Issue 34: Which dystopia is this, anyway?
We've been culturally preparing ourselves for the apocalypse for decades. Who knew it would turn out to be so banal.
Today’s briefing is by Andrew Potter (AP), associate professor at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University.
“You’re too young to remember it,” her mother said, “but we were expecting nuclear war all the time, really, up into my early thirties. Later, all of that felt unreal. But the feeling that things became basically okay turns out to have actually been what was unreal.” -- William Gibson, Agency (2020)
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WHATEVER YOU WANT TO SAY ABOUT THE CURRENT SITUATION, one thing you probably can’t say is that anyone should be terribly surprised. Not about the specificities of the pandemic necessarily, but rather the whole general dystopian condition we’ve stumbled into. In a lot of ways, we’ve been mentally preparing for this for almost my entire life. Never has a society been so successful, yet so persuaded of its own imminent collapse.
The dystopian scenarios and apocalyptic visions vary. Sometimes the shock to civilization is exogenous: Aliens invade; the moon explodes; a giant meteor strikes the Earth; a massive volcanic eruption sends us into nuclear winter; The Big One finally happens. Sometimes, like in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the cataclysm remains deliberately unspecified. Hollywood has been dining out on this stuff for years.
In the current vogue, the apocalypse arrives as a morality play disguised as an action thriller. The cause of our catastrophe is, in some form or another, our own doing, the result of our collective frailties or hubris or selfishness or ambition. Nuclear war was the dominant theme when I was growing up -- we all watched The Day After and walked in anti-nuclear protest rallies — an adolescence whose soundtrack was largely hit songs about nuclear annihilation.
The nuclear fear faded but the essentially moralizing character of the dystopianism stayed. All that happened was we went from a situation where most of our apocalyptic anxiety was focused on one specific concern to a multiplicity of threats. Worried about global warming? Watch The Day After Tomorrow. Think that global terrorism is an existential threat to the West? Here’s Battlestar Galactica. Believe that every conservative government is a patriarchal theocracy-in-waiting? Then the Handmaid’s Tale is the show for you.
But more often than not, now, the sense that we’re screwed has no specific target: it is just diffused across the whole Western techno-liberal-consumerist pleasure cruise. That’s largely why the zombie narrative has established itself as the dominant form of contemporary social criticism — it can serve as a vehicle for just about any sort of socio-economic commentary. Nuclear armageddon, biological warfare, toxic pollution, genetic engineering: all of these and more have found some of their most articulate explorations in stories where the dead have awakened and now walk the earth.
What unites almost all of these narratives is that the apocalypse arrives as a result of our collective guilt. But that is why it isn’t really the end for humanity: Instead, it is an opportunity for our moral rebirth, a “chance for a new beginning, a biblical flood where bodies have replaced water but the strong and righteous can still be saved.” On this view, the pandemic is just a naturalized biblical narrative: civilization is our original sin, and what we are going through is a painful but necessary step on our way back to a lost authenticity, a renewed connection to the Earth and to our essential natures.
The reality of the situation might be somewhat more banal.
In science fiction writer William Gibson’s 2014 novel The Peripheral (and its 2020 sequel, Agency) the plot see-saws between the near future in America and early 22nd century London. Somewhere in between was The Jackpot, an apocalyptic event that has left civilization more or less intact, but there’s just… less of it. Less nature, less people, less everything.
But as the book makes clear, The Jackpot isn’t the result of a single Big Event: “No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war,”says one character. “Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures … diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.”
In other interviews and commentary, Gibson himself has described The Jackpot as a civilizational car wreck at least a hundred years in the making. On his view, The Jackpot is just a work of logical inference: our decline is just the inevitable working out of the internal logic of our way of life. The difference between this and the Old Testament-tinged morality plays is that there’s no cultural rebirth at the end of this, no authenticity regained.
If William Gibson is the post-cyberpunk prophet of a slow-motion apocalypse, its hard-nosed theorist is Robin Hanson, a futurist of some sort who is a professor of economics at George Mason University. In a series of blogposts and then expanded in his book Age of Em, Hanson has argued that we are living in what he calls “the dreamtime”, a period of human evolution that will turn out to be a brief interlude “when delusions drove history. Our descendants will remember our era as the one where the human capacity to sincerely believe crazy non-adaptive things, and act on those beliefs, was dialled to the max.”
According to Hanson, we have been free riding off the social and economic surplus we gained from grabbing the low-hanging fruit of the industrial revolution (largely, very cheap access to large sources of energy) and largely ceasing to have children. This has given us a huge collective safety net, a buffer that shields us from the consequences of our many delusions. Hanson continues: Our descendants
will note how we instead spent our wealth to buy products we saw in ads that talked mostly about the sort of folks who buy them. They will lament our obsession with super-stimuli that highjacked our evolved heuristics to give us taste without nutrition. They will note we spent vast sums on things that didn’t actually help on the margin, such as on medicine that didn’t make us healthier, or education that didn’t make us more productive...
But as Hanson sees it, this highly maladaptive situation can’t last, and we’re heading (back) to a quasi-medieval world where everyone lives at or near a subsistence level, and where, eventually, “most everything worth knowing will be known by many; truly new and important discoveries will be quite rare…. Wild nature will be mostly gone, and universal coordination and destruction will both be far harder than today.”
The recurring question since this all began has been, when can we start getting back to normal? The unfortunate answer might be: never. The sense that things were fundamentally okay, that the ship will eventually right itself, might turn out to have been our fundamental cultural delusion. (AP)
Journalism: “The Real Lord of the Flies”: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months
Poetry: First lines of emails I’ve received while quarantined
Music: Someone has uploaded their old cassette recordings of Brave New Waves broadcasts from the 80s and 90s
Video: A ghostly train winds its way through the Tokyo night
Podcast: A London witch explains spells, persecution, and sex magic
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Policy for Pandemics is produced and edited by Andrew Potter and co-edited by Charlotte Reboul and Paisley Sim (bios here) If you have any feedback or would like to contribute to this newsletter, please send an email to andrew2.potter@mcgill.ca