It's not an event, it's an environment
Avoiding The Fetal Position, pt 1 of 2: Therapeutic Apocalypticism
Should I be concerned?
In some sense, my therapist asks me this question every session. This week, however, he raised the question specifically in response to the fact that I started a newsletter about the worst parts of the Bible coming to life. I said something about how it’s helpful for me to process through writing, etc etc. Later, I realized that it would have been more cathartic for me to answer as though the question was about the prospect of apocalypse itself.
In that case, of course, the only possible answer is: Ya Think?
I’m a proudly left-of-center, non-literalist Jesusperson. I’m also a mild depressive who likes (needs) to write songs and play guitar very loud to expel bad vibes. When I was 11 years old I tried to get through Left Behind, but I got bored because I had already read It, Jurassic Park, and The Andromeda Strain. All of which is to say, as much distance as my academic training may pressure me to have from this topic, my personal temperament, political persuasion, early theological immersion, and equally early literary habits pretty much doomed me as far as the Steven Pinker view of history is concerned.
No, I don’t think the founding of the modern state of Israel fulfills Biblical prophecy, and I’m not about to create a map with the words “THE BEAST WITH TEN HORNS” scrawled over the European Union. But I also don’t think one can take in the headlines—climate crisis! lolfascism! Corporate AI! Capitalists monetizing Chinese Communist propaganda! whatever this is!—without thinking maybe, perhaps, This Is It: if not the end of all things, then at least the end of whatever name you want to put to the world-system (International neoliberal order? Late-stage capitalism? Anthropocene?) presently engulfing humanity.
I mean...none of this is controversial, right? I don’t think I’m saying anything mind-blowing for anyone with a passing interest in world affairs. Maybe 4 years ago, you could argue, such a person might have been justified in responding by reciting, albeit with a gentle stammer, the credo of progress. The centre is still holding, it’s getting better all the time, etc. But as far as I can tell, on or about November 2016, human nature changed, and that change pretty much killed the question “Should I be concerned?”
I’m being (slightly) hyperbolic, but I really believe Trump’s election—along with Brexit, Duterte’s election in the Philippines, Xi Jinping’s ascension to “core leader,” and other events from that wonderful year—marked a world-historical turning point whose ramifications are only gradually becoming visible. (I wholly endorse the position that, crucial as 2020 will be, 2016 was the most important election of our lifetime.) The questions that define The Way We Live Now could be better phrased, “Is there any reason today to not be concerned? Also, what should I do with the concern gnawing at the inside of my skull and spreading like lice all over my body?”
(Hey, you signed up for a newsletter about the end of the world, not me! I’m just giving you the existentially horrific content you demanded…)
This is the core issue when we step back and consider the contours of the present crisis. Is the thought of cataclysm so crushing that it negates political action? Does the scale of imminent collapse obliterate the difference between doing something and doing nothing? Is there such a thing as an apocalyptic vision that mobilizes rather than paralyzes? Have I rephrased the same question enough times yet?
Some would call doing the eschaton twist a call to resignation, an unhealthy, navel-gazing kind of nihilism that comes naturally to someone who spent his childhood in a sunlight-deprived city. But fatalism, as far as I’m concerned, comes from not thinking about The End(s) clearly or deeply enough, treating it rather as a vague phenomenon threatening everyone who isn’t Jonathan Franzen.
Funnily enough, in the past month alone I’ve come across at least 3 journals featuring meditation about how to confront apocalypse without curling into a fetal position. If I were more of a charismatic believer I’d say that’s a sign I have the gift of second sight. I’m more of a charismatic-adjacent reluctant Calvinist, though, so I’ll take that as a sign that total depravity is the only crushingly obvious aspect of Christian doctrine, at least to anyone who’s observed homo sapiens’ undying propensity for treating the “hear no evil/see no evil” monkeys as moral exemplars.
Anyway, these 3 positions could respectively be called therapeutic apocalypticism, utopian apocalypticism, and kairotic apocalypticism. I’m fully aware that they “could” be called these things only by someone who spent 7 years in English graduate school, but bear with me. I’ll start with the article with the cutest name, by futurist Jamais Cascio: “The Apocalypse: It’s Not The End Of The World.”
If Cascio is right, we should respond precisely by treating the end times as fodder for a really emotional counseling session. In a recent issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (love that definite article, makes it sounds like a mid-oughts indie band), Cascio argues that we misunderstand the apocalypse insofar as we think of it as “a shattering, all-encompassing transformation,” whose sudden onset births “an entirely new paradigm for humanity.” To the contrary, Cascio writes, “The apocalypse isn’t an event; it’s an environment”:
We’re so accustomed to thinking about apocalyptic futures as a storytelling playground, or as a reset button, or as a confirmation that we were right all along, that too few of us have given much consideration to how we might experience a truly apocalyptic scenario. It would be unlikely to take us by surprise, so we’d feel dread as things worsen. It wouldn’t hit evenly around the world, so we’d be able to see what kinds of suffering we face as it approaches. Most importantly, it wouldn’t be an overnight change. It would be the slow torture of seeing everything fall apart, knowing that we could have stopped it.
Good thing that description sounds completely hypothetical and not at all like our era of rolling Californian blackouts and billionaires pouring infrastructure-saving capital into luxury silos and once again whatever this is.
Environment rather than event, Cascio’s version of apocalypse comes into focus almost like a pointillist painting, a multitude of mini-crises that, over the course of decades, add up to “everything falling apart.” Yet Cascio somehow also asserts that this “ongoing traumatic shock,” when named as such, holds the potential for personal and collective conversion. Confronting apocalypse as a present progressive trauma, our response would “feel more like therapy than a form of admonishment or an erasure of the old,” as we process the emotional experience of subsisting, moment by moment, on the brink. Therapeutic apocalypticism might, in turn, “prove a more fruitful driver for action” as we “acknowledge the sheer resilience of humanity.”
It’s a beautiful vision, not just of how humans might respond to the long emergency, but of therapy itself. I guess I could stand to acknowledge a little more sheer resilience in counseling. I made it through defending my dissertation, dammit. I can handle Skynet! In all seriousness, I see profound value in periodically naming the common factor amidst all the varieties of trauma that characterize human society, the thread of continuity that binds our pain together: It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. Nursing our wounds at twilight, we might at least find solace in tending to each other’s sores, and also in Bob Dylan’s voice, which really is lovelier than people think.
At the same time, it’s telling that Cascio’s therapeutic apocalypticism focuses on “minimizing harm,” “mitigating the catastrophe.” Of course, even Medicare for All and the Green New Deal are projects of mitigation, not salvation: neither Big Pharma or Big Oil are going to go down without a fight. (Just in case you stop reading now, this IN NO WAY makes either M4A or the GND undeserving of support!) Still, I can’t help but think that Cascio’s prescription, without some clearer definition, would produce the most minimal form of minimization. Therapy is, after all, ultimately about the individual’s sheer resilience, not humanity’s. If apocalypse is reducible to a tapestry of individual traumas, then it’s not hard to see how the corollary response would remain focused on the personal and psychological, not the political; on coping, not revolutionizing.
Such a response seems especially likely in light of the ongoing pervasiveness of pop therapy, albeit the kind with F-bombs. The gig economy’s fixation with the entrepreneurial individual pretty much guarantees that, in practice, “therapeutic apocalypticism” may look a lot like self-help books advising the reader to “unfuck your end times.” Drink more tea! Let go of grudges! Find your passion! Establish boundaries (literally, as in move further inland to escape the encroaching ocean)! Granted, I haven’t done a deep dive into self-help books, but most of the time, the “help” in question strikes me as purely apolitical or just flat out reactionary. This is why the chapter headings of Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck (“Don’t Try,” “Happiness Is A Problem”) and Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life (“Stand Up Straight With Your Shoulders Back,” “Treat Yourself Like Someone You Are Responsible For Helping”) are basically interchangeable. Eventually, Mark Manson is going to get his own Quillette column, and then, truly, the end times will be upon us.
I mean, we live in a timeline where people can unironically liken the word “Boomer” to the most hateful slur in the English language, and where billionaires burst into tears on live TV as they contemplate the dehumanizing horror of having to pay a wealth tax. Absent some rigorous theorizing about what the concepts of “harm” and “mitigation” actually mean, therapeutic apocalypticism is just going to ensure that the Great Unraveling features a lot of wannabe Mark Mansons and Marie Kondos signing streaming deals. I’m sure at least a couple billionaires will want to watch that content in their lavishly decorated bunkers, as they consider whether their imitation Monet paintings spark joy, and contemplate how persecuted they were in the Before Times.
I think I’ve written too much for the Sabbath and I’m threatening to violate Mark Manson’s first rule of living well. I’ll hit the pause button, and will pick up with utopian and kairotic apocalypticisms in the next post. In the meantime, I told you this newsletter was going to involves some serious bear enthusiasms, so here’s a video about a cub and a German Shepherd becoming besties.