Hope and humanity at the end of the world
A reflection during precarious times on the appeal of apocalyptic themes in speculative fiction
“It’s not possible.”
“No. It’s necessary.”
Humanity’s last hope spins out of control above a strange planet light years away from our deteriorating home, and the protagonist speaks these three words in his attempt to overcome the impossible.
In his Interstellar, Christopher Nolan lays bare a defining characteristic of the human condition: our absurd, heroic insistence on defying what an indifferent mathematics declares to be nearly or completely impossible.
Like a moth to a flame, I find myself returning again and again to such apocalyptic stories. In these strange times, which have grown ever more precarious and disturbing since March 2020, we have all become intimiate with the texture of approaching catastrohpe. Each day brings the precipice into sharper focus, revealing not just the fall itself, not just its distance, but the terrible patience of inevitable catastrophe.
Some have commented that my preoccupation with narratives of fictional collapse are prolonging some inner sadness which seems to have defined my character. Perhaps they are right. This genre brings little comfort and can be devastating with a kind of disturbing precision that cuts us loose from our illusions, forcing us instead to see the dire truth. In our hunger to keep the illusion alive, we feed ourselves with nullifying distraction instead of looking into the darkness—clear-eyed, but sorrowful. So, why do I practise the latter?
In these stories there exists a truth more fundamental and more starkly beautiful than the truth of their dark warnings about the strange and vicious politics of our time. It is a commentary not on corruption but on the revolution of the human spirit against apathy and evil.
The Architect of Our Ascent
So many voices these days claiming some authority, the prophets of our digital age, are singing some version of a burial hymn. If we listen closely, they seem to be telling us we are beyond saving. Maybe they’re right. But if we stop listening to them, we might hear something else. A voice we have tried to silence but that will not be silenced. It whispers to us, as it always has, that there is still hope.
Sometimes it begins as delusion. Sometimes we cling to it in such desperation that we forget to act. Sometimes it is so pathetic and so thin that abandoning it seems the right course.
Yet this fragile thing is the architect of our species’ ascent and the instrument of our survival. It is the seed of our will to endure and, if nurtured, will grow in the cracks of our concrete world.
In apolapytic fiction, we follow humanity into the depths of its own nightmare. We watch its katabasis into dystopia or its regression back to the primitive and the dissolution of civilization as we know it. But, if we look carefully, such stories document the trajectory of hope itself, following to the fullest extent its stubborn arc toward some kind of catharsis at the end of chaos.
Look, for instance, at how Interstellar presents us with two men possessed by hope. Dr. Mann let his hope metastasize into something grotesque: a cancer of self-preservation that would sacrifice the survival of all for the self. His hope has no dignity, and therefore no humanity. We may forgive Dr. Man for his fear, but not for his deception. Cooper’s hope serves a purpose much larger than himself. He is not guided by panic but by a terrible clarity. Here is presented the choice that defines us: to wield our desperation as a weapon against others or as a tool for collective salvation.
The success or failure of trying to rescue ourselves from the darkness of selfishness is secondary to the beauty—yes, the beauty—of attempting the necessary in defiance of the impossible.
An Antidote to Despair
My fascination with this genre is not a morbid curiosity about worlds and characters tortured by the imaginations of their authors. I am not a tourist in the museum of human suffering. What drives me is a kind of overwhelming need to witness proof of humanity’s will to restore itself and triumph over its propensity and its talent for destruction. I could describe it as an almost spiritual and unbearable longing to know that the divine is real and that we are worthy of its redemption; an unbearable belief that the dormant potential and inner compassion and striving of humanity will remember itself and tip the scales in the contest for our future, no matter the odds.
Every genre traffics in hope, but apocalyptic fiction puts on a unique performance. After stripping away everything we know and rely on until we are naked and alone, what remains? Our inexplicable ability to hope without reason, to attempt what cannot be done simply because it must be done.
This is why I return to these dark waters, especially now. I write these words from a position of comfort, of safety, and a depression I have not earned. I have the luxury of commenting on but not experiencing real violence. But these stories let me practise hope.
And yes, the constant exposure to such fiction may cultivate melancholy, but the difference between stories of apocalypse and today’s headlines is that the stories have an end. In them I discover a strange alchemy in learning to maintain hope not in spite of the darkness, but because of it.
The evidence of our species’ many failures is accumulating like snow. The climate is changing, societies are fracturing, and old alliances are crumbling as new ones becoming more threatening. Isolation, of countries and of ourselves, is becoming pronounced. The systems we have built to protect us are themselves becoming fictions we cling to. The pattern is ancient and well established. Faced with all of this, of course we choose to anesthetize ourselves, if we have that option. But there is another path: look directly into the wound and choose to believe in healing.
If you read the news for any amount of time, the end of the world no longer feels that far removed from the genre of literature and film dedicated to such themes. Despite this, I find not depression in such fiction, but its antidote: the evidence of something reaching out to us through the rubble. The whisper, barely heard, that survival is not only possible but necessary.
In that absurd, irrational, magnificent whisper, I find a reason to persist in this strange world.