‘And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder: and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps.’ That’s the Guide of Revelation, however the phrases may as nicely have been spoken by an American anytime between the spiritual revivals of the 18th century and the chiliastic chat threads of right this moment. Many horrible endings have come and gone in the USA: civil struggle, slavery, two world wars, assassinations, soiled wars, a Capitol stormed by hooligans. But the fact is in any other case: the world as we all know it, in all its magnificence and horror, thriller and terror, remains to be right here. Folks proceed to suppose in any other case, nevertheless—that, because the literary critic Frank Kermode as soon as prompt, the apocalypse is perhaps true, or can not however be true, in a special sense.
Within the spirit of Kermode, it might be rash to not acknowledge that if our digital communications networks are glutted with lakes of fireplace and speaking heads who converse in devilish tongues, it’s as a result of the sense of promise provided by political programs and new applied sciences has soured. And never solely that: sizzling wars, a warming local weather, and resurgent fascism are now not unusual. Neither is an historic, ugly trope lately poured into a brand new, environment-friendly bottle: that folks themselves are the issue. In 2018, the thinker Todd Could printed an op-ed in The New York Occasions that requested ‘whether it would be a tragedy if the planet no longer contained human beings. And the answer I am going to give might seem puzzling at first. I want to suggest, at least tentatively, both that it would be a tragedy and that it might just be a good thing.’ To flee an apocalypse, in different phrases, we should cross not via the attention of a needle however one other apocalypse. For Could, an apocalypse is a morally fascinating answer to issues like world warming. Name it the upper misanthropy. If something, the circularity of Could’s pondering reinforces his sense of humanity being trapped by its personal ideas and gadgets, digital or actual.
A second pressure of latest antihumanism is promoted by tech tycoons like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. They dream of recent types of human intelligence that may now not be human, comparable to synthetic basic intelligence or an embodied web. Why privilege the human mind, they ask, if computing energy can at all times leapfrog it, a lot in order that computer systems threaten to make pondering by mere people superfluous. However the misanthropic attraction to ‘transhumanism’ – purpose untethered from the mind, and subsequently pure – is itself a type of evangelism, not ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ however relatively ‘Ideas in the Service of Oligarchs’. The Silicon Valley gurus are promising enchantment of a perverse form: digital paradises of untrammeled pondering and the cultivation of ecotopias now not spoiled by human beings. Musk and Thiel, too, are harpers harping with their harps.
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Forty-five years in the past – hardly a blink of the attention within the lengthy historical past of apocalyptic pondering – the novelist and thinker Maurice Blanchot asserted in The Writing of Catastrophe that ‘We are on the edge of disaster without being able to situate it in the future.’ The explanation, he stated, is that catastrophe ‘is rather always already past’. What Blanchot meant is that catastrophe is acknowledged solely after it has occurred. On this sense, an apocalypse isn’t a revelation of one thing new; as a substitute, it reveals the unsettling dimensions of a world that we already know.
I used to be reminded of this in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because it occurred, though there was no snow on the bottom on the time I used to be fascinated with icebergs. ‘We’d relatively have the iceberg than the ship’, begins the primary stanza of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem The Imaginary Iceberg, which continues,
though it meant the top of journey.
Though it stood stock-still like cloudy rock
and all the ocean had been shifting marble.
Throughout that point these traces got here to me in every kind of climate. The Imaginary Iceberg is a poem that I really like, though on the time I couldn’t bear in mind after I had final learn it. But there it was, its first 4 traces on repeat in my thoughts’s ear, a phantom verse.
It was March and I used to be in a small metropolis in japanese Germany. The closest icebergs had been not less than 2,000 miles to the northwest. Quickly it grew to become troublesome to see a lot of something as a result of COVID-19 restrictions shrank my each day ramble to the quick stroll between my condo and workplace. There was well mannered grumbling concerning the restrictions. That modified in April, when anti-vaxxers started to prepare weekly protests in Germany’s huge cities. Irrespective of how clamorous these gatherings grew to become, they had been subdued in comparison with a typical response to the pandemic in the USA. The pastor David Jeremiah, who was one in every of President Trump’s evangelical advisers, questioned if the virus was biblical prophecy, and known as the pandemic ‘the most apocalyptic thing that has ever happened to us’. Many People agreed: by the center of March, publishers in the USA had been reporting robust gross sales for books about apocalypse.
Because the weeks in lockdown handed and an apocalyptic fervour confirmed no indicators of fading, I got here to grasp what The Imaginary Iceberg was nudging me to listen to. The poem has three 11-line stanzas, and as they unfold the tight rhyme and rhythmical schemes established within the first stanza are regularly relaxed, the one exception being the rhyming couplets that finish every stanza. Bishop takes the poem’s metaphors in the other way, stressing self-containment and the lack of sight: ‘The iceberg cuts its facets from within’. Starting innocently sufficient with an unambiguous assertion, the poem turns into a parable concerning the risks of valuing the imaginary over the imagined, of treasuring an iceberg that’s ‘Like jewelry from a grave’, that ‘saves itself perpetually and adorns / only itself’.
Bishop is cautioning towards surrendering the mandatory work of notion and comprehension for the seduction of apocalyptic revelation, regardless of how engaging which may be. ‘We’d relatively have the iceberg than the ship, / though it meant the top of journey.’ Be cautious of how of pondering that hinge on a catastrophic break between the current and the previous, I heard the poem saying. Bishop’s clever warning comes with a present: the size of an imaginary iceberg will be explored along with her as your information, even when you put an finish to journey.
Scene from the Guide of Apocalypse, France, c.fifteenth century. Picture through Wikimedia Commons
This text first appeared in IWM Publish (Spring/Summer time 2024).
