ON: Canceling the Apocalypse

Is it the end of the world as we know it?

Song of the Week: “I Know the End,” by Phoebe Bridgers - “The billboard said ‘The End Is Near’ / I turned around, there was nothing there”

The summer after my junior year of university, I sublet an apartment that didn’t have Wi-Fi. At the beginning of the summer, my brother Paul gave me an unusual gift: an external hard drive loaded with pirated movies and TV shows to watch on my laptop in the long, internet-free evenings after work. 

I don’t remember anything I watched that summer, with one notable exception: the 2013 special effects extravaganza Pacific Rim. I remember lying on the couch under the humming air conditioning, eating roasted chickpeas and drinking root beer, utterly absorbed by this immensely silly movie on my laptop screen. 

I rewatched Pacific Rim last night, and am happy to report that I still had a fantastic time. The movie, directed by Guillermo del Toro, is set in the futuristic world of 2025, twelve years after enormous monsters called “kaiju” emerged from a trans-dimensional rift beneath the Pacific Ocean and started wreaking havoc on coastal cities. In response, the world’s militaries and scientists banded together to create a succession of “jaegers,” skyscraper-sized robots controlled simultaneously by duos of pilots who are “drift-compatible.”

Listen. It’s a movie about giant robots punching giant monsters using the power of friendship. It’s not sophisticated. It’s also extremely fun, in a “twelve-year-old boy’s imagination” kind of way. I hadn’t remembered the scene where the protagonists’ jaeger uses a container ship as a baseball bat to hit a kaiju attacking Hong Kong, a scene so absurd and satisfying that I was left laughing like a toddler knocking over a tower of blocks. 

What I did remember, however - what stayed with me in the twelve years since I first watched the movie - was Idris Elba’s climactic inspirational speech.¹

“Today. Today…at the edge of our hope, at the end of our time, we have chosen not only to believe in ourselves, but in each other,” declares the delightfully named Stacker Pentecost. “Today there is not a man or woman in here that shall stand alone. Not today. Today we face the monsters that are at our door and bring the fight to them! Today, we are canceling the apocalypse!

The speech is basically a carbon copy of Bill Pullman’s equally cheesy and equally glorious climactic speech at the end of Independence Day (1996), but for some reason that last line lingers with me. Canceling the apocalypse.

Apocalyptic Visions

We’ve been making apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic movies for almost as long as we’ve had movies. The 1916 Danish movie The End of the World depicts worldwide destruction and chaos following a comet that passes close to earth. It tapped into anxieties about Haley’s Comet, which had passed Earth six years earlier, as well as fears about the ongoing World War I. 

In the decades that followed, hundreds of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic movies were made, some of them introducing imagery that would remain iconic today. Japan gave us the Godzilla franchise (1954-), a thinly-veiled analogy for the horrors wrought by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The War of the Worlds (1953) adapted H. G. Wells’s allegory for colonization into an alien invasion movie that tapped into contemporary anxieties about nuclear war, modern warfare, and the U.S.S.R. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) created the contemporary zombie apocalypse genre, which is still going strong today with 28 Months Later and The Last of Us.

And I’ll never forget the deep, visceral dread I felt when my dad brought home the climate change apocalypse movie The Day After Tomorrow (2004) from Blockbuster. I was so upset by the movie’s imagery - and the possibility that a young girl would have a limb amputated - that I went to my room and refused to finish watching it.² I still haven’t seen the ending.

Why do generations of viewers have such an appetite for apocalyptic movies? 

Some of it, of course, is for the low-brow joy of destructive spectacle: it can be viscerally satisfying to watch giant robots smash giant monsters through skyscrapers, or see aliens mangle national landmarks.³

But apocalyptic narratives are also nothing new. Humans have been describing or predicting the (potentially imminent) end of the world for thousands of years. The Torah describes God destroying the world in a Great Flood, and the book of Daniel predicts the end of the world as well. Norse mythology tells of the coming Ragnarök, in which prominent gods including Odin, Thor, and Loki will die and the world will burn.⁴ And the Biblical book of Revelation, with its signs of the End Times and Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, provides much of prophecy and iconography that we now see as inextricable from the end of the world.

As I have written about many times, I grew up Seventh-Day Adventist. Seventh-day Adventism emerged from the 1840s Millerite movement, a Second Great Awakening religious movement that aimed to predict the imminent return of Jesus down to the day: October 22, 1844. When Jesus did not return - an event referred to as “The Great Disappointment” - some of the Millerites regrouped and set out to proclaim the Gospel around the world while still anticipating Jesus’ soon return.

I am grateful for many of the gifts given to me by growing up Adventist - pacificism, vegetarianism, an emphasis on education and health - but the relentless focus on the End Times is not one of them. While my parents didn’t spend much time talking about the end of the world, it was inescapable in the larger Adventist culture. At church, at family reunions, and on the playground I would hear about “wars and rumors of wars,” about catastrophic earthquakes that would drown the entire state of California, of the violent persecution of Adventists that was just around the corner.⁵

I used to have nightmares about the end of the world at least once a month, would wake up shaking and soaked in sweat, my imagination filled with vivid images of armed men shooting my dad for being an Adventist pastor. When the 2008 financial crisis happened, I had a panic attack. This is it, I thought. The End Times are here. Not once did I think I would live long enough to get married, build a career, or have a child. 

While Adventism particularly focused on the End Times, it is not unique. My friends who grew up Evangelical had their own apocalyptic books and movies: 1972’s A Thief in the Night, and the infamous Rapture-inspired Left Behind series (1995-2007). 

While I am no longer an Adventist, that apocalyptic anxiety is still with me. And it has a lot to feed it. From climate change to fascism to AI, every day brings me new horrors, new harbingers of doom.

On Tuesday, during our weekly check-in, my boss Jon casually mentioned AI 2027, a flashy set of predictions about artificial intelligence that have been making the rounds since April of this year.⁶

Using a convincing set of dynamic graphs, numbers, and breathless prose, the authors predict that AI will achieve superhuman sentience by 2027 and completely exterminate humans by 2030. “It’s pretty scary stuff,” Jon said, outlining his idea for an article featuring our professors’ response while I tried to avoid having a panic attack at my desk. Should I even try to have kids if they’re just going to die immediately? 

Fortunately, half an hour of reading allayed my anxieties and exposed AI 2027’s many inaccuracies, logical leaps, and science fiction-level flights of fancy. But the damage to my nervous system was done. And I know it will happen again. If it’s not a hostile AI takeover, it’s widespread climate collapse, or the Carrington Event, or the Yellowstone supervolcano. 

I can’t help it. I still expect the End Times around every corner. 

How do I avoid spending my life anticipating my violent, imminent death?

We Have Made It Through Worse

The author Emily St. John Mandel is most famous for her postapocalyptic novel Station Eleven (2014), which became particularly popular in 2020 because of its depiction of a world-ending pandemic. Her centuries-spanning novel Sea of Tranquility (2022), however, has just as much to say about the end of the world. 

One thread of the book follows Olive Llewelyn (a clear stand-in for the author) as she lives through a pandemic in 2203 after writing a famous book about a fictional one. In an interview, Llewelyn discusses why there is such a continuing appetite for apocalyptic narratives.⁷

She considers the theory that they represent our frustrations with societal inequality, our hopes that the world could be remade better.⁸

She also considers that apocalyptic narratives stem from a hunger for personal heroism - a theory certainly reflected in the generations of disaster movies full of individual acts of courage and daring. 

Olive is most interested, however, in the perpetual recurrence of these apocalyptic visions.

When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending? I had a fascinating conversation with my mother once, where she talked about the guilt that she and her friends had felt about bringing children into the universe. This was in the mid-2160s, in Colony Two. It’s hard to imagine a more tranquil time or place, but they were concerned about asteroid storms, and if life on the moon became untenable, about the continued viability of life on Earth…and my point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world. (189)

What Mandel calls narcissism, I would more kindly term inexperience. All of us are living our lives for the first time. While our ancestors lived through (and sometimes survived) earthquakes and famines, wars and regime changes, we can view them with the gift of hindsight and the comfort of distance. 

I know a man who was born in a bomb shelter during the Blitz. His mother had no reassurance that the war would end, that Hitler would be defeated. She had no such reassurance at the time, and neither do we. 

And the hard, horrible truth is that there is no guarantee that we will survive whatever horrors happen in our times. It is easy to tell the story of human survival and paper over those who did not survive. Hitler’s eventual defeat did not undo the tens of millions of people exterminated in the Holocaust. The election of Barack Obama does not erase the Transatlantic Slave Trade. 

As the poet Clint Smith writes:

When people say “we have it made it through worse before” 

all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones
of those who did not make it, those who did not
survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who

did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.
I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms
meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to

convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no
solace in rearranging language to make a different word
tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe

does not bend in a direction that will comfort us.
Sometimes it bends in ways we don’t expect & there are
people who fall off in the process. Please, dear reader,

do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future
to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not
live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies

that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left
standing after the war has ended. Some of us have
become ghosts by the time the dust has settled. 

Sensible and Human Things

In 2020, of course, we all lived through a pandemic, all knew with certainty that we were experiencing an event that would be spoken about in the history books.⁹

We are still dealing with the social and political repercussions of the pandemic, and likely will for decades to come. 

It’s easy to forget, only five years later, how unified we felt in those first weeks, and how afraid. No one knew how or when the pandemic would end. For the more than three million people who died of Covid in 2020, it was the end of the world. 

In “This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For,” an article for Wired published on March 30, 2020, the author Laurie Penny talks about how the pandemic’s sudden and dramatic changes to global society deviated from so many of our cultural imagination of apocalypse. 

There was a lot of sourdough, deer strolling down main streets, and people saying goodbye to their loved ones over FaceTime. There was a critical lack of shooting zombies, or watching aliens blow up the Eiffel Tower, or skyscraper-sized robots smashing monsters with ships. 

Penny explores how the Greek root of “apocalypse” - apokaluptein - does not mean the end of the world, but rather “uncovering,” or “revealing.” A revelation of things as they really are.

The people on the front lines are not fighters. They are healers and carers…Nurses, doctors, cleaners, drivers. Emotional and domestic labor has never been part of the grand story men have told themselves about the destiny of the species - not even when they imagine its grave. In the end, it will not be a butchery. Instead, it will be a bakery, as everyone has apparently decided that the best thing to do when the world lurches sideways is learn to make bread.

The world did not survive the pandemic because of heroic individuals with guns, or dramatic last stands. It survived because of the daily, grueling work of being human and refusing to stop: cleaning, caring, healing, doing research.

When I panicked the other day about AI 2027, it was the memory of that daily work that helped calm me down. I recalled a 1948 essay from the writer C. S. Lewis that comforted me in 2020, and continues to comfort me now. Lewis was writing three years after the invention of the atomic bomb, in an era where imminent nuclear annihilation seemed not only possible but inevitable.

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

The Antidote to Despair

So what do we do?

It is easy to read Lewis’s words and interpret them as a call to ignore the headlines, keep your head down, and focus on your own personal happiness, your own priorities. While that is healthy in the face of certain imagined apocalypses - God knows I can’t do anything about the Yellowstone supervolcano, save for not settling in Wyoming - I wouldn’t advise it for others.

When it comes to climate change, or fascism, or AI - the three dooms that most often keep me up at night - action is the antidote to despair. 

In the chapter “The Sacred and the Superfund” from her wonderful book Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the vital importance of loving action, and the seductive nature of despair. “We are deluged by information regarding our destruction of the world and hear almost nothing about how to nurture it,” she writes. “It is no surprise then that environmentalism becomes synonymous with dire predictions and powerless feelings. Our natural inclination to do right by the world is stifled, breeding despair when it should be inspiring action” (327). 

Despair tells us that nothing we do matters. Despair tells us the war is over when it’s only just beginning. Despair gives us permission to live as if our choices don’t matter. “Despair is paralysis,” she continues. “It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth. Environmental despair is a poison every bit as destructive as the methylated mercury in the bottom of Onondaga Lake. But how can we submit to despair while the land is saying ‘Help’?” (328). 

The antidote to despair, she says, is the slow, thankless, day-by-day work of restoration. Of showing up. Of creating the world we want to live in. Of refusing the hostile takeover of our imaginations. 

“The stories are piling up all around in scraps of land being restored: trout streams reclaimed from siltation, brownfields  turned into community gardens, prairies reclaimed from soybeans, wolves howling in their old territories, schoolkids helping salamanders across the road,” Kimmerer concludes. “If your heart isn’t raised by the sight of whooping cranes restored to their ancient flyway, you must not have a pulse. It’s true that these victories are as small and fragile as origami cranes, but their power moves as inspiration” (339). 

She quotes the naturalist E. O. Wilson: “There can be no purpose more inspiring than to begin the age of restoration, reweaving the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us” (339). 

Or, in the words of a piece of art that hangs in my friend Livvy and Ivan’s house: “the beginning is near.”

We take our kids to protests. We beat our “swords into ploughshare and our spears into pruning hooks.”¹⁰ We plant trees.

We cancel the apocalypse.

When it comes to canceling the apocalypse, what should I add to my syllabus?

I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!

1. In part because it provides the title for an epic track from the score, which frequently shows up on Spotify soundtrack playlists that I use to write to.

2. As a kid, I really, really hated amputations in books and movies. As I wrote about a few months ago, merely hearing someone describe an amputation at a historical site was enough to leave me nauseous and heaving. I still avoid depictions of amputation wherever I can, and will look up spoilers so I know when to look away.

3. So much so that there’s a TV Trope for it: Monumental Damage.

4. A term made famous, of course, by Taika Waititi’s delightfully campy Thor: Ragnarok (2017).

5. I write at length about this experience in a memoir for the last chapter of my dissertation, which was excerpted for the alt-Adventist magazine Spectrum in 2022. Let me know if you’d like to read a copy!

6. I’m not going to link to it because I don’t want to support them, but it’s very easy to Google if you want to go down that particular doomsaying rabbit hole. I particularly liked Gary Marcus’s response on Substack.

7. I didn’t actually like Sea of Tranquility, which I found to be smug and unoriginal in its deployment of science fiction tropes. I do, however, love this passage, which I think could have been an effective personal essay.

8. This theory recalls the infamous statement that “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism,” which the author Mark Fisher attributes both to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek.

9. If, we speculated, history would continue long enough to be written down.

10. Isaiah 2:4. The verse is the namesake of many peace campaigns, such as the RAWtools project, which reforges guns into garden tools.