First World is destabilized by the chaos beyond its borders, borders it can no longer effectively control. Federal authority, incapable of dealing with regional problems, finds itself ceding powers to ever more isolated local communities.

 

That isolation will likely find itself playing out along predictable fault lines, as Michael Lind previews in a recent Harper’s article. In Lind’s view, the growing unwillingness of economic elites to support education, income redistribution, and health care, along with their retreat into the protected, privileged spaces of the neo-feudal society, combine to spell the end of the broad middle-class. The new underclass (Which Dares Not Speak Its Name due to its allegiance to the myth of egalitarian society) poses no threat to the economic royalists at the top, because as the war of all-against-all is felt particularly sharply at the bottom of the food chain, the various sub-groups that reside there can be counted on to perceive each other as the more immediate source of their problems.¹ Lind sees a two-tiered society in the making: an upper tier, provided with work, security, comfort, hope, and insulation/protection from a disenfranchised, fragmented, and squabbling underclass, which faces a hard-scrabble existence with little chance of improvement. The proper image for the new world order with its international moneyed class: an air-conditioned, tinted-windowed, bullet-proofed limousine gliding safely over a pot-holed, squalid, dangerous street in Lagos — or New York or Toronto.

 

Paul Kennedy, historian and author of Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, presents a wealth of evidence to support his own grimly compelling vision. Even as he performs the appropriate genuflections to the logic of the market and does a journeyman’s work in ranking countries’ “competitive advantages” as they face the road ahead, unlike his ebullient contemporaries Alvin Toffler or Bill Gates Kennedy has the good grace not to elide the incredible suffering that is going to occur in the Third World, and the honesty to admit the possibility of a no-win scenario all round. Kennedy also understands the importance of scale when it comes to thinking about human history, which in turn suggests the need to consider whether we are justified in thinking our past success in overcoming adversity provides any sort of basis for believing we are up to the challenges that now confront us:

 

this work also asks whether today's global forces for change are not moving us beyond our traditional guidelines into a remarkable new set of circumstances -- one in which human social organizations may be unequal to the challenges posed by overpopulation, environmental damage, and technology-driven revolutions and where the issue of winners and losers may to some degree be irrelevant. If, for example, the continued abuse of the developing world's environment leads to global warming, or, if there is a massive flood of economic refugees from the poorer to the richer parts of the world, everyone will suffer, in various ways. In sum, just as nation-state rivalries are being overtaken by bigger issues, we may have to think about the future on a far broader scale than has characterized thinking about international politics in the past. Even if the Great Powers still seek to rise, or at least not to fall, their endeavors could well occur in a world so damaged as to render much of that effort pointless. (15)

 

Unfortunately (for all of us), Kennedy’s book goes on to prove that the tone in this introductory passage is entirely too tentative.

 

In general, apocalyptic scenarios take place against the prior and persistent conceit that human culture does truly move to culmination, that there is a larger goal or a target toward which time’s arrow is moving. Like children inferring mommy and daddy will always be there because they have always been there in the past, we project our history forward under the presumption that the human presence on this planet is a durable one and, no matter how or why, purposive. We can’t imagine an alternative. But while in cultural development there has been innovation, differentiation, and amplification, such changes can no longer be taken as evidence for an overall direction or telos. For there is no teleology at work here, let alone an eschatology, a dialectic, or even a simple logic. In fact, it is precisely the absence of any point to our history that makes this apocalypse unreadable except as an accretion of systemically deleterious effects which, incredibly, have become indistinguishable from progress. Skeptical of totalizing theories, postmodern intellectuals are reluctant to prophesy doom, but without coherent oppositional narratives to clarify such effects those who profit from the positive spin have the stage to themselves. Thus every sign gets read as its opposite, every trend that points to a decline is seen as the prelude to improvement, and every person becomes a shareholder in the fantasies of the boosters. In this environment of doublethink, the now-routine failure of corporations or nations to provide even short-term security for their members can be glossed as bitter but necessary “medicine,” or as the “growing pains” associated with increasing economic “rationalization.” We are left in the paradoxical position described in game theory as the “prisoner’s dilemma” and in environmental thought as the “tragedy of the commons”: the incentive for individuals to ignore the evidence for unqualified disaster far outweighs the personal risks involved in seeking to slow it. Everyone proceeds according to this same calculation, indeed is encouraged to do so, and everyone suffers minimally — that is, until the collective moment of reckoning is reached.

 

Four Horsemen

 

What is the hard evidence that taking the long view reveals an apocalypse already in progress? To keep our metaphor intact, we could speak in terms of the “four horsemen.” There are the usual ones — war, famine, disease, pestilence — but to put a finer point on the apocalypse I’m describing we are better to call our riders 1) arms proliferation, 2) environmental degradation, 3) the crisis of meaning, and, crucially, 4) the malignant global economy.

 

1

 

Armaments are the world’s single biggest business. John Ralston Saul notes that “by any standards — historic, economic, moral, or simply practical — in a healthy economy arms would not occupy first place unless that society were at war. Even then, such prominence would be viewed as an aberration to be put up with no longer than events required” (141). The permanent war footing of the earth’s major powers, and the rapid military build-up of many others, constitutes an aberration that has ascended to normalcy, so much so, in fact, that most American taxpayers now understand military expenditures to be more vital than health, education and, especially, welfare. Indeed, on the far right, military spending is seen as the only legitimate use of taxes by a national government. Because the American body politic has obligingly allowed itself to be perfused with upwards of 200 million personal firearms with no signs of saturation in sight, the extent to which the psychological need for “self-defense” informs all segments of policy, foreign and domestic, should come as no surprise.

 

In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, certain questions are more easily entertained. What effect, for example, might all that personal firepower — and the willingness to use it — have in times of severe social disruption? Imagine, as Umberto Eco does (drawing on Roberto Vacca’s Il medio evo prossimo venturo), a giant traffic jam and blackout in the northeast US during a blizzard which leads to:

 

forced marches in the snow, with the dead left by the wayside. Lacking provisions of any kind, the wayfarers try to commandeer food and shelter, and the tens of millions of firearms sold in America are put to use. All power is taken over by the armed forces, although they too are victims of the general paralysis. Supermarkets are looted, the supply of candles in homes runs out, and the number of deaths from cold, hunger and starvation in the hospitals rises. When, after a few weeks, things have with difficulty returned to normal, millions of corpses scattered throughout the city and countryside begin to spread epidemics, bringing back scourges on a scale equal to that of the Black Death . . . (489)

 

. . . and on it goes, with a decline in the rule of law and a general disintegration of modern society into neo-feudalism. Now Eco’s point, highlighted by this rather dramatic scenario, is that in a sense we don’t need a disaster to inaugurate a new middle age for, to make the point yet again, in many respects we are already living through one: “One must decide whether the above thesis is an apocalyptic scenario or the exaggeration of something that already exists.”

 

Of course, advanced weaponry is not necessary to kill whole peoples, as the horror of Rwanda has shown. The rhetoric of the N.R.A. may then be largely correct, with only an addendum necessary: Guns don’t kill people, people kill people — guns are just a way of creating “added value.” Given the underlying tensions between ethnic and national groups, religions and classes, arms sales become simply a method by which the First World cashes in on the simmering results of its own colonial adventures and the world’s myriad internecine feuds. Even the nuclear arsenals in the making in Israel, Pakistan, India, or Iraq, which now bring these countries near-universal opprobrium, were unthinkable without the prior transfer of necessary bootstrapping technologies by the West to these, the earth’s most lucrative hot-spots.

 

In general, the multiplication of arms throughout the Third World means that the struggles which are likely to arise ever-more frequently in the decades to come (i.e., nationalist and ethnic wars, and wars for resources) have the potential to be fought at increasingly high levels of ferocity with concomitantly high levels of collateral damage to infrastructure and environment. As the Persian Gulf conflict amply demonstrated, modern warfare not only targets military personnel and civilians, but also aims to reduce the capacity of the ecosystem to support the survivors.

 

2

 

About the degradation and exhaustion of the planetary biosphere, again not much needs be said. Most of us are benumbed by the statistical evidence that points to our gross long-term mismanagement of the earth’s resources, its biota, and its atmosphere, soils, and water. The State of the World reports from the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, for example, provide disturbing yearly round-ups of the various obstacles the planet faces in its “progress toward a sustainable society,” as the reports’ subtitle judiciously puts it. Yet that “progress” toward sustainability still awaits confirmation. Worldwatch director Lester Brown and his associates lament in their 1993 foreword, “One of these years we would like to write an upbeat State of the World, one reporting that some of the trends of global degradation have been reversed. Unfortunately, not enough people are working yet to reverse the trends of decline for us to write such a report. We are falling far short in our efforts” (xvii). As a sequential reading of the reports quickly shows, not only are we “falling short” but the decline becomes ever more precipitous with each passing year. Typical articles try to put a brave face on unmitigated disaster: “Conserving Biological Diversity” discusses the earth’s declining biological diversity; “Confronting Nuclear Waste” explores the technical incapacity of humans to deal with nuclear waste; “Reforming Forestry” documents the annihilation of the earth’s forests; “Reviving Coral Reefs” describes their worldwide decline. (One wonders what an analysis of Canada’s former east coast fishery might have been called: maybe “Keeping the Cod Stocks Healthy.”)

 

Environmental apocalypticism is by now a familiar part of the landscape, but all the anxiety in the world does little to moderate our destructiveness. Just as smokers or alcoholics do not perceive the ongoing catastrophe in their cells and tissues and can therefore project the day of reckoning far into the future, so too is our devastation of the environment a problem in observation. The social system has not evolved to recognize environmental perturbations in a preemptive and amelioratory manner; in fact, it is constructed precisely on the basis of ignoring such stimuli as it pursues its own self-organization (see Luhmann). Environmental problems are endlessly recontextualized, analyzed, debated, and circulated through bureaucracies to the point where environmental protection consists largely in changing the definitions of “wetlands,” “allowable catch,” or “toxic limits” to comply with a state that already exists. Indeed, from this systems theory paradigm, it is questionable whether society is any longer capable of drawing a useful distinction between sign and referent at all.

 

3

 

This brings us to Jean Baudrillard, who must be the crown prince of apocalypse theory, although one suspects the actual mechanics of the world’s undoing would for him be nothing more than the messy and mundane details of a crisis far more profound and far more interesting, one that occurs at the level of meaning, purpose, the sign itself. That crisis appears simultaneously as both an excess and a scarcity:

 

It is as if the poles of our world were converging, and this merciless short circuit manifests both overproduction and the exhaustion of potential energies at the same time. It is no longer a matter of crisis but of disaster, a catastrophe in slow motion. The real crisis lies in the fact that policies no longer permit this dual political game of hope and metaphorical promise. The pole of reckoning, dénouement, and apocalypse (in the good and bad sense of the word), which we had been able to postpone until the infiniteness of the Day of Judgment, this pole has come infinitely closer, and one could join Canetti in saying that we have already passed it unawares and now find ourselves in the situation of having overextended our own finalities, of having short-circuited our own perspectives, and of already being in the hereafter, that is, without horizon and without hope. ("The Anorexic Ruins")

 

With Baudrillard the apocalypse is long played out, old news, so one shouldn’t panic. How can you panic about an apocalypse that precedes you, exceeds you, defines you? Baudrillard long presaged R.E.M. by announcing, “It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine).” While I agree with him that we are now moving through a signscape made unnavigable by its own excrescences, Baudrillard’s emphasis is, as always, on the futility of resistance. Emerging out of the seventies and eighties as a theory of what is beginning to look like the final flowering of the welfare state, Baudrillard’s post-scarcity semiotic is no longer so timely:

 

We are already experiencing or soon will experience the perfection of the societal. Everything is there. The heavens have come down to earth. We sense the fatal taste of material paradise. It drives one to despair, but what should one do? No future. Nevertheless, do not panic. Everything has already become nuclear, faraway, vaporized. The explosion has already occurred; the bomb is only a metaphor now. What more do you want? Everything has already been wiped off the map. It is useless to dream: the clash has gently taken place everywhere.

 

Armageddon by surplus meaning, a drowning in honey. Not exactly what the prophet St. John had in mind. For the many victims caught in the slow torture of the ongoing apocalypse, this aesthetisization of the endgame would be nothing short of obscene. The more natural stance toward this mess is one of anger, indignation, and defiance: as a friend of mine puts it, “sometimes you have to pick up the cue by the narrow end and start swinging.” That’s pool-hall politics, but in the face of Baudrillard’s incognizable hyperreality it’s either that or lapse into numb acquiescence as the velvet jackboots are put to you.

 

Whether one resigns oneself to the seductions of hyperreality or falls into sheer animal panic, the point I think Baudrillard makes very well is that there is no longer a clear imperative to do anything at all. Perhaps the apocalypse is upon us, but so what? Unless or until a critical mass of desperation is reached, it seems unlikely the advanced nations have the collective will to acknowledge their own precarious situation: that they have at best shunted the ecological ramifications of their industrialization onto the rest of the world; that they can provide meaningful work to fewer and fewer of their citizens; that they have no moral authority to tell any other country how or at what pace to develop its economy; and that their political structure is fast devolving into a policy clearing-house for international capital and its movers and stakeholders.

 

4

 

This latter point brings us to the final horse, and let’s for a moment imagine, as do some biblical scholars and most economists and politicians, that this particular horse is the white one, the one which the Savior himself is said to ride. The savior in this secular interpretation would be liberal democracy and capitalism, which along with the lowering of trade barriers through international agreements such as GATT and NAFTA and the application of market principles to ever more forms of human interaction, marks the sublime phase of our political and economic development. This optimistic reading is embraced by people like Milton Friedman, Newt Gingrich, and Francis Fukuyama, whose The End of History and The Last Man is a Hegelian treatment of the apotheosis of liberal democracy and capitalism, or “lib-dem-cap” as I’ll call them to signify the conflation of the political and economic implicit in Fukuyama’s thesis. The victory of lib-dem-cap is the outer limit of human socio-economic evolution, rational self-interest quenched and hardened in the smithy of democratic institutions.

 

In Fukuyama’s view, although the voyage to lib-dem-cap has been a difficult one, the many horrors of the twentieth century have been but a few rapids in the inexorable flow of history, not evidence of a basic flaw in his (or Hegel’s) teleology. This think-tank idealism’s blithe elision of the manifest empirical facts of our time prompts Jacques Derrida to write:

 

it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the "end of ideologies" and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth. (85)

 

Must it now be that to reach the golden age promised in Revelations, Hugo Gernsback, and The Jetsons we must first pass through an extraordinary period of “structural adjustment” that for most will be no different than a living hell? Stock markets rise and total output increases but, as if it were some bloated parasite drawing off our nourishment, improvements in the fortune of global capital generally mean a diminishment in the lives of the people an economy is supposed to serve. A rise in the stock market means the stock market has risen; an increase in GDP means Exxon wrecked another oil-tanker and Boeing fired ten thousand workers. Somehow, irresponsibility and profit-taking by corporations can accrue to a country as a net gain. Coddled and coveted by liberal democracy, big business was celebrated as the goose that laid the golden egg of employment, but stateless corporations and financial institutions now steal their eggs along with them as they head for greener pastures. Capitalism has always had to destroy so that it could create more capital, but global capitalism destroys so that there is little left but capital. Soon, the new trans-national economy, with its elite class of knowledge workers, money-movers, and their subordinates, will rise and circulate like a warm, pleasant zephyr above the miasma below, where laissez-faire will still obtain, but only as method of enforcing the stratification.

 

In the conclusion to his book, Fukuyama marshals the image of a wagon train of nations at last entering a new frontier town to symbolize the arduous journey to the liberal capitalist utopia at history’s trail-end. But the image rings hollow in today’s by no means kinder and gentler world. Fukuyama seems to believe the “rich North Atlantic democracies” (to borrow Richard Rorty’s phrase) are destined to be history’s John Waynes or Glenn Fords; but there is nothing in the brutal present and recent past to think so, and plenty to think they might be better compared to the Clint Eastwood character in Unforgiven, whose only heroic quality is that he doesn’t kill the whores. If lib-dem-cap as currently constructed represents the best of all possible socio-economic arrangements, there may not be world enough and time to see it come to fruition across the globe.

 

Revelations 6:17

 

Yet even this dismal portrayal of lib-dem-cap has a darker dimension. For what if the gathering storm is in some sense and in some quarters gamely anticipated? What if there are those who not only understand precisely the kind of fix we are in but actually view it as a confirmation of their ideology — and an opportunity to exploit? I do not mean the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who already started the apocalypse clock running in 1975, or their assorted ilk, who are no doubt preparing for a Judgment Day in the year 2000. Nor do I mean the various cults and survivalists who stockpile supplies and munitions against nuclear war, totalitarian government, or forestry service workers. No, I’m simply talking about those who have always had an interest in chaos, the folks who think that just as with Kennedy’s rising and falling nations, life divides people into winners and losers — and it’s best to be among the winners. In the halcyon days of supply-side economics the rhetoric from these cash-value pragmatists said that in open market competition even the loser wins. But now the news is less rosy. It turns out that in the new economy we won’t all be driving Cadillacs. In O-Zone even the millionaires and billionaires are worried:

 

"You think just because there hasn't been a world war or a nuclear explosion the world's okay. But the planet's hotter and a whole lot messier, and that leak was worse than a bomb. And look at crime. Look at the alien problem. Look at money. Forget war -- war's a dinosaur. The world is much worse off."“I’m not worse off,” Murdick said . . . “Neither are you.”

 

"Willis, what kind of a world is it when there are some simple things you can't buy with money?" Hooper added, "I hate that." (13)

 

Life in the future looks more and more like a zero-sum game, and as any investment consultant will tell you, you must prepare yourself for a pay-as-you-go economy in which only the savvy and the diversified will survive.

 

In this sort of milieu it’s only natural to subscribe to the Chicago Gangster Theory of life, as Andrew Ross names the rising tide of social Darwinism after the genetic model of Richard Dawkins: “Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases, for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior” (quoted in Ross 254). Ross is quick to point out that the “gangster” is an ill-chosen metaphor for absolute self-interest, because there is just as much or more basis for the opposite view, that gangsters, like everyone else, are embedded in social networks that bind them to their families, friends, communities, and so on. But while I agree with Ross that Dawkins’ theory is part and parcel of the Hobbesian world-view that sociobiology often seems to underwrite, our manifestly inequitable and unjust social order doesn’t require a Dawkins or a Darwin to justify itself (although it could use a new Dickens to describe it). It now gets along quite well with no justification at all. The “way things are” seems to have become its own excuse, and the regurgitation of this or that bio-ideology is simply a prettying-up operation of power structures already secured by the fact that they can “get away with it.”

 

So what can be done about the secular four horsemen? The short answer is: nothing, really. An apocalypse, even one that moves like a tortoise, does not admit of correction, mitigation, or reversal. Taking on each of these catastrophic developments alone might bear positive results, but even assuming they were seen as tokens of impending doom instead of the price of progress, their total magnitude poses a challenge only a concerted effort by all responsible nations could even begin to deal with. Some technophilic wowsers suppose that what man has unleashed, he can, so to speak, re-leash. But as the apocalyptic forces have had decades, centuries perhaps, to gain momentum and have, too, insinuated themselves into the physical processes of the planet and the mental furniture of the human animal, the organizational apparatus, technical control, and collective good faith required now to bring these forces to heel seem to defy plausibility.

 

But then (and to borrow a term from biology that specifies evolutionary experiments that are freakishly maladapted to non-extraordinary environments) what are humans but “hopeful monsters”? One group of Ragnarockers who call themselves “DOOM, the Society for Secular Armageddonism,” express their faith in the coming apocalypse this way:

 

This conviction is based not on religious prophecy, but on observance [sic] of a multitude of critical world threats, including nuclear proliferation, chemical/biological weapons, terrorism, ozone depletion, global warming, deforestation, acid rain, massive species loss, ocean and air pollution, exploding population, global complacency and many more. We believe the magnitude and number of these threats represent a movement toward a secular apocalypse that has gained such momentum it can no longer be stopped. The situation is hopeless. In the face of this coming cataclysm, the Society feels that the only viable remaining option is immediate emergency action, across the board, against all global threats. Such action is imperative if there be any chance of delaying the inevitable, of staving off, however temporarily, our imminent doom. (Apocalypse Culture; my emphasis)

 

That’s the thing about apocalypses: they offer no hope, no hope at all, but humans just won’t seem to throw in the towel. In that light, we can take equally cold comfort from the distinguished economist Robert Heilbroner, who wrote twenty years ago in his Inquiry into the Human Prospect that

 

in all likelihood we must brace ourselves for the consequences of what we have spoken -- the risk of "wars of redistribution" or of "preemptive seizure," the rise of social tensions in the industrialized nations over the division of an ever more slow-growing or even diminishing product, and the prospect of a far more coercive exercise of national power as the means by which we will attempt to bring these disruptive processes under control. From that period of harsh adjustment, I can see no escape. Rationalize as we will, stretch the figures as favorably as honesty will permit, we cannot reconcile the requirements for a lengthy continuation of the present rate of industrialization of the globe with the capacity of existing resources or the fragile biosphere to permit or to tolerate the effects of that industrialization. Nor is it easy to foresee a willing acquiescence of humankind, individually or through its existing social organizations, in the alterations of lifeways that foresight would dictate. If then, by the question "Is there hope for man?" we ask whether it is possible to meet the challenges of the future without the payment of a fearful price, the answer must be: No, there is no such hope. (162)

 

Predictably, despite this dismal prognosis Heilbroner manages to find the silver lining, or at least, in a tough-minded way, how we (and I tend to think “we” is properly understood as the “West,”) might construe the coming disaster as a test of our mettle:

 

The human prospect is not an irrevocable death sentence. It is not an inevitable doomsday toward which we are headed, although the risk of enormous catastrophe exists. The prospect is better viewed as a formidable array of challenges that must be overcome before human survival is assured, before we can move beyond doomsday. These challenges can be overcome by the saving intervention of nature if not by the wisdom and foresight of man. The death sentence is therefore better viewed as a contingent life sentence -- one that will permit the continuance of human society, but only on a basis very different from that of the present, and probably only after much suffering during the period of transition. (164)

 

In other words, if we don’t discipline ourselves nature will do it for us. Either way, what doesn’t kill everybody makes the survivors stronger, to place Heilbroner’s views in their properly Nietzchean philosophical climate.

 

As these two examples show us, following the typical apocalyptic narrative structure seems almost as unavoidable as the apocalypse itself: “We’re screwed, no getting around it, but . . .” So it is that doomsayers, for all their dire warnings, like to hold out the note of hope, the chance that maybe things could turn out differently if only we’ll listen to them more attentively. This carrot-and-stick strategy helps us see that apocalyptic rhetoric is always an invocation of power: do thus and so, or else suffer the consequences. Even those, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Pat Robertson, who are firmly convinced the Judgment Day is at hand, have a practical agenda in the here and now to gain adherents and compel obedience, and clearly the apocalypse scenario is a useful tool.² The only thing more predictable than apocalyptic pronouncements is the scoffing with which they are greeted, yet the apocalyptic frame of mind is never impressed by the fact that doomsday has always failed to manifest itself decisively. In truth, apocalypticism depends on the asymptotic inability of the world to ever reach conclusion; the perpetual pregnancy of the apocalyptic moment is what keeps its metaphoric appeal so strong. What good is the apocalypse once it begins? As Ross notes in his discussion of Dawkins, the notion of “scarcity” — whether in terms of time, food, wealth, or heavenly seating-room, and whether based on ecology, economics, or the Gospels — is a powerful means by which to limit freedoms and naturalize repressive social orders. Perhaps this is another reason why it is difficult for us to entertain the notion that we are already moving through the apocalypse: to admit to such a thing would be to drain the “threat of doom” of its potency, and would allow the symbolic value of scarcity (mobilized so effectively by fiscal conservatives and religious zealots alike) to be effaced by a more coercive and brutal set of exigencies. Yet perhaps if we owned up to these disastrous exigencies we would at least be better prepared to discuss openly the socio-political bases for shortage, which so far are labeled by economists simply as “the distribution problem.”

 

Having said that, it might now seem appropriate to acknowledge my own unspoken agenda, to call out for an end to arms sales, genuine environmental protection, renewal of civic society, guaranteed incomes to redistribute wealth, and so on. In posting that agenda, I would also be heading off the charge that my theory is irresponsible precisely because it describes an apocalypse that is ongoing, overwhelming, and a fortiori not susceptible to correction. Admittedly, there is a point at which cynicism should draw back from fatalism. Yet I only wish my subject left me cheery enough to believe such introspection would amount to more than an exercise in fashionable self-reflexivity.

 

So let me instead conclude as despairingly as I began. We know that “History” consists of grand narratives arranged over past, present, and future events. We learn from Lyotard that metanarrative is now moribund. But we simply cannot go on without internalizing at least one metanarrative, for today, tomorrow, and the days after that: the narrative that takes for granted the world will go on. We all get up each morning and pursue our private lives as if they fit into this larger story, which is, granted, a story without a defined resolution, but still one we hope is not without a plot, at least not as far as it concerns us personally. Doesn’t everyone who raises a child believe, with Bill Clinton, in “a place called Hope”? Isn’t hope another name for the implicit belief that time is taking us somewhere, that things can only get better — even if now they are quite bad? Don’t we tell our children that things always have a way of working out?

 

Well, what if things don’t have a “way” of working out; what if the notion that our world works at all is based on a sample too small to be predictive, a nose taken for a camel? Suppose our hyper-complex civilization is nothing more than an evolutionary blind alley. This is not a new idea, but let us place it an even more sweeping context. Recent discoveries of planets around nearby stars have upped the odds of non-terrestrial life, but at the same time led some in the SETI community (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) to suppose that were there many enduring civilizations in the galaxy we would have detected one by now, considering that our bubble of electromagnetic semiosis announces our presence for more than fifty light years in all directions. Yet any fellow sentients remain, contra The X-Files, tellingly silent. Some conclude that a paucity of ETI can be explained only if advanced civilizations have a relatively brief life span, so that by their technological zenith they are already senescent. To be sure, such a theory is as unfalsifiable as can be imagined. But if nothing else it reminds us of how facile, too, is the opposing theory, the one we have never relinquished, the one that assumes rather than having a foot in the grave our world is only now learning to walk.

 

Ours may be understood as an apocalypse without origin or destination. It may have begun to unpack with the advent of the junk bond, the A-bomb, the concentration camp, the internal combustion engine, the corporation, or even the scientific method; and it may cease only when most of those things are no more. So then: is this apocalypse I have described really an apocalypse, or just the motion of history itself? For the multitudes who have died, are dying, and will die under modern history’s heavy feet there is no significant difference. Perhaps it is time to ask ourselves the questions we have foolishly assumed this same history has already settled. Who says the human presence on this earth was ever sustainable? Why do we continue to believe so strongly in our competency to manage the risks we compound daily? Where is this secret heart of history we trust has been beating? What precisely leads us to believe our world is not perishing? Why isn’t this the Apocalypse?

 

 

Notes

 

1. In that vein, another Harper’s article finds Canadian David Frum, the latest synapse in the pan-national neo-con brain-trust, demonstrating one of the sly, faux-populist containment strategies by which the elites and their spokespeople help single out the currently unemployed underclass as the approved scapegoat for those not currently unemployed: “People are tired of the constant moaning they hear about the poor. A lot of middle-class taxpayers feel they’re paying more and more for the poor and the poor are behaving worse and worse. And people are not sure that they’re as sympathetic as they used to be” (“A Revolution.” 50).

 

2. Editorializing in The New Republic, Robert Wright seems somewhat puzzled by the conspicuous paradoxes in Robertson’s apocalyptic rhetoric: “First he uses climate chaos as a recruiting device, amassing money and power by calling it a sign of the apocalypse. Then he uses the money and power to decry policies that might reduce the chaos and forestall the apocalypse. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy!” But of course the whole point is that Robertson’s supporters don’t want to him do anything about the apocalypse save to check off its signs and help them prepare for the end. The apocalypse they envision is simply prelude to salvation, and the only danger would be to have a soul unfit for the millennium. To send money to block the apocalypse would be like paying Dr. Kevorkian to not help expedite your demise.

 

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