ArticleIt’s early March 2020, and I’m riding near-empty peak hour trains to an office that is days away from being shuttered for an uncertain number of weeks or months. This eerie commute was probably not the optimal moment to finally start reading Emily St John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven, about a civilisation-ending flu pandemic, but in I plunged.
I wouldn’t exactly call it a comfort read, but in those “unprecedented times” it proved both weirdly cathartic and weirdly reassuring. The virus in Station Eleven, dubbed the Georgia Flu, is fast and deadly. Within weeks, 99 per cent of the world’s population has succumbed. There are no debates about lockdowns, masks, treatments, vaccines: it’s the end of governments, of electricity, of air travel, of pharmaceuticals, of social media, of cities. Bands of survivors form rudimentary settlements; the novel follows a group who, twenty years after the collapse, travel from town to town by caravan to perform Shakespeare for these communities — “Because survival is insufficient”.
This, plainly, was not the pandemic we were having in 2020 and afterwards. COVID-19 occupied a messy middle ground that we are less likely to read or write novels about, somewhere in between domestic realism and post-apocalyptic dystopia. We didn’t have to go to work anymore — but also, we did. We kept making policy, and we kept making memes. We grappled with immense fear and suffering, and we continued to do the laundry. We’re still reckoning with the fallout of the pandemic, but a time traveller from 2019 would hardly find 2025 unrecognisable.
One of the most recognisable things, perhaps, would be the apocalyptic mood that permeated our discussions about the future pre-COVID and has in no way abated since.
The other day, I watched a stranger on Instagram chirpily explain how, with her lack of survival skills, she not only expects to be among the first to die in the coming apocalypse, she’d actually prefer it that way. Competing for resources in a post-apocalyptic hellscape? No thanks, she joked: “I’m barely coping in this pre-apocalyptic hellscape.”
This is — extrapolating loosely from the poster’s appearance and access to social media — a pre-apocalyptic hellscape in which, after filming and posting this video, she could probably call a driver to her home within minutes by means of an app, choose from an array of local eateries or grocery stores to supply her with dinner, drop into a bookstore to pick up one of literally thousands of titles recently published in her country, take a hot shower, call a plumber if her shower stops working, take her rubbish out and reliably expect her local council to disappear it, expect an ambulance to show up pretty promptly in a medical emergency, quit her job if she doesn’t like it and find a new one, attend a protest, complain about the government, or plan a holiday.
There’s an underbelly to all these things — from democratic erosion to the evils of Uber and Amazon to precarious healthcare, rampant depression and anxiety, and deep social divisions. But in the sweep of human history, this is an astounding level of functionality for any society, let alone a “pre-apocalyptic hellscape”. The things that are appalling about it — corruption, inequality, injustice, cruelty — are appallingly routine across human societies.
Is it a kind of fiddling while Rome burns, to enumerate the trappings and comforts of modern life? We have our barista coffees and our TikTok microtrends; meanwhile, war rages and the world warms.
The curious thing is, while everyone seems to agree that Rome is on the verge of spectacular collapse, nobody seems to agree on whether it’s burning or flooding. While climate change seems the most obvious candidate for looming catastrophe, some argue that the focus on environmental challenges is itself the biggest threat. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, in his recent conversation with The New York Times’ Ross Douthat, says the climate lobby’s goal of “degrowth” would turn out to be “super oppressive”, and basically refers to Greta Thunberg as the antichrist. Meanwhile it wouldn’t be too hard to make a case for Peter Thiel and friends — champions of AI and transhumanism — as the supervillains of the piece, hastening humanity’s destruction.
The key issue is the moral flabbiness of the West — the “civilisational suicidal empathy” decried by the likes of Elon Musk, and routinely cast as a feminisation problem. Or else it’s the opposite: the callousness and cruelty of an increasingly fascist right, and the “toxic masculinity” that seems to correlate with it. Progressives lament the erosion of, say, abortion or trans rights and invoke a Handmaid’s Tale-type future; conservatives warn that progressive victories on issues like euthanasia are ushering in a pervasive culture of death.
If everyone agrees that the threat is existential, but has completely contrary ideas of what the threat is, it’s little wonder that our experience of the political process is largely one of deadlock. How do we take action on the most pressing issues of our day if we can’t even agree what they are? And what happens if we get it wrong?
Depending on who you believe, net zero is a dire necessity or else a self-destructive cul-de-sac. Science is going to save us, or destroy us; it either needs to be urgently curbed, or given far more latitude. Liberal democracy has utterly failed, is no longer fit for purpose; or it’s the most successful political system humans have devised — despite its glitches — and urgently needs to be revitalised if anything like our way of life is to endure. Capitalism is either the source of our prosperity — lifting more than a billion people out of poverty over the last few decades — or it’s a fundamental wrong turn and needs to be comprehensively overhauled.
These things are not so much debated as absolutely assumed by each side, and therefore one group’s valiant attempts at reform look to their opponents like staggeringly stupid and possibly malign interventions that will obviously only compound the problem.
The human capacity for making bad things worse — for doubling down on what we’ve already got wrong — is not new. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis’s much-loved and psychologically astute work of fiction, the titular devil writes gleefully to his underling about how easily we humans can misconstrue our situation, and therefore respond to it in precisely the wrong way:
The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm … Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality … and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.
Easily mistaken; easily deceived. Easily nudged down paths that will only exacerbate our problems. That’s us — humanity in all our folly and hubris.
But that’s not the whole story about us. I return again and again to the warning and encouragement that the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson issued a decade ago now in her book The Givenness of Things. She writes about the power of “cultural pessimism” to create “a kind of somber panic, a collective dream-state in which recourse to terrible remedies is inspired by delusions of mortal threat”. This apocalypticism (we might call it) is an even more alarming development, she suggests, than the threats which tend to inspire it — not least because its “major passion is bitter hostility toward many or most of the people within the very culture the pessimists always feel they are intent on rescuing”:
When panic on one side is creating alarm on the other, it is easy to forget that there are always as good grounds for optimism as for pessimism — exactly the same grounds, in fact — that is, because we are human. We still have every potential for good we have ever had, and the same presumptive claim to respect, our own respect and one another’s. We are still creatures of singular interest and value, agile of soul as we have always been and as we will continue to be even despite our errors and depredations, for as long as we abide on this earth. To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.
It’s striking that the human tendency to apocalypticism was just as pronounced two millennia ago as it is today. Jesus cautioned his disciples against being deceived by “wars and rumours of wars”, disasters and political chaos, into thinking the world is ending. He did preach the end of the world; but also, our inability to recognise it. People will betray and hate each other, he said (Robinson’s “fear and contempt”?); the love of most will grow cold; but your grasp of events and your powers of prediction are severely limited.
The response Jesus counselled to this ignorance — this humanness — was not inaction or despair, but a quiet and wise faithfulness, a stewardship of the times and conditions we are dealt.
I agree with the band of survivor-performers in Station Eleven (via Star Trek) that “survival is insufficient”. I agree with the woman on Instagram that survival is not, after all, the most important thing. And I agree with the writer and podcaster Elizabeth Oldfield (by way of the atheist chaplain Vanessa Zoltan) that, “Every generation thinks the world is ending, but whether the apocalypse is coming or not, I want to be the kind of person that is needed at the end of the world.”
Not the person with advanced wilderness skills; not the space pioneer or the self-proclaimed political messiah; but the one whose love does not grow cold; the one who, facing down enormous challenges, acts in hope but also humility; the one who rejects fear and contempt and continues instead to embrace the other — and the future that we can only shape together.
Natasha Moore is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. She is the author of For the Love of God: How the Church is Better and Worse Than You Ever Imagined and The Pleasures of Pessimism. She holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Cambridge. This article was first published in ABC Religion & Ethics.