Apocalypse Again

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This is the On the Media Midweek podcast.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

What with everything that's been going on recently, there's a distinctly apocalyptic feel to our times.

Over the weekend, President Trump posting an AI-generated image of himself with the phrase, Schipocalypse Now.

The caption, I love the smell of deportations in the morning.

Floods that seem to me to be a new stage in climate change.

They're like an apocalypse.

There we are.

It's the zombie apocalypse within our Social Security Administration.

We must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse.

So many people look at this and they say, James, is this the apocalypse?

Gorian Linsky is a cultural critic and author of the book, Everything Must Go, the stories we tell ourselves about the end of the world.

Back in March, I asked him about the ways we've imagined and reimagined our grisly end throughout history and where this idea of the world coming to a grand blazing finale first came from.

In Hinduism and Buddhism to this day, history is a cycle, a wheel, and it has different phases, destruction and renovation, rebirth, decline.

It was the ancient prophet Zoroaster, who lived around the 7th or 6th century BC, who offered a new and different scenario.

Zoroaster and then in Judaism, Christianity, it's a straight line.

That's a seismic change.

The world can actually end.

And that is what dominates the Western imagination.

And it's summed up in the last book of the New Testament, Revelation.

You were shocked to find it so hard to follow.

The man who wrote it, John of Patmos, just seems to be a very angry, vindictive man.

In his telephone, it's not about forgiving sinners.

It's about slaying them.

It's extremely bloodthirsty.

It's extremely violent.

There's all kinds of bizarre, monstrous creatures and satanic beasts.

Well, the author was probably a little bitter because the Romans Romans had exiled him to the island of Patmos.

Most historians would agree that what he's talking about is the Roman Empire, the mark of the beast and 666 and the seven horns.

These are all references to Rome.

I mean, if you'd have told him that people would be talking about Revelation 2,000 years later, then he would have been very disappointed because he was like, oh, well, the world still exists then.

But then finally, the Christian apocalypse gives way to new end-of-the-world scenarios.

And it was something that looked very much like apocalypse that brought Mary Shelley and Lord Byron and other literary lights together in a mansion overlooking Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816.

It was quite a year and quite an era.

So you've got scientific discoveries that the Earth is much older than the church claimed, discoveries of the first dinosaur skeletons, and the idea that catastrophe could reshape the earth.

And then you also have that mirrored in politics through the French Revolution and the idea that the world as you knew it could be turned upside down.

Also, a lot of people like Byron and Shelley, they were traveling around Europe, fascinated by the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

So all of these things are kind of in their heads that the world as we know it can be wiped out.

And then in 1815, this volcano in Indonesia called Tambora erupts.

The biggest eruption in modern history.

Creates so many particles of dirt and sulfur that they circle the earth.

Come summer of 1816, the climate is just ruined.

You've got snowstorms and June and so on.

And I found that so fascinating.

That's something that felt certainly to the people who are living here in the volcano like an apocalyptic event is the reason why Byron and Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley had to shelter indoors.

And that's when Byron said, Well, let's all write a ghost story.

This leads Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.

Byron never finishes his story, but what he does do is write this poem, Darkness.

And as you note, there's no deity.

The righteous are not reprieved.

It just ends in ultimate negation.

The thing about darkness, and this kind of horrified some critics at the time, is that it's utterly hopeless.

We talked about Revelation earlier, and for those that have not been killed or sent to hell, it's a very happy ending for the righteous.

Byron sort of shuts down the world.

The sun goes out, people freeze, they starve, kill and eat each other, utter bleakness and annihilation, which is just not comprehensible to the Christian mind.

The apocalypse genre didn't really catch on until the end of the 19th century with H.G.

Wells.

There's the whole idea of the fandasiècle, technology is changing, all these ideas swimming around in the late 19th century that even though the British Empire is at its height, there is a sense that it is also in decline.

H.G.

Wells really begins his career with a vision vision at the end of the world in his novel, The Time Machine.

And you say he revolutionized the genre?

Science fiction up to that point tended to have lots of different outlandish things happening.

H.G.

Wells' very smart instinct was that if you take the world as it is, and then you just drop one absolutely bizarre incident into it, whether that be a time machine or a Martian invasion.

Yes, Martians!

Do you mean you haven't heard?

Oh, Mr.

Channel, it's all over the radio.

People would see themselves and they think, oh my God, how would I react to that?

Which brings us to the Great War.

Before 1918, you say that two-thirds of our end-of-the-world scenarios involved natural disaster and only a third stemmed from human activity.

After the war, it reversed.

Yeah, because it was such a moral shock.

One of the many changes wrought by the First World War was this sense that the end of the world would be caused by our own stupidity and selfishness, that there would be another world war and that it would be final.

You wrote that there was an idea floating around that maybe scientists should invent a weapon that could annihilate the whole world because maybe that would force the world to make peace.

It was a really popular idea.

Like the inventors of dynamite, poison gas, thought that this would be such a horrific thing, nobody would dare fight a war again.

On the other hand, there was that 1927 novel by Pierpont B.

Noyes called The Pallid Giant, in which he concludes that the only way a super weapon could end war is by finishing off the human race.

So what you get in the pallid giant is something very prophetic about the Cold War, that the fear of somebody else using the weapon would mean that you would use it first.

What you actually then saw in the Cold War was that people were so horrified by it that they wouldn't use those weapons.

And yet we had some very, very close shaves that were only revealed later.

That also proves the pallid giant point.

You know, the incubator missile crisis, it could so easily have gone the other way.

And it would have been fear of the other side using the weapon that would have brought about the calamities.

So having plunged into the atomic age for real, let's talk about how it inspired Neville Schute's culture-shifting novel On the Beach in 1957.

The novel and later the film showed us something we hadn't quite seen before.

Well, this was a phenomenon that I think people have largely forgotten that Leo Salad, one of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, had come up with the possibility of something called a cobalt bomb, where you would create this sort of jacket.

of cobo around an atomic bomb, which had a much longer half-life.

The radiation would be far more dangerous and far more long-lasting.

This was the weapon people were most terrified about.

That's the doomsday device in the planet of the apes.

It never existed, but it was this terrifying concept because it would poison everyone, even if you were, as in on the beach.

In Australia, far away from the exchange of weapons, the radiation would get you eventually.

It's a really strange book because the tone is very sort of calm and subdued.

Do you mean to tell me this whole damn war was an accident?

No,

it wasn't an accident.

I didn't say that.

Somehow granted the time for examination, we shall find that our so-called civilization was gloriously destroyed by a handful of vacuum tubes and transistors.

And yet it does end with absolutely everybody in the world dead.

And what Schute was really interested in was showing how people would respond to that, how people would feel about imminent extinction.

And that's such an important part of end of the world literature, that emotional dimension.

Right.

Just as hopeless and yet completely different in tone is Stanley Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb from 1964, which was in pre-production during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Kubrick was obsessed with nuclear war.

He did so much research and he found that the logic of what we call mutually assured assured destruction was absurd.

And that led him to a black comedy.

And again, it's the cobalt bomb.

It's the doomsday machine.

And so many lines in the movie and characters in the movie are drawn from that world of the nuclear strategists.

They're direct quotes from a strategist called Herman Kahn.

But with the proper breeding techniques and the ratio of, say, 10 females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within, say, 20 years.

But look here, Doctor, wouldn't this nucleus of survivors be so grief-stricken and anguished that they'd, well, envy the dead and not want to go on living?

The real leap that it takes in the end is to end the world.

Mushroom clouds blossoming, as Viralin Smilmeat again plays.

That was what made it so shocking, but also very divisive.

Some people thought it was an amazing advertisement for nuclear disarmament, and others said it just encouraged a bleak shrug, an empty chuckle.

I wish we had time to dive into all of the possible scenarios you outline in your book, but we don't.

So let's stick to the ones that are largely man-made, like climate change or pandemics, because in this century alone, starting from the 1918 flu epidemic through AIDS and beyond, the real world has given us ample inspiration.

It can seem almost like a force of nature or you get different versions where it turns out it's a government virus bioweapon that has leaked.

In thrillers, that really matters.

It's like, where does this pandemic come from?

But actually, I'd say that probably the best pandemic novels like Earth Abides by George Stewart or Station 11 by Emily St.

John Mandel, it's not really about where it starts, the attempts to mitigate it or any of that.

It's more about what it does to humanity, how it would feel to live through that, and the chances of preserving decent, humane, civilized values, the possibility of rebuilding society and what society that would be, who would be left, what choices would they make.

So back in March of 2020, during the early days of the lockdown, there were headlines about dolphins returning to city harbors and goats wandering in the street.

And you noted the prevalence of that meme that humanity is the virus and COVID is the vaccine.

Now, you weren't crazy about that meme.

And you saw the novel by Emily St.

John Mandel set 20 years after a pandemic that kills 99% of humanity as a kind of rebuttal.

Station 11 became in a way my moral lodestar while writing the book.

St.

John Mandel really cares about the people who have died, the things we have lost.

So seeing the fact that there are no more planes, rather than going, oh, well, good.

Aeroplanes are monstrosities, and technology is bad, which is a huge theme of a lot of apocalyptic literature.

She's sort of going, My God, what a miracle it was that we could fly.

She draws your attention to the things about modern life that we take for granted and that are kind of miraculous.

What are you doing?

I'm making a museum, tribute to the best of the old days, reminder of how good we used to have it.

Something to aim for, to get back to.

So many writers seem to hate a lot of modern life, and that calls back to John of Patmos and Revelation, the idea of it would be good if we just swept this all away.

You can see that manifesting now in various political movements, this idea of let's just break and burn everything because it's corrupt and decadent and it's not working anymore.

What you get in station 11 is, no, once you break this stuff, then you realize what it is that you've lost.

I stood looking over the damage,

trying to remember the sweetness of life on earth.

And that's why I find it the most moral, the most moving example.

So now, how about the apocalyptic nature of climate change?

You say there's been an apocalyptic strain in environmentalism since the movement began in the 60s, and that that kind of messaging doesn't seem to be a great motivator.

It feels instinctively like it would be, the Greta Thunberg approach.

The earth is on fire.

We need to do something.

Unfortunately, and this is also what happened with the atomic bomb, that kind of language often tends to make people either resist and go, you're being hysterical, or to despair.

The challenge for writers and filmmakers to turn that into compelling stories mirrored the problems that scientists and activists had trying to tell a compelling story that would lead to action, because it's not like nuclear war.

Either nuclear war happens or it does not.

And if it does, it will be very bad very quickly.

Whereas with the climate crisis, it is happening, but it is happening slowly.

It's very hard to put something like that into a compelling story.

You've observed that Kim Stanley Robinson, a longtime writer of climate-based science fiction, is an exception to the sort of impotence creation of a lot of climate science fiction that you complained about, and I totally agree, he enables us to see how we might live in a world transformed by climate upheaval.

His imagination stretches beyond catastrophe.

Yeah, in his novels, things are bad, but they're not the end.

He has great faith in sensible people of goodwill working together to make things not as bad as they could be.

And it's a very rare space in fiction.

It's a very hard thing to do, even much, much harder to do in films.

To this day, I think the biggest film that is explicitly about climate change is Day After Tomorrow from 2004.

It depicts something that could happen, but it has it happening in a matter of days.

You recall what you said about how polar melting might disrupt the North Atlantic Current?

Yes.

Well, I think it's happening.

So it was both extremely important and many climate scientists were talking about the movie as an opportunity to discuss this problem.

But at the same time, they had to go, well, obviously it wouldn't happen like that.

Now, the other current frontrunner for most dreaded apocalypse is death by robots, or more recently, AI.

This scenario has actually been around for a century, but the anxiety has never been so high.

So first jump back to our earlier anxieties around these thinking machines, starting with the play R You R from 1920 by Czech writer Karol Trapek.

Literally the play that invents the word robot is about the end of the world as well.

It is about these intelligent humanoids replacing humanity in all of these different jobs.

Then there is a fertility crisis and the idea is that on some biological level, humans have accepted that they're going to be replaced a humanitarian attempts to make the robots more human this makes them angry violent jealous they actually set about actively wiping out humanity and you essentially end with only one human left alive RUR was a really big deal in 1927 it was the first radio play to be aired by the BBC yeah an absolute cornerstone basically starts the idea of the robot from which everything else flows.

It was a crime to make robots.

No, Alquist, I don't regret that even today.

Not even today.

Not even today, the last day of civilization.

Was it a crime to shatter the servitude of labor?

The dreadful and humiliating labor that man had to undergo?

Work was too hard.

And to overcome that was not what the two Rossums had in mind.

It's what I had in mind.

How well you succeeded!

For profit,

for progress,

we have destroyed mankind.

These are like very, very old ideas that continue to play out in our discussion of what AI might do to us because it has a mind of its own or because we've given it the wrong instructions.

Two of the most famous thinking machines in science fiction history came later in the 20th century.

Hal from Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey in 1968, 1968, and Skynet from The Terminator from 1984.

Hal defined the quintessential rogue-sentient AI for decades, while Skynet inspired a lot more confusion.

So what do each of these machines reveal about our fears?

Well, the strange thing about 2001 is that when they were asked about it, Kubrick and Arthur C.

Clarke, who co-wrote it with him, were very optimistic about AI.

In fact, Clark loved the idea that machines would help us ascend to a different level of humanity.

So it wasn't really meant to be an anti-AI movie.

But what an artist is doing is not necessarily how it enters the public imagination.

So HAL did enter the imagination as essentially a killer AI.

And you get a similar thing with Skynet and the Terminator.

The Skynet funding bill is passed.

The system goes online on August 4th, 1997.

Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate.

It becomes self-aware at 2.14 a.m.

Eastern Time, August 29th.

In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Skynet fights back.

Yes, it launches its missiles against the targets.

Those movies were so popular and they sort of stuck in the imagination.

And because they combined Skynet, which we never really see,

with the Terminator, this killer robot that we do see.

I'll be back.

Even to this day, AI researchers get tired of people talking about Skynet.

So it's very interesting to go back to these actual films and go, well, what did they think about the possibilities of AI versus what the public mind then did to them?

Well, you have thoroughly studied our centuries-long obsession with the apocalypse.

So what's it taught you about facing the current moment we're in, which feels like an endless onslaught of bad, bad, and more bad?

So it's not that bad things haven't happened, but the worst thing, the actual end of the world is perhaps not the thing that we should be fearing.

I worry about things getting worse.

I don't worry about things ending.

And I would say it does make me more appreciative of life as it is.

I do resist what I call doomerism.

I don't think that that is useful and I don't think it's morally righteous.

There should be some sense of what to appreciate and what to salvage and an awareness of the preciousness of life rather than contemplating the end.

Well, thank you, Dorian.

Terrific.

Thank you, Brooke.

Dorian Linsky is the author of Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World.

Thanks for listening to the On the Media Midweek podcast.

Tune into the big show this weekend to hear all about the turmoil roiling CBS.

I'm Brooke Ladstone.