Conscious Choice: The Many Faces of Apocalypse

June 2003

The Many Faces of Apocalypse

Science Fiction to Fire 'n' Brimstone

by James John Bell

"If the apocalypse comes, beep me." — Buffy Summers in "Buffy The Vampire Slayer"

As kids, my friends and I stumbled across the old piece of plywood while hiking. Such large junk was a familiar site — these woods on Chicago’s South Side near Palos Forest Preserve were really not woods at all, but overgrown underbrush along the industrial Illinois & Michigan canal corridor. The piece of plywood was almost overlooked, but I noticed that if you jumped on it there was a bit of a bounce. We cleared off the dirt and grass. There were hinges; it was a makeshift door. With some effort we opened it and within seconds we pledged to keep our discovery secret. After all, it’s not every day that you find buried in the woods a nuclear fallout shelter!

For the next few years, during the early‘80s, my friends and I prepared for the end of the world. It wasn’t enough to just plan — the door we discovered became our escape hatch from the world, where we would adventure in role playing games like Twilight 2000 and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. We didn’t just believe the end was coming, we fantasized about it. Jimmy Carter reinforced our beliefs in his farewell address, Ronald Reagan said Star Wars could save some of us from an all-out attack, abc’s The Day After prepared us for survival. Then the 1984 movie Red Dawn brought our past few years of post-apocalyptic planning to life on the silver screen. The apocalypse better get here soon, our kid-sized notions told us, otherwise we’re all going to have to get jobs at McDonalds or the mall.

Apocalypse Then

Little did we know that decades earlier the nearby forest preserves of Red Gate Woods were the secret birthplace of the atomic bomb. The peaceful Palos woodlands contained, at one time, secret military installations where the Manhattan Project took place. I didn’t find this out till years later when I was beginning to understand what the world looked like beyond the safety of my childhood fallout shelter.

I lived a nomadic activist lifestyle during the 1990s in the twilight world of the Western Shoshone in Nevada. It was a conquered Indian nation where over 900 nuclear bombs had been detonated, many above ground, since the dawn of the atomic age.

My friends these days were those who navigated the backcountry of the Nevada nuclear test site. When word of an underground nuclear test came they would hike miles, avoiding security patrols and radioactive craters, in order to chain themselves to ground zero in protest. Such symbols of the apocalypse were sought out because — by revealing them to people — the world could be changed!

Large scale underground testing of nuclear bombs was eventually stopped in 1992. The major threats to national security that fueled the 80s were no more either. The Berlin Wall was long gone. I watched the whole world transform in a matter of years. America didn’t change, but I sensed that, as a nation, we were beginning to fantasize about some kind of coming transformation.

Apocalypse Now

Today, our popular culture is awestruck with apocalypse, from the rise of machines in this spring and summer’s films Matrix Reloaded and Terminator 3 to Michael Crichton’s mini-machine takeover in his new novel, Prey. Classic apocalyptic science fiction is disturbingly prescient as well, with John Brunner’s industrial-apocalyptic The Sheep Look Up coming back in print this June and Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Realtime fueling apocalyptic beliefs.

But machines cannot compete with God. Witness the sales of the fundamentalist Christian-bent Left Behind book series on the apocalypse, which has sold over 55,000,000 copies. Moreover, Armageddon came out in April and is perfect reading while watching the evolution of war action on Iraq. It continues the story of those left behind after the Christian rapture and tells of the "battle of the ages" when the armies of the world are drawn inexorably toward the Middle East for total war.

Recently a former fundamentalist Christian and I swapped childhood stories of the specter of an apocalypse. While I was playing in a fallout shelter she was watching her Mom turn on the kitchen faucet just to check if it ran red with blood — a sign that the biblical rapture was underway. The number of Americans who believe such things are staggering. A Time/cnn poll recently showed that "59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies in the Book of Revelation will come true." One-quarter of people polled believe that the Bible predicted the September 11 attack, and 17 percent of Americans believe the end of the world will happen in their lifetime." The die-hard religious among us are planning their escape from the present world into rapture, while the scientists and hackers construct their own popular techno-version of the end times.

Apocalypse Tomorrow

The two sequels to the blockbuster film The Matrix promise to delve further into the philosophy and origins of Earth’s machine-controlled apocalyptic future. Cast members were required to read Wired editor Kevin Kelly’s book Out of Control — The Rise of Neo-biological Civilization before they could read the first script. Page one reads, "The realm of the born — all that is nature and the realm of the made — all that is humanly constructed — are becoming one."

The nuclear arms race of decades past has now been replaced by a race for technological convergence. U.K. science fiction author and anti-nuclear activist John Brunner described our post-arms race era as "the brain race." The products of the brain race’s technological convergence are already staggering: the merging of biological and nonbiological entities into living machines, like mit’s robo-pike, plants and animals engineered to grow pharmaceutical drugs (e.g. corn grown to produce a pig vaccination). In addition there are the smart robots like the military’s robo-soldier, Hermes and the pilotless X-45 aircraft.

Some scientists, like Bill Joy, the chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, are even warning that we could lose control of the brain race. They believe that this exponentially expanding technological utopia, or "technotopia," could cause the total extinction of life as we know it, others say the direction we’re headed smacks of eugenics — the creation of an elite super-humanity.

A number of scientists, researchers, and military analysts believe the brain race will soon give rise to a "machine intelligence" that could surpass human intelligence within a few decades, leading to what’s come to be called the "Singularity." Author and inventor Ray Kurzweil defines this phenomenon as "technological change so rapid and profound it could create a rupture in the very fabric of human history ...we cannot even imagine what will happen from our present perspective." A range of dates is given for the advent of the Singularity. Its possibility has sparked a huge following with many believing this "techno-rapture" will occur in their lifetimes.

A few books on the Singularity are out now — others are in the works and due out over the next couple of years. Taking the Red Pill, edited by Glenn Yeffeth, features scientific and philosophical essays that explore both the technological speed-up toward the Singularity and The Matrix‘s portrayal of a post-Singularity world. Ray Kurzweil’s essay, "The Human Machine Merger: Are We Heading for The Matrix," goes head to head with Bill Joy’s essay, "Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us." He contends that circa 2030, the technology of The Matrix will be within our grasp and humanity will be teetering on the edge of the Singularity.

Beyond Apocalypse: The Bright Side

Whatever the form apocalyptic desire takes, Singularity or Christian rapture — it reveals something about how we view our present world. I believe our culture’s obsession with apocalypse is really just an amplified desire for change — a longing for a different tomorrow, one that we can’t fully articulate, but that we know is out there.

When we’re riveted to movies, TV, and books that focus on an apocalypse, what we’re really doing is withdrawing from a present (and a future) that we find unacceptable. Be it Independence Day, The Matrix, or Terminator, we continue to pay top dollar to watch the icons of consumer society get wiped off the map.

In my estimation, what America’s strange love affair with the apocalypse is really telling us, is not that America is going to end, but that we’re ready for significant change. The trouble is that our revulsion of the present has also caused many of us to retreat into the fallout shelters of our minds. Many people will not come out until a positive vision of the world shows itself.

I believe that all this apocalypse talk is an indicator that people are ready for — even fantasizing about — significant change. Our challenge is to tap into that desire and channel this very powerful social energy toward creating a positive apocalypse-free future.

James John Bell is a Chicago writer. His Web site is LastWizards.com. He wrote the afterword for John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, available in June.

Aiming for an Apocalypse-Free Future

In order to counter the growing popularity of the myth of technotopia and the apocalypse, we must actively construct a new mythology, one that is more appealing. If enough people adapt a vision of a possible future, they will change their behavior in ways that are consistent with that image. A new reality will evolve. Here are some ideas:

Develop strong common visions about the future we want — organic food, sustainable homes, responsible and ethical businesses.

Think local, act global — environmental issues have now become singular, impacting everyone: global climate change, invasive species, genetic pollution, polluted groundwater. Place-based & single-issue environmentalism is no longer relevant or effective. Local actions must connect to and form alliances with other struggles.

Adopt a systems analysis and approach — that addresses the root causes of global environmental problems: for instance, driving resource extraction industries from the first to the third world causes even more environmental damage, while a systems approach addresses the destructive models of capitalism and consumption that drive these industries.

Free your mind — by breaking out of binary modes of thinking. When the world is framed in categories of good/evil, left/right, Democrat/Republican, it cements the status quo. The current power structure is dependent on the control of such rigid categorization, like the computer is dependent on the uniformity of the one/zero.

Break down borders and artificial separations by challenging assumptions — this allows for new possibilities and alliances, like seeing the growing global peace and democracy movement, not as a thousand separate struggles around corporate globalization and war, but as a rising super-power with the ability to truly unite the world.

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