Having children is the most natural thing in the world, and at the same time among the most morally fraught. During the time I am talking about here, I was consumed—pointlessly, morbidly consumed—by the question of whether having brought a human being into the world was a terrible ethical blunder, given what seemed to lie ahead. The last thing the world needed, after all, was more people in it, and the last thing any hitherto nonexistent person needed was to be in the world. It was of course a little late in the day now, the deed being well and truly done, to be giving serious attention to these fundamental questions, but then again it was precisely the day’s lateness that brought the questions themselves into absolute focus.
Because the first thing to be said about becoming a parent, whether it happens by choice or by chance, is that it is one of only very few events in life that are entirely irreversible. Once you’re in, existentially speaking, you’re in. And so the real question, the only question—given what the world is, how dark and uncertain its future—is that of how to proceed. How are we supposed to live, given the distinct possibility that our species, our civilization, might already be doomed?
Should we just ignore the end of the world?
Again, the question is not wholly ironic: on a personal level, I’m open to the suggestion that such a response—by which I mean no response at all—might well be the sanest one, given the situation. It’s certainly the easiest response, and therefore by some distance the most tempting. The problem, our problem as a culture—which, I may as well admit, neatly dovetails with my problem as a writer, and to some hopefully limited extent yours as a reader—is one of boredom.
Because let’s at least be honest about this: the apocalypse is profoundly dull. I for one am sick to death of the end of days. I’m sick, in particular, of climate change. Is it possible to be terrified and bored at the same time? Is it possible, I mean, to be bored of terror—if not of the kind of literal terror that privileged people like me rarely experience, at least the kind of abstract terror that is released like a soporific gas from the whole topic of ecological catastrophe?
The threat of nuclear war that hung over much of the twentieth century at least had the advantage of focusing the mind. Nuclear war, for all its considerable flaws, you at least have to admit was gripping. It adhered to certain established narrative conventions. You had near misses, global panics. You had mutually assured destruction, game theory, mushroom clouds, total and instant annihilation. You had plot, was what you had: you had drama. And even more crucially, you had characters. You had protagonists and antagonists, guys with fingers on buttons who either did or did not choose to push them. And when it came to protestors on the streets calling for complete nuclear disarmament, you had an entirely rational and achievable demand. As imminent as it surely seemed for so long, nobody actually wanted nuclear war. Everyone understood that it would have been an act of madness, an obvious moral grotesquerie, to punch in the codes, to launch the warheads, to cause annihilation of an unprecedented swiftness and scale.
And the important point in this context is that we ourselves were not among the protagonists and antagonists. We were not going to be punching in any launch codes either way. We were bystanders, whose role was limited to cowering in terror, maybe holding the occasional placard, partaking here and there in a chant if called upon to do so. We didn’t want to go to our graves, but at least we knew that if we did, we would do so more or less passively, more or less without blame.
“Once people saw in the apocalypse the unknowable avenging hand of God,” as the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger put it in an essay from the late 1970s. “Today it appears as the methodically calculated product of our own actions.” The apocalypse, he writes, “was also once a singular event, to be expected unannounced as a bolt from the blue: an unthinkable moment that only seers and prophets could anticipate—and, of course, no one wanted to listen to their warnings and predictions. Our end of the world, on the other hand, is sung from the rooftops even by the sparrows; the element of surprise is missing; it seems only to be a question of time. The doom we picture for ourselves is insidious and torturingly slow in its approach, the apocalypse in slow motion.”
This slowness is something new in history. The apocalypse, in both its religious and its secular modes, has always appeared in the form of a blinding flash, a sudden intercession of divine or technological power. There is no mythological template to help us make sense of the current mutated form of the end times. We don’t know how to think about it, how to give it the form of myth and story, and so it metastasizes and spreads, a blood sickness in the culture. The slow and insidious doom identified by Enzensberger takes multiple forms, insinuating itself into the most unlikely of places. There is no one cause, no single locus of apocalyptic unease. It’s all horsemen, all the time.
And there is a deeper register to this truth: I don’t know that I would have it any other way. I want my toilet to flush. I want streaming music. I want to buy what I want to buy, eat what I want to eat, go where I want to go. I want to be able to leave my tiny island in the North Atlantic when I need to, or just when I feel like it. And if polar bears are going to be starving to death due to habitat destruction, I want to be able to watch deeply upsetting YouTube videos about it.
You will note that this book about the apocalyptic tenor of our time features a great many interludes of travel to distant places—to Ukraine and California and South Dakota, to the highlands of Scotland and to New Zealand—and that I neither walked nor sailed nor took a train to any of these places. And let the record further show that during the time I was traveling for this book, I was also traveling to many other places to talk about my previous book. My footprint is as broad and deep and indelible as my guilt.
My days are a procession of last things, seals opened. I myself am the apocalypse of which I speak. That is the prophesy of this book.
* * *
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The origins of my own obsession with this topic are buried deep in the submerged civilization of childhood. One of my earliest memories pertains to the end of the world. I was in the kitchen of my grandmother’s house. My grandmother was at the stove, and I was sitting at the table with my uncle, who was explaining to me the likely outcome of a nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia. I don’t know why he was doing this, other than that it was the mid-eighties and the chill of the Cold War could still be felt in the air, and he was in any case very much that kind of uncle. I’m guessing I was five, maybe six.
From a fruit bowl in the center of the table he selected first three apples, and then two small clementines. The apples he spread out on the table at equal intervals; then he carefully positioned the clementines on top of the rightward and leftward apples, leaving the middle one untouched. The apple on the left, he said, was the United States, while the one on the right was Russia. And the apple in the middle, he said, was Ireland, where we were. Its location, he explained, was more or less exactly halfway between the United States and the Soviet Union, gigantic countries of which there were two important things to be said: that they despised each other for reasons too complicated to get into with a child, and that they were both armed to the teeth with nuclear missiles, bombs so powerful that they were capable of wiping out entire countries in a matter of moments. I should imagine, he said, that the clementines were nuclear bombs.