This Bright and Shining Apocalypse

Abandoned commercial boats on the floor of Russia's Aral Sea, which is nearly dry
from human overconsumption. Photos like these have been used by Hollywood to
design what Earth might look like in a post-apocalyptic hellscape.

About seventeen years ago, I wrote a playscript and accompanying novel set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Writing in 2003, my work was one among a flood of pop-culture apocalypses in the aftermath of 9/11 and, discouraged by the overwhelming force of the cultural moment, I gave up before writing the final draft. What, I wondered, would make mine matter when professional writers were addressing the topic with such vigor?

I postulated a world ravaged by contagion. The receding tide of humanity left the surviving rump population scared, defenseless, and desperate for answers. I divided humanity into two camps, those who opted to create autonomous settled communities and rebuild society, and nomadic hordes living out Nietzschean power fantasies. Not surprisingly, for those who know me, I intended to write a character study, and instead drifted into religion and faith.

This season’s slide into uncertainty and plague has reawakened my interest in this work. I’m reluctant to return to something written that long ago, as I’m in a different place, as both a human being and a writer, than in 2003. Yet looking around, at a situation where reality has impinged upon my fictional creation, perhaps it’s important to return to old haunts, if only to balance what I got right, versus what I got wrong.

A world brought low by disease seems timely. When I first took stumbling steps into writing my own stories, we assumed civilization would collapse from nuclear war. Since then we’ve stumbled through robot rebellions, contagions, environmental devastation, and the Aztec calendar as reasons why humanity might end. Somehow, we persistently survive. Yet we remain aware that humanity can only destroy itself once, and it could happen soon.

Yet watching the world actually struggling with pandemic, I realize my most important mistake: I distilled human impulses into a Manichean dualism. On one side, I placed my protagonists, a sympathetic band who wanted to rebuild civilization from the moldering remains. They didn’t know how to accomplish this goal with the available tools, however. One plot point turned on whether a guitar was worth more as music, or as firewood.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, engraving
by Albrecht Dürer (click to enlarge)

Opposite my protagonists, I placed a mysterious outside force, which within the playscript was only implied. Our heroes viewed the outside world with distrust, because anybody not geographically rooted must, perforce, need something. And some people who need something would take it forcefully. Having faced this challenge once, our heroes feared and disbelieved outsiders—even while acknowledging they needed help, which strangers might provide.

Watching an actual pandemic unfold, this dualism seems remarkably short-sighted. Yes, a certain segment of our body politic seems willing to forfeit the elderly, the chronically ill, and the disabled to appease the gods of economics. But the majority of humanity has banded together. Large arts institutions, which aren’t exactly wealthy, are streaming their content online. Stores are reserving valuable shopping hours for seniors.

Farbeit from me to ever praise corporations hastily, but even Disney, the commercial juggernaut that currently owns your dreams, has shown remarkable humanity. During times of isolation, they could withhold their lucrative content until desperate parents paid handsomely to quiet their stir-crazy children. Yet they’ve willingly released their most valuable current property, Frozen II, to housebound families who need something to make time go away.

Seventeen years ago, I envisioned a split between ordinary citizens who wanted civilization to continue, and ordinary citizens giving rein to their gut-level appetites and aggression. That isn’t what we’re seeing. Instead, I look around and witness a government controlled by plutocrats, who assign monetary prices to human values, who regard survival as negotiation leverage, and want to maximize their self-centered outcomes and calcify their power hierarchy.

Arrayed against this mercenary social stratum, we have ordinary people who, to greater or lesser degrees, acknowledge that humanity survives because we don’t assign prices to everything. Humans, the broader society currently agrees, are natural collaborators, who persist against unequal odds because we have one another. Sure, some people break quarantine or demand Spring Break. But looking around, this appears, from my perspective, like a small and venal minority.

Apparently I have to re-evaluate what the end of civilization will mean. Like countless armchair futurists before me, I’ve always assumed that halting the status quo will unleash some level of human barbarism. Yet outside a few arrogant, self-centered corners, that isn’t what I see. I’ve implicitly internalized the neoliberal argument that, when the chips are down, we’re all on our own. Yet it looks like we’re braving this together.