Our apocalypse will not call itself the apocalypse.
In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, it became common for me and many others to use the rapid shutdown of the United States in mid-March as a dividing line in time. There was the Before, when we walked around without masks and ate indoors and went to school, and there was the After, when none of that seemed safe or worthwhile and it seemed like the world would never recover.
Yet after three and a half years, it has become increasingly clear that COVID-19 was not an apocalypse. It was a catastrophe that stopped the world, but it didn’t really end it. The danger of the disease itself was quickly overshadowed by the many dangers connected to it, dangers that existed long before March 2020. COVID-19 became one of many diseases that disproportionately affected people of color. Beliefs about the response to the disease, and even its reality, became anchored to political divisions. Wealthy corporations raked in heavy profits riding the disproportionate benefits of government intervention, and as the disease continues to have devastating effects on the disabled and immunocompromised, the able-bodied can choose to ignore it, just as the unaffected have done in many previous epidemics.
There were people for whom the world ended during COVID-19. But the apocalyptic nature of COVID-19 was brief. The apocalypses of systemic racism, classism, ableism, political and religious sectarianism, and global imperialism that COVID-19 exacerbated lasted far longer, and continue to persist to this day.
Yet we have ceased to view these forces as world-ending, because we are desensitized to everyday apocalypses like these.
For as long as humans have told themselves stories, they have told themselves stories of apocalypse. Whether out of theological necessity or morbid fascination, these questions take on a culturally relevant shape in every generation. But our understanding of the “End” usually involves the status-quo cycle of normalcy being broken somehow. There will be a moment, a Ragnarok or an Armageddon, that we can isolate and call the “End.” Even if there is an eternity beyond it, an After, there is a turning point at which things change. They have to change, how could the world end any other way?
In the United States today, we no longer write Books of Revelation, but we do write dystopias and post-apocalypses that seek to reflect on our world in the same way. Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games” reflects on classism and desensitization to violence by depicting a labor force divided against each other by an annual gladiatorial battle among children. Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” shows us a Christian fundamentalist regime that has deprived women of the ability to read and work and forces them into sexual slavery. But though they occupy the same land, Collins’s Panem and Atwood’s Gilead are not the United States. They may be relevant to us, but something went wrong. The cycle was broken. We know that they live in the After because we live in the Before, and there needed to be a war or a coup before the child-murdering and sexual slavery could begin.
When Imaan Mirza, Ethan Jasny, Jay Hong Chew, and I pitched “It’s Only a Matter of Time,” we sought to discuss constancy even as we felt surrounded by a narrative of rapid change. This narrative not only tells us that humanity is achieving new unprecedented heights, but that the challenges we face are similarly unprecedented.
These threats are new and unique in their power to end our civilization or our world, we tell ourselves. But the fact that the After seems to loom over us only reinforces the idea that we live in the Before. We never stop to wonder whether we might already be living in the After.
That is why Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel “Parable of the Sower” resonates with me so much. To our protagonist, Lauren Olamina, as well as to the reader, it is clear that the world of the late 2020s is the After. Neighborhoods are walled off to keep out the rampant street violence, labor and climate conditions have deteriorated, and widespread corruption has rendered public services useless. The world, for all intents and purposes, has ended.
But the adults around Lauren never see it that way. To them, these are merely bad times in the Before, times from which the nation will soon recover. In many ways, their belief is justified. Technology has greatly improved, though it is inaccessible to the many. Humanity has traveled to Mars, though the government is pulling funding for further missions. The United States still exists, its quality of life has just declined. As the novel progresses, the reader is forced to an uncomfortable conclusion: nothing really changed, and the world ended anyway.
The After looks like the Before.
These everyday apocalypses stick with me because they remove a barrier that exists in other dystopias. We are not afforded the luxury of knowing that the world has ended. Butler gives us no war, no coup, no global pandemic to mark the times. There is merely Now and Then with the knowledge that somewhere in between the world ended, but there is no “End” to identify.
Nothing changed, and yet the world ended anyway.
E. M. Forster’s 1909 novella “The Machine Stops” fits the everyday apocalypse mold for me as well. The novella sees humans entirely reliant upon a massive Machine that houses and provides for them beneath the surface of the Earth. The human experience is reduced to developing “ideas,” which they present to others through video calls. Few take note when the Machine begins to fail, having created a religion around the Machine and believing it to be omnipotent. There is a clear Now and Then, but it is more difficult to demarcate when humans became so reliant on technology that the world ended. The antagonizing force is not necessarily the Machine, but rather the stories its human dependents tell about it.
In much the same way, the stories we tell about the world around us today, on issues ranging widely from artificial intelligence and space travel to racial and economic justice, encourage us to think that we are living in the Before. We’re not in Panem or Gilead, so we must be in the Before.
But we cannot rely on the apocalypse to call itself the apocalypse.
It can be tempting to escape into worlds where the evil is clear, worlds where we know which side is right and we can see the world ending before it happens. But the world is not going to tell us when it is necessary to take action. Fascism and hatred and evil often do not have a Thanos snap or an Order 66 or a Battle of Armageddon that function as a call to arms.
In our dystopias, we glorify the heroism of our protagonists because it is clear to us that they live in the After, that there is something that must be fixed, not merely prevented. Yet being able to identify and date the End is a luxury we are not afforded in the real world.
So what does it mean to live in the After? It means recognizing that the climate emergency is here as unprecedented natural disasters ravage our planet. It means recognizing that the imperialism of our governments and corporations are leading to deaths from preventable diseases in the global South. It means recognizing that the things we fear in our dystopias are lived realities for many people around the globe, and that the times in which we live are times when immediate action is necessary. The status quo will not save us.
We must be able to recognize the ending of the world as it happens, whether it is our world that is ending or the world of someone on the other side of the planet. This is what the After looks like, and action is necessary now. Posterity will not look kindly on our inaction in the face of the end of the world.
Our apocalypse does not call itself the apocalypse. It is up to us to notice it.
