More on apocalypse
Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2020 11:10 am
As some may know already, I am currently writing a book about the sociology of apocalypse. This is a bit of a funny time to be writing this book. It was going to be about climate change, nuclear war, that kind of sh.t, but I suppose now there's going to be an extra chapter on pandemics as well.
So, here's some of my initial thoughts as I'm trying to piece together what to think about all this. Feedback appreciated, but it turned out a rather long post, apologies.
First, it's about narrative. One of the main research questions in apocalypse studies is why are people and societies at large always so convinced that the end of the world is just around the corner, when all the evidence, from 3000 years of history, is that the world has stubbornly refused to end.
This is not to make light of the current crisis (or, indeed, others, like climate change) - the fact that it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it isn't going to happen this time. Or that, if the cataclysm comes and passes, if we somehow live through it and come out the other side, and the world is still pretty much there, many people are going to suffer and die along the way - it will have been their end of the world, if not ours (for example, for the Sioux, the apocalypse has happened, with Armageddon at Wounded Knee).
Kermode, in his essay The sense of an ending, proposed that we are living in our own narratives, with us as the main characters. As we are the main part of the story, our lives cannot be small or insignificant, one way in which to put ourselves into the bigger picture of the universe is that we must be living in extraordinary times, our generation, our lifetime is special in a way that of previous generations wasn't. The two defining points in the timeline of the world are its beginning and its end, since we're clearly not living at the beginning we must be living at the other end of time. However, visions of us standing at the beginning can be found in the utopian narratives of the founder generations of new societies looking hopefully to the horizon of the future; the end narratives see us standing at the end of time instead, looking back. Often millenarian narratives combine the two, with the end of the world being the catalyst for the beginning of a new world, with our, special, generation at the apex of the cataclysm that brings the change. Within our generation, we are further distinguished between the masses and the select few who know the truth and thus can act upon, and shape, events. That truth may be revealed religiously, or through science, or maybe, if we cannot draw on either spiritual or scientific habitus, through the conviction that we have acquired special knowledge through other means such as uncovered conspiracies - in all cases only a select few can appreciate what is really happening. (And again, a disclaimer that this is not trying to put scientific knowledge on the same epistemic level as revelation or conspiracy theory, however the narrative function special knowledge fulfills is similar, whether that knowledge is justified or not - but there are clearly more conversations to be had about this).
But narrative goes deeper than just fulfilling a psychological need to be special and justify our inclusion of ourselves as one of the main characters in world history. Our narratives are bound by conventions and cultural expectations, for example the need for events to be shaped by agency. For events to be part of our narrative, they need to have a meaning, and for them to have a meaning they can't just have happened. We have largely done away with Providence or fate, directed by God or gods as the agents of change, however, meaning and agency is found through other means. As Ulrich Beck has theorised for example, natural catastrophe gets reinterpreted not as an act of God, but as failures in risk management. Hurricane Katrina was a natural event, but the suffering it has caused was now the responsibility of government for not maintaining the levees, individuals for not heeding evacuation orders, and all of late modern society for increasing the incidence of extreme weather events through letting climate change happen. Man-made risk, and crucially, our collective awareness of it, has replaced fate as the primary imaginary of our future and who is to blame for it. The setting has changed but the narrative structure survives.
Once a risk event is anchored to our culturally inherited narratives of the apocalyptic, wider narrative tropes come into play - we'll have saviours, messiahs and prophets, judgement and redemption, post apocalyptic utopias and distopias, and more, as integral parts of the stories we tell ourselves of late modern, globalised existential risks - and this inflects how we react to them.
Secondly then, it's about the cultural norms and values into which those narratives are woven. Mary Douglas analysed risk stories as dirt taboos - risk is introduced to a society through the unclean (i.e. taboo breaking) habits of outsiders. These taboos may be in origin about lowering risks to a society through prohibiting uncleanliness or certain foods that are perceived as risky, but they can become highly ritualised, so that practices can continue being taboo breaking even if they are no longer introducing a tangible risk. It then becomes a general concern that practices that break with taboos, or a culture's general set of norms, values and ritualised beliefs, introduce potential harm to society. This means that other societies, which may have a different set of cultural norms etc are inherently dangerous as well. They don't eat what we eat, they don't wash like we wash, they don't f.ck like we f.ck.
Risk taboos tend to be associated with the breaking of bodily boundaries - this is where harm is most naturally introduced to the individual. Bad hygiene practices, rotten food, unsafe sex, these are all inherently dangerous, and as such have become the focus of many (most?) ritualised dirt taboos. Breaking cultural norms in these areas introduces harm to a society. But a closely knit society can itself become a ritualised metaphor for the body, breaking cultural boundaries is analogous to breaking the bodily ones. Risk from outsiders is therefore especially salient, illnesses which break through the society's bodily boundary for example are due to the norm and taboo breaking behaviour of other cultures.
Infectious disease outbreaks that invade our bodily boundaries, both of the individual and of our society, are due to dirt taboo breaking practices of outsiders. Infectious diseases tend to be named, in popular discourse at least, after their (often merely assumed) country of origin. German measles, Spanish flu, Mexican swine fever, Middle East respiratory syndrome, Trump's "Chinese virus" (though it's heartening to see some international pushback against this name). It's the foreigner's and outsider's unclean habits in breaking dirt taboos that is to blame (and remember, we need someone to blame), e.g. the (imagined) Chinese cultural trait of eating animals we in our culture would deem unclean to eat, in case of the coronavirus outbreaks. Or the sexual practices of homosexuals during the HIV epidemic (though they weren't foreigners, they were clearly dirt taboo breaking outsiders within a heteronormative society, and thus fair game for being blamed). Or the dirty unnatural animal husbandry practices of the British, if you were following the BSE episode from the continent.
Now another disclaimer, poor hygiene or animal husbandry practices can indeed lead to infectious disease outbreaks, so I'm not saying this is all just pure xenophobia. Indeed, Douglas' dirt taboos all tended to have an origin in perfectly sensible precautions (by the standards of knowledge in the given culture at the time), the point is that they have become ritualised so that the taboo breaking behaviour of outsiders and other cultures becomes the culprit rather than the underlying actual risky behaviour on which we tend to have much less knowledge. Long before possible origins for the virus have been identified, popular discourse had already started focussing on the "dirty Chinese" and their "dirty" foods. One of the insidious facets of all this is precisely that the xenophobia and the precautionary risk avoidance behaviour are so difficult to disentangle.
So where are we? In order to make sense of times like this, we construct narratives, of us at the cusp of momentous, world changing events. We are special characters in these narratives not just because unlike our ancestors we live in the pivotal times, but also because we are among the select few who have access to special knowledge and with special knowledge comes access to our special pathways for salvation and further along, redemption. It sets us apart from the masses, the others who are to blame because natural disasters don't just happen, they are the fault of somebody, somebody else who either directs events nefariously, or lets things happen through unnatural, unclean, taboo breaking behaviour. What exactly the wider apocalyptic narratives are, and what precisely the taboos are that the others have broken, varies from society to society; events get narrated through our own various cultural lenses.
But universally we, as a narrating species have a tendency to dramaticise cataclysmic events, to assign roles of heroes and villains onto an uncaring directionless nature. And yet despite all this the world has not yet ended, and like all crises before us, this too will pass. Just pray that we're not the Sioux, and this is not our Wounded Knee.
The end
So, here's some of my initial thoughts as I'm trying to piece together what to think about all this. Feedback appreciated, but it turned out a rather long post, apologies.
First, it's about narrative. One of the main research questions in apocalypse studies is why are people and societies at large always so convinced that the end of the world is just around the corner, when all the evidence, from 3000 years of history, is that the world has stubbornly refused to end.
This is not to make light of the current crisis (or, indeed, others, like climate change) - the fact that it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it isn't going to happen this time. Or that, if the cataclysm comes and passes, if we somehow live through it and come out the other side, and the world is still pretty much there, many people are going to suffer and die along the way - it will have been their end of the world, if not ours (for example, for the Sioux, the apocalypse has happened, with Armageddon at Wounded Knee).
Kermode, in his essay The sense of an ending, proposed that we are living in our own narratives, with us as the main characters. As we are the main part of the story, our lives cannot be small or insignificant, one way in which to put ourselves into the bigger picture of the universe is that we must be living in extraordinary times, our generation, our lifetime is special in a way that of previous generations wasn't. The two defining points in the timeline of the world are its beginning and its end, since we're clearly not living at the beginning we must be living at the other end of time. However, visions of us standing at the beginning can be found in the utopian narratives of the founder generations of new societies looking hopefully to the horizon of the future; the end narratives see us standing at the end of time instead, looking back. Often millenarian narratives combine the two, with the end of the world being the catalyst for the beginning of a new world, with our, special, generation at the apex of the cataclysm that brings the change. Within our generation, we are further distinguished between the masses and the select few who know the truth and thus can act upon, and shape, events. That truth may be revealed religiously, or through science, or maybe, if we cannot draw on either spiritual or scientific habitus, through the conviction that we have acquired special knowledge through other means such as uncovered conspiracies - in all cases only a select few can appreciate what is really happening. (And again, a disclaimer that this is not trying to put scientific knowledge on the same epistemic level as revelation or conspiracy theory, however the narrative function special knowledge fulfills is similar, whether that knowledge is justified or not - but there are clearly more conversations to be had about this).
But narrative goes deeper than just fulfilling a psychological need to be special and justify our inclusion of ourselves as one of the main characters in world history. Our narratives are bound by conventions and cultural expectations, for example the need for events to be shaped by agency. For events to be part of our narrative, they need to have a meaning, and for them to have a meaning they can't just have happened. We have largely done away with Providence or fate, directed by God or gods as the agents of change, however, meaning and agency is found through other means. As Ulrich Beck has theorised for example, natural catastrophe gets reinterpreted not as an act of God, but as failures in risk management. Hurricane Katrina was a natural event, but the suffering it has caused was now the responsibility of government for not maintaining the levees, individuals for not heeding evacuation orders, and all of late modern society for increasing the incidence of extreme weather events through letting climate change happen. Man-made risk, and crucially, our collective awareness of it, has replaced fate as the primary imaginary of our future and who is to blame for it. The setting has changed but the narrative structure survives.
Once a risk event is anchored to our culturally inherited narratives of the apocalyptic, wider narrative tropes come into play - we'll have saviours, messiahs and prophets, judgement and redemption, post apocalyptic utopias and distopias, and more, as integral parts of the stories we tell ourselves of late modern, globalised existential risks - and this inflects how we react to them.
Secondly then, it's about the cultural norms and values into which those narratives are woven. Mary Douglas analysed risk stories as dirt taboos - risk is introduced to a society through the unclean (i.e. taboo breaking) habits of outsiders. These taboos may be in origin about lowering risks to a society through prohibiting uncleanliness or certain foods that are perceived as risky, but they can become highly ritualised, so that practices can continue being taboo breaking even if they are no longer introducing a tangible risk. It then becomes a general concern that practices that break with taboos, or a culture's general set of norms, values and ritualised beliefs, introduce potential harm to society. This means that other societies, which may have a different set of cultural norms etc are inherently dangerous as well. They don't eat what we eat, they don't wash like we wash, they don't f.ck like we f.ck.
Risk taboos tend to be associated with the breaking of bodily boundaries - this is where harm is most naturally introduced to the individual. Bad hygiene practices, rotten food, unsafe sex, these are all inherently dangerous, and as such have become the focus of many (most?) ritualised dirt taboos. Breaking cultural norms in these areas introduces harm to a society. But a closely knit society can itself become a ritualised metaphor for the body, breaking cultural boundaries is analogous to breaking the bodily ones. Risk from outsiders is therefore especially salient, illnesses which break through the society's bodily boundary for example are due to the norm and taboo breaking behaviour of other cultures.
Infectious disease outbreaks that invade our bodily boundaries, both of the individual and of our society, are due to dirt taboo breaking practices of outsiders. Infectious diseases tend to be named, in popular discourse at least, after their (often merely assumed) country of origin. German measles, Spanish flu, Mexican swine fever, Middle East respiratory syndrome, Trump's "Chinese virus" (though it's heartening to see some international pushback against this name). It's the foreigner's and outsider's unclean habits in breaking dirt taboos that is to blame (and remember, we need someone to blame), e.g. the (imagined) Chinese cultural trait of eating animals we in our culture would deem unclean to eat, in case of the coronavirus outbreaks. Or the sexual practices of homosexuals during the HIV epidemic (though they weren't foreigners, they were clearly dirt taboo breaking outsiders within a heteronormative society, and thus fair game for being blamed). Or the dirty unnatural animal husbandry practices of the British, if you were following the BSE episode from the continent.
Now another disclaimer, poor hygiene or animal husbandry practices can indeed lead to infectious disease outbreaks, so I'm not saying this is all just pure xenophobia. Indeed, Douglas' dirt taboos all tended to have an origin in perfectly sensible precautions (by the standards of knowledge in the given culture at the time), the point is that they have become ritualised so that the taboo breaking behaviour of outsiders and other cultures becomes the culprit rather than the underlying actual risky behaviour on which we tend to have much less knowledge. Long before possible origins for the virus have been identified, popular discourse had already started focussing on the "dirty Chinese" and their "dirty" foods. One of the insidious facets of all this is precisely that the xenophobia and the precautionary risk avoidance behaviour are so difficult to disentangle.
So where are we? In order to make sense of times like this, we construct narratives, of us at the cusp of momentous, world changing events. We are special characters in these narratives not just because unlike our ancestors we live in the pivotal times, but also because we are among the select few who have access to special knowledge and with special knowledge comes access to our special pathways for salvation and further along, redemption. It sets us apart from the masses, the others who are to blame because natural disasters don't just happen, they are the fault of somebody, somebody else who either directs events nefariously, or lets things happen through unnatural, unclean, taboo breaking behaviour. What exactly the wider apocalyptic narratives are, and what precisely the taboos are that the others have broken, varies from society to society; events get narrated through our own various cultural lenses.
But universally we, as a narrating species have a tendency to dramaticise cataclysmic events, to assign roles of heroes and villains onto an uncaring directionless nature. And yet despite all this the world has not yet ended, and like all crises before us, this too will pass. Just pray that we're not the Sioux, and this is not our Wounded Knee.
The end
Just wish I had something valuable to add.