Apocalyptic Narratives

Science, Risk and Prophecy

Hauke Riesch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367275730
• eBook ISBN: 9781000390469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science
• Index: Literature

Linking literature from the sociological study of the apocalyptic with the sociology and philosophy of science, Apocalyptic Narratives explores how the apocalyptic narrative frames and provides meaning to contemporary, secular and scientific crises focussing on nuclear war, general environmental crisis and climate change in both English- and German-speaking cultural contexts.

In particular, the book will use social identity and representation theories, the sociologies of risk and Lakatos' philosophy of science to trace how our cultural background and apocalyptic tradition shape our wider interpretation, communication and response to contemporary global crisis. The set of environmental and other challenges that the world is facing is often framed in terms of apocalyptic or existential crisis. Yet apocalyptic fears about the near future are nothing new. This book looks at the narrative connections between our current sense of crisis and the apocalyptic.

The book will be of interest to readers interested in environmental crisis and communication, the sociology and philosophy of science, and existential risk, but also to readers interested in the apocalyptic and its contemporary relevance.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The beginning of the end

I am writing this introduction in November 2020, a few days into a second national lockdown that the UK government has ordered in an attempt to curb the spread of a second wave of the coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic – rather later than medical expert advice had advised, but better late than never. In the earlier phase of the pandemic, the first lockdown in April earlier this year appears, with hindsight, a time of solidarity; there was clapping for our National Health Service every Thursday and a feeling of togetherness, that we will overcome this obstacle. This had been especially heartening to see in a nation that had been bitterly divided by the process of exiting the European Union.

This time around, the lockdown has a different feel to it: Winter is coming, Christmas is ruined and there appears to be no end in sight to our new lives in relative isolation. We see our friends, families and colleagues much less often, our jobs are at risk, people – particularly my students cooped up in their halls – feel lonely and depressed, and there is the underlying fear for our health running in the background, and this is just for those of us who like me have so far been lucky enough not to have been personally affected by the virus. While there is still some solidarity, the lockdown rules are more relaxed, education institutions including my university are still open, but on the streets people seem to be trying their best to live their normal lives, and masks are worn only fairly infrequently even by those who take the disease seriously. There is an alarming international movement of people who believe that the virus is just a hoax, nothing that needs to be worried about other than as a conspiracy to keep people docile for the New World Order. This in turn has linked with the “QAnon” movement and grown into a larger contemporary conspiracy movement that links authoritarian politics, white supremacy and vaccine refusal in what some commentators have described as a culturally ascendant apocalyptic and millennial cult (Watt, 2020).

In short, this seems to be a perfect time to finish writing a book about the apocalypse. Allusions to the apocalyptic and the virus appear frequently, in pop culture memes that jokingly refer to zombie movies or post-apocalyptic landscapes, or newspaper cartoons that depict the virus as the fourth (or sometimes fifth) horseman of the apocalypse. Op-ed writers in the newspapers might warn about the apocalyptic as an interpretative frame or utilise it themselves (e.g. Scheller, 2020). The fact that all of us, worldwide, are facing the same issue adds to the pandemic appearing apocalyptic.

However, even before the virus hit, talk about worldwide crises had an often apocalyptic imagery attached to it: We would talk about climate change, catastrophic environmental crises (such as the collapse of insect populations), worldwide economic crisis or nuclear proliferation using an apocalyptic framing. The break-up of old political certainties, with populist and authoritarian regimes having come to power in several countries, with right-wing as well as religious terrorism on the rise and a growing new conspiracy culture surrounding QAnon that takes on older conspiracy narrative tropes of anti-Semitism, race wars and New World Order and links these with increasing success to current events (like the virus) – all this is happening with the climate crisis looming menacingly in the background. Commentators openly compare the current worldwide feeling of apocalyptic anxiety with that of the 1920s and ’30s (e.g. Mason, 2016), and we all know where that led to.

As much as the feeling that the world is in grave peril is sincerely felt, it is also hardly a new one, and pervades contemporary political and public discussions (Wuthnow, 2010), in what Skrimshire calls the “politics of fear” (2008). Climate change has been widely recognised as a worrying issue since at least the 1990s, and before that the cold war held the attention of a whole generation that was convinced a civilisation ending nuclear war is either imminent or at least a real possibility. Before that, the world did actually flare up in two world wars separated by a worldwide economic crisis, which must have felt like the world was actually making a pretty good effort at ending, and not just a prediction. These fairly contemporary fears and crises are joined by a long line of apocalyptic and millennial/utopian expectations about the imminent end that stemmed from various religious denominations or humanist expectations of inevitable collapses of the current order like that of Marx or the Jacobins. As Skrimshire (2008) argued, current political crisis is conceptually linked to our apocalyptic, eschatological and utopian cultural heritage, and thus coloured accordingly. The invocation of the apocalyptic to current political crisis has been made by various academic discussants: Derrida (1984) discussed the politics of cold war nuclear fears in the mid-1980s through analogy with the apocalypse; Žižek (2010) likens the “terminal crisis” of capitalism to the end times. Morton (2013) describes the apocalyptic in terms of his “hyperobject” notion (objects that are too enormous to be perceived in full and include concepts such as climate change). What these discussions miss out on, for me, is a clearer sense of how the fascination with the apocalyptic translates into how we should think about current crisis and what makes it different from previous fears.

Because at the end (no pun intended!), almost every generation has had to live through either very justified apocalyptic fears or expectations or at least apocalyptic fears that feel very justified for those who believed in them – and yet the world has not ended. None of this is to say that current fears, certainly about climate change, are unsubstantiated, and clearly even if the world or civilisation survives it, this doesn’t mean that there won’t be plenty of suffering along the way. But if we have always been wrong before, is there anything that makes the current set of crises different (from a sociological rather than scientific point of view)?

This book represents my attempt to make some sense of how I should feel about my own apocalyptic fears – largely around climate change – by putting them into the context of the wider cultural heritage of apocalypse, and how the apocalypse as an interpretative narrative frame can push us into certain stances with regard to current fears. This includes not just how the apocalyptic narrative can enhance our anxieties but also how an apocalyptic narrative can make us complacent through the inductive argument that all predictions of the end have so far come to naught and therefore this one will too. I hope that by understanding the apocalyptic narrative frame a bit better, we can figure out better how to counter such arguments, how to use our experience and knowledge of the apocalyptic narrative to make a case for why certain apocalypses such as climate change should be taken much more seriously than they are.

It is here that I believe any analysis needs to take into account philosophies and sociologies of knowledge, how knowledge is arrived at and defended in the face of (disconfirming) evidence, and how all this relates to the underlying narratives we construct as a way of inserting meaning into our knowledge claims. Importantly, this needs to include scientific as well as non-scientific knowledge claims, since our reaction to the science of current crisis is being filtered through the lens of our wider cultural expectation of the apocalyptic. Overall, merely pointing to the science and its facts and evidences, as conclusive as this is for me personally, is not going to be enough to persuade anyone to take climate change (or any other apocalypse that one might be worried about) seriously, and it has been shown at length not to be enough as well (Gregory and Miller, 1998).

Apocalypses, millennia and conspiracies

The terminology surrounding academic literature on the apocalypse and apocalyptic thought can be confusing. It is not a clearly defined sociological term and tends to get used by scholars from different disciplines in subtly different ways. Wojcik (1997, p. 11) points out that biblical scholars tend to use it to describe the revelations and prophecies as limited to Jewish and Christian traditions delineated, for example, in the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation and the profuse historical array of their interpretations. Outside of biblical and theological studies, apocalypse has become a more general term and refers to “a sense of an ending, decline, societal crisis, and transformation” (Wojcik, pp. 11–12), and thus it does not rely on the divine or supernatural. It is this latter, more diffuse meaning that I will adopt, however I will also argue that the religious and the supernatural meaning of apocalypse has influenced and directed our wider apocalyptic visions to a large extent. It is in many ways part of the cultural baggage that we carry around with us and that we use to make sense of new and otherwise bewildering threats to our existence.

Another term often used within the literature is “millennialism”. This is in some ways a more specific one, as it often connotes movements rather than mere beliefs, and again it is tied mostly to religious expectations of the end. Strictly speaking, the millennium here refers to a specific reading of scripture which roughly expects a specific sequence of events: Before the final battle between the forces of good and evil and God’s final judgement, there will be a thousand years of peace and paradise – that is a millennium (Revelation 20:1–3, King James Version).

However, in many ways, though technically millennialism as a term is restricted to the various Christian interpretations of Revelation, the term is being applied more widely to sects, cults or movements that anticipate the imminent end of the world, where this end is anticipated because it will bring about a cleansing of the world, a period of peace and happiness and finally just punishment for sinners and the wicked. As such, millennialism can occur in other religions or movements that believe an imminent or currently ongoing period of social disruption will bring about either a period of earthly paradise or the final end followed with bliss for the righteous in the afterlife. In this vein, quite a variety of movements have been described as millennial, and these don’t have to be religious in nature either, if they believe that the rupture and following period of bliss is a natural phenomenon (see Wessinger, 2011b). Thus they include communist revolutionaries (who, after all, believe in a new paradisiacal world order being brought about through revolutionary overthrow of the status quo), French revolutionaries, the German national socialists, ISIS and Islamic fundamentalism, UFO cults, New Agers who expect a new Age of Aquarius is imminent and many, many others.

Some scholars make a more rigid distinction between apocalypticism and millennialism; for example Robertson (2016) uses the term apocalyptic to refer to eschatologies (theological studies of the end) where “the outcome of the end time is total and destructive”, whereas millennial narratives are eschatologies where “the world is not destroyed but transformed, and a better world is instigated” (p. 42). While having a clear terminology is obviously important, however, I will for the purposes of my argument here not employ such a rigid distinction. While I will recognise that apocalyptic and millennial have different connotations as to the destructiveness of the coming event as well as to the visions as to what will come after, there are considerable overlaps between the two, and there is rather a spectrum in both the destructiveness of the coming cataclysm and the desirability of the world afterwards that renders making such clear divisions difficult. But it is exactly the interpretative flexibility of these terms, alongside many of the other central ideas I will discuss (e.g. science, religion, risk) that makes them such powerful tools for the development of narratives and imaginaries of the near future.

Seen like this, millennialism and the apocalyptic are very fluid categories that include low profile and everyday movements as well as the big, destructive, revolutionary ones. After all, any movement advocating social change needs to make at least a little break with the past, and hope for an improved future. Thus some academic discussion on apocalypticism/millennialism includes popular cultural movements that would not necessarily or immediately be associated with either; for example Wojcik (1997) talks about the punk subcultural movement as displaying traits of the apocalyptic because of its nihilism and dystopian vision of where current society is headed. Next to punk, apocalyptic and millennial themes can be found in a variety of popular culture settings: For example the contributors in Walliss and Newport’s (2014) collection examine apocalypticism in a variety of popular cultural contexts, ranging from the lyrics of Bob Dylan and heavy metal to literary genres like science fiction and anime. Within the sphere of political subcultures, some contemporary political projects such as Brexit or Trumpism have also been argued to have characteristics of a millennial movement and managed to mobilise evangelical voters through these associations (Knowles, 2018; Berry, 2020).

A type of social movement very much related to millennialism/apocalypticism, and one that I regret not being able to look at in more detail in this book, is that of the conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories, as Cassam (2019) argues, are not just about there being nefarious conspiracies, because clearly people do in fact conspire very often. Instead, conspiracy theories “are first and foremost forms of political propaganda” (Cassam, 2019, p. 7), usually right wing, and this political association was also made prominent in Hofstadter’s (1966) seminal essay on the “paranoid style of American politics”. But there is also an epistemological strand to these. Harambam (2020) outlines academic literature on conspiracy theories: They have been linked to paranoid politics and societal danger but also to “bad science” (i.e. “flawed understandings of reality”). Conspiracy theory is described as explaining away all evidence to the contrary of their worldview as actually confirmatory to their idea that there is a vast conspiracy (that therefore also manipulates the available evidence); in Popper’s (2005 [1959]) terms, then, they are unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific.

The link to politics and danger – as well as to millennialism – is probably well demonstrated by the rise of “prepper” culture, which encourages self-sufficiency and living apart from society in preparation of the imminent end (Garrett, 2020), but also the recent, more mainstream rise of the QAnon conspiracy theory during the build-up to Donald Trump’s re-election campaign set against the backdrop of a global pandemic. A range of recent commentators discussing these movements have pointed to the link between apocalypticism and millennialism. For example, Jamie Doward, writing in the Guardian, introduces QAnon as “heavy on millennialism and the idea that a reckoning awaits the world, [and] the theory has found fertile ground in the American ‘alt-right’” (Doward, 2020). The increasingly open association of QAnon with far-right, white supremacist and Nazi iconography (Lawrence, 2020) also indirectly points to a link, with Nazism noted by some prominent theorists in millennial studies as a prime example of a modern, secularised millennial movement (e.g. Barkun, 1974).

Michael Barkun has in more recent years himself developed an interest in studying conspiracy theories, which he describes as “apocalyptic visions” in the subtitle of his 2013 book. For Barkun, conspiracy theories and millennialism are linked, though not systematically so. Conspiracy theories, like millennialism, are often dualistic worldviews that divide the world into good and evil forces, where maybe a difference is that “conspiracy theories locate and describe evil, while millennialism explains the mechanism for its ultimate defeat” (Barkun, 2013, p. 10). Conspiracy theories are then a prominent element of the larger category of millennialism. But then again, making a clear distinction between these two concepts hinges on being able to settle on a clearer definition of what millennialism is in the first place.

Millennialism and conspiracy theory are themselves linked to wider discussion about how we know what we (think we) know. In that context, Barkun (2016) writes about conspiracy theories as “stigmatised knowledge”, where its rejection by the authorities becomes “a sign that a belief must be true”. Acknowledging that their beliefs lie on the fringe, the conspiracy theorists Robertson (2016) interviewed consciously described themselves as “conspiracy nutters”. However, Barkun also notes that this appears to be changing, with the internet among other things blurring the boundaries between fringe and mainstream views. Harambam and Aupers (2015, 2017), in contrast to Robertson, found that conspiracy theorists they studied rejected the label as well as the stigmatised status of their world-views, preferring instead to insist that their knowledge claims are based on science, reason and evidence.

In this, there is link between conspiracy theory as stigmatised knowledge and other, more overtly religious beliefs such as creationism, in that they too believe their view is supported by science and they use scientific legitimation strategies (setting up their own journals, conferences and learned societies) to argue their view. This then ties up to a wider argument I want to make in this book, that the apocalyptic knowledge claims we will encounter – from a formally religious point of view but also informally spiritual, conspiratorial and “properly” scientific – have similar legitimisation strategies, and all believe to be arguing from the side of “reason” and that therefore clear distinction between say secular and religious apocalyptic predictions is not so easily made. But I will of course expand on this point later on.

Narratives and meaning making

The way we think about the catastrophic near future is framed through our familiar cultural narratives whic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Making sense of how we make sense of the world
• 3 The meaning of death and the making of time
• 4 Apocalyptic visions
• 5 What to know and how to know it
• 6 Risk
• 7 Utopias
• 8 Nuclear apocalypse and the nature of evil
• 9 Environmental apocalypse and the nature of nature
• 10 Climate apocalypse and the nature of prophecy
• 11 The end is near!
• Bibliography
• Index