Apocalypse, or Just a Catastrophe?

Which particular end of the world are we looking at, again?

“Narrative seems to be the default task orientation of the human mind.  …If our minds can process information in narrative terms, they automatically will.”

—Brian Boyd, Why Lyrics Last

What is Unapocalyptic even about? So far, I’ve posted blueprints for space colonies and talked about abstract theories of change; how does this add up? It’s all connected, trust me—and not in a tinfoil-hat conspiracy-theory sort of way. I want to do book reviews, talk about stuff that excites me, and give you a window into my current work, but the main connective tissue of Unapocalyptic posts is tools to think with. The Single-Family Space colony was an example of a powerful tool called reframing, which I’ll talk more about later on. Your theories of change, on the other hand, influence how you frame narratives about the future, whether in your own life, a science fiction story you’re writing, or a foresight scenario. Today I want to talk about the grammar of apocalypse and how we use and abuse it, because that has consequences too.

When I work as a futurist, I always find it’s incredibly helpful to have come from a literary background, because our literature is our collective mind laid bare. You look at even the driest trends analysis differently when you understand that it’s a kind of story, and that there’s a history and a structure to the stories we tell ourselves.

The Brian Boyd quote that opens this post summarizes the argument in his book On the Origin of Stories, which I highly recommend. The idea is echoed in one of my favourite passages from Northrop Frye’s magisterial study of Western literature, Anatomy of Criticism, where he argues compellingly that every prose text, even the most dessicated and abstract, has buried within it a protagonist, a struggle, and a triumph—even if the protagonist is just an idea and the struggle is the argument the author is making to prove it. He takes perhaps the most obtuse and abstract work of philosophy ever written, G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, and analyzes it as a story. What he finds it that it has a hero—Spirit—which undergoes growth, fights exciting battles, experiences setbacks, and ultimately wins through in the end. We think narratively, even when we don’t know we’re doing it.

In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye sets out to do nothing less than create a ‘general theory of storytelling.’ His source material is the entire Western canon. Part of his theory is that, historically, this canon revolves around one central wellspring of metaphor and analogy: the Bible. He calls the Bible The Great Code that underlies all European storytelling in the past 1500 years. And a key part of that code is its systematic use of apocalyptic language.

When we worry about our personal and collective futures, or hope for a particular outcome, we automatically turn those worries and hopes into a story. (It’s not a habit, it’s a faculty, as Alicia Juarrero claims in her book Dynamics in Action. She and Boyd claim that storytelling evolved as a way to think and talk about the behaviour of complex adaptive systems.) When we imagine extreme catastrophe or triumph, the story we tell ourselves or our audience tends toward one of two apocalyptic templates. These templates resonate deeply with our audiences (and ourselves). They are preternaturally compelling, so when we’re doomscrolling for clues to our collective future, scenarios that use those templates will naturally rise to the top—regardless of their factual merits.

According to Frye, the Bible establishes two kinds of apocalyptic prose: positive and negative. Dystopia and Utopia alike return again and again to the metaphoric types of Biblical narrative. Each type is repeated across the canon of literature, like nomadic code reproducing itself virally inside the meme machines that are authors. Crucially, each apocalyptic type comes with a set of central metaphors. For instance, the positive apocalypse consistently uses the imagery of a harmonious society, city, garden, and sheepfold. (That last one might not seem to resonate with us urban postmoderns, until you realize that the idea of a sheltered space for animals underlies notions like nature preserves, coral forest and wetlands restoration, rewilding, etc.)

If you’ve watched the first season of the TV series Foundation, you’ll have seen these metaphors come to life in the Imperial Palace on Trantor (itself a world-city). There’s an actual garden, and the trinity of clone emperors act as shepherds for their flock, which is also supposed to be a perfected society. We even find a serpent in this garden. Foundation is all about apocalypse—how it can come about, how to avoid it, how to minimize its effects. It’s not immune to the powerful gravitational pull of the Biblical canon; neither is the science fiction of Solarpunk and Hopepunk, which generally synthesize City and Garden into a vision of the technological and natural worlds reconciled.

If the positive apocalypse comes with its set of metaphors, so does the negative; Frye calls it

…the world of the nightmare and the scapegoat… the world as it is before the human imagination begins to work on it and before any image of human desire, such as the city or the garden, has been solidly established; the world also of wasted and perverted work, ruins and catacombs, instruments of torture and monuments of folly.

The metaphors of the negative apocalypse reverse the positive eschatology: we have egoistic individualists instead of a Society, ruins instead of a City, the wasteland instead of the Garden, and lurking monsters instead of the Sheepfold. It’s not hard to find works written using this demonic grammar. In Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, innocent youths are turned into murderous, self-interested ‘rational actors’ to prove a political point. The value of human beings is reduced to their DNA in GATTACA. Nuclear war, asteroid impacts, plagues or economic collapse create any number of Mad Max ruins and deserts, which are inevitably zombie-infested or encampments of murderous scavengers presided over by soulless AIs or capricious psychopaths.

The power of this language creates a problem.

Such metaphors are overwhelmingly powerful attractors, but don’t actually describe what’s happening in our world. Remember the Brian Boyd quote that opens this post: “…If our minds can process information in narrative terms, they automatically will.” We think in stories, but reality doesn’t have to conform to our narrative compulsions; and, in fact, it doesn’t. We are, collectively and individually, looking at the future through a broken lens.

If a real apocalypse were happening right now, but it didn’t fit our inherited narratives, would we even recognize it?

Apocalypse as Subtraction: the Positive Metaphor

The instant you become aware of these all-encompassing, magnetic metaphors, you receive a immunizing shock. You start seeing this language everywhere. I scan every trends report, tweet, news article andscientific paper for its underlying metaphoric language. This can be buried very deeply, as the hero of Phenomenology of the Mind is, but the garden and the wasteland, the city and the ruin are always there.

Knowing this, you can engage in a process of deliberate subtraction from everything you read. Which kind of apocalypse is being described by, say, the news reports about the Canadian wildfires this past summer? Or, by Elon Musk’s screed about building a city on Mars? Which apocalypse is being reinforced by selecting and isolating specific elements of the complex, intertwined changes happening all around us, in order to fit them into the imagery of loner/society, ruin/city, wasteland/garden, and monster/pet?

We actually can piece together an image of the future that has some accuracy to it, even if specific prediction is impossible. One of the great tools for doing this is the systematic subtraction of the apocalyptic grammar from the information that we’re being bombarded with. Tune yourself to that grammar, and subtract. Then see what is actually left over in what you’re being told. It is usually much more ambiguous, complex, and indicative both of the highly connected nature of our world, and the scope and freedom of choice that we still have.

The AI apocalypse is a great example. There seems to be no middle ground in discussions about how AI will affect us. It’s either going to be paradise or hell. But if you look at the specific imagery that the conversations revolve around, you start discovering patterns. Take Nick Bostrom’s feared “paperclip maximizer,” a hypothetical AI that is given a directive to produce paperclips with maximum efficiency. It decides that the most efficient way is to eliminate all industry that doesn’t support this effort, and oh yes, the pesky humans who are using up resources that could go into making paperclips.

There are lots of good analyses of the paperclip maximizer. What I’m suggesting is that, if you look at the maximizer as an actant in an apocalyptic narrative, what kind of actant is it? It’s clearly on the demonic side, part of a fallen Society where individuals do not act to counterbalance one anothers’ proclivities, and where each individual is driven only by self-interest. So, regardless of any other arguments for or against the idea, we should be suspicious of it because of how closely the maximizer conforms to one of the apocalyptic types.

You can walk through the entire literature on AI and find countless examples where apocalyptic types are unconsciously introduced into arguments. AIs are devils; they’re angels; they’re rulers or slaves; they build their own, alien cities that exclude us; they’ve broken out of the sheepfold and are running amok… Rarely are they just fallible people having trouble finding their place in the world, like the rest of us.

Give it a try; you’ll find the language everywhere. Subtract that and what remains is, well, really interesting.

Apocalypse as Subtraction: Recognizing a Real Apocalypse

I’ll end on a more somber note. If our inherited apocalyptic grammar is not up to describing the current moment, and if a real apocalypse were happening, what would that look like? What should we be paying attention to? Floods, droughts, mass migrations… these are all catastrophes, true, and all are likely in an era of uncontrolled climate change. But what’s the sign of an actual apocalypse?

It’s silence.

When the first explorers reached the Americas, they found towns everywhere. The Amazon was full of cities, the explorers reported. Both continents were teeming with up to 100 million people. The entire east coast of what is now the United States was planted with carefully managed trees, most of edible nut varieties. The residents generally practiced game and land management rather than agriculture, so the explorers had a hard time discerning the sophisticated social structures behind what looked like wandering tribes. But the place was packed.

When the first settlers arrived, some years later, they found an empty, trackless wilderness. They found few people and thought it was unowned land for the taking; they had no idea that 93% of the population of the Americas had died or would soon die from plagues the explorers had brought.

Much of this sad history is recounted in Charles C. Mann’s book 1491. What’s most significant for this discussion, though, was that the settlers could not see what was not there.

A real apocalypse looks like the progressive, unnoticed subtraction of abundance from the world.

When I was a kid in the late 60’s, we drove to the mountains for vacation every summer. I remember every time Dad pulled the car in to gas up, he also had to take a squeegee and wipe the bug-spat off our windshield. Sometimes it was speckled everywhere, like rain drops.

A couple of summers ago I drove across the prairies, and only after turning in my rental car did I notice that never once had I needed to clear bugs off the windshield. I found this deeply disturbing, not just in and of itself, but because it hinted that there could be much more I was also unaware I was missing. There is an apocalypse happening right now, and perhaps more than one; but it’s not coming in the form of monsters or dictators, and it’s not the floods, droughts and wildfires that are its heralds.

It’s the unnoticed disappearance of what was always there that you should be alert for.