← Philosophy For Our Times
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Hello.
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And welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. It's Ed here and I'm introducing our special Halloween episode celebrating all things magical and monstrous. In this episode, members of the IAI team will be reading out articles that cover topics that such as zombies and the apocalypse, taking a whistle stop tour through some of the most famous films, TV shows and books that have scared audiences over the last century and beyond. So settle in by the fire, wrap up warm, and maybe find some enchanted items to protect you from the monsters. Our first article was written by Natalie Lawrence, who was a researcher at the University of Cambridge for focusing on the natural histories of exotic monsters and this article was read out by Ali so let's get to it.
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Battling the Corona Monster a throwback to 2020 by Natalie Lawrence when you think of monsters, you might imagine the dragons coiled menacingly atop hordes of gold, the lion headed chimaeras of ancient mythology, or the lurching bulk of Dr. Frankenstein' creation. Monsters are things that don't exist except in the realm of stories and fairy tales. They are the stuff of make believe. We tell tales of boogeymen to scare children into behaving, or indulge ourselves with the escapism of fantasy films. After a couple of hours, the monster is gone, the film is over and the brightly lit monster free world returns. Not quite what was going on in the world just a couple of years ago during the global COVID 19 pandemic shows us just how prevalent monsters still are. Even though we might like to think that science has everything taped, the thing is, monsters are not things that exist externally. They come from inside our minds. They are integral to the way that we see the world. And there are plenty of monsters haunting us at the present. Traditional monsters or monsters in stories are usually out there. They come from distant times and places, exotic lands beyond everyday experience, or long ago from which they cannot reach us. They are safely encapsulated in books, films and stories, media that we can choose to indulge in or put down at a moment's notice Shutting the monsters away. Maps used to be drawn with lands beyond the known world filled with all manner of fantastical things. Dog headed men, cannibals, phoenixes, or vast sea beasts cavorting across the waves. Medieval cartographers labeled unknown regions with hic sunt dracones. Here be dragons, signaling that these were mysterious places where the things beyond nature stalked. If they did stray too close, they were rapidly excised, as in the witch craze of the 16th and 17th centuries and its hysterical rash of public executions. But why is this? Why did the dragons never come to perch on the roof of the town hall? Or the unicorns stroll through people's gardens? Why is there never a boogeyman when you actually look under the bed? Well, a thought about what a monster is might explain that. Monsters are things that embody our anxieties and fears, transgress our boundaries, and mix up categories. They reveal what those fears and anxieties are. We give them physical form in our imaginations, but we also do not like to face them. We have always placed them as far away from us as we are able to. Life is easier that way. More recently, though, especially from the 20th century on, monsters evolved. They were no longer things that could be placed safely at arm's length. They could not be used simply as scapegoats. We began to realize that monsters, or monstrosity itself, were something inside us that we ourselves contain. Monsters. It explains why we enjoy indulging in monster media so much, because it allows us to face them temporarily, get the thrill of fright, and then forget all about them in the light of day. Monster making is something that every human being does with elements of the world and themselves that frighten them. Embodying dangerous and unpleasant things in something that can be demonized and pushed away like witches burnt at the stake is far easier than dealing with them as an integral part of you or your society. Monsters are infinitely varied. As a result, they do not all have multiple heads or vast size, the ability to breathe fire, or strange, slimy visages. Sometimes they can be very mundane to look at. The monster that concerned us in 2020 cannot be seen at all, Nor could it easily be fended off, even with excessive hand washing. Sometimes monsters can be invisible agents that infect the body and do terrible things to it. This is not, of course, to suggest that the pandemic was not very real and very serious. COVID 19 was not a hoax, whatever the conspiracy theorists on YouTube say. But coronavirus was not just a medical, economic and political phenomenon either. It was also A psychological one, because we cannot help but make monsters out of the things that scare us to create monstrous images out of our inchoate fears. And a situation such as, such as a 2020 pandemic was one where fear was rife and the boundaries of normal life were being thrown into disarray. The world felt like a very alien place at the time. A dystopian new reality that seemed to have little prospect of returning to the normal of before anytime soon. And this dystopia was a playground for new monsters. Some, of course, tried the age old trick of pushing the monsters out there. Geographically, the pandemic brought out plenty of deplorable latent or not so latent racism in the West. The blame for the virus was placed in the east to countries we view as alien to us. Full of people shopping in dangerous wet markets to fuel their strange bat eating habits. Even worse, some suspected lab fermented plans to topple the global competition. The zoonotic transmission of the virus and the health risks of wet markets may be a question for infectious disease experts, but that does not change the vilification of a whole geographical region. On the basis of these perceptions that occurred in some quarters at the beginning of the pandemic, before European countries went into lockdown, coronavirus was seen as an exotic infection, something that happened in places where people ate funny things and suffered from strange diseases. It did not seem like a problem that we would have to deal with. But monsters are things across borders of all kinds of, including social and political ones. When our borders were too breached, it was quite a shock, and it created an eruption of casual racism. Threats bring out the demons lurking under the veneer of everyday life. The disaster fantasies waiting to be unleashed, the apocalyptic dreams and the psychic fights for survival dampened by comfortable urban living. They reveal the manic denial in which we all live in our cozy consumer bubbles. And the coronavirus was no different. The polar opposite is panic. The visceral fears of apocalyptic destruction against which all possible measures must be taken. Especially stocking up on toilet roll. Remember the super spreaders, lax hand washers and people clearing their throats became the monstrous agents that carried the threat, which must be vilified. But panic about a perceived threat is often the external manifestation of our internal monsters. The dichotomy between mania and and panic was clearly demonstrated by the spectrum between the it's no worse than the flu denialists and the this will end the world camp. Both reactions were, if anything, a barrier to taking concerted coherent action over the course of the spread only a depressive position. Neither panic nor denial allows for recent action. For now we must sit with our monsters of panic and face them. Monsters are the chaotic elements that cause us to dissolve and reform borders. This is what happened during the COVID 19 pandemic, global restructuring along the lines of a viral outbreak and progression. It caused fragmentation down to the level of the individual, invading our very bodies, keeping friends and families apart. Anyone could have been harboring the disease invisibly. All the more terrifying was that we knew so little about it, even now. Arguably, COVID 19 slid right into the mold of monsters that we have already imagined in films such as 28 days later, I Am Legendary and other post apocalyptic plague fantasies. Uncontrollable disease is just one of the coterie of modern monsters, along with a murderous psychopath, nuclear powered Godzilla and homicidal AI that can tell us a great deal about the fearful underbelly of modern civilization.
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Moving on to our next article. This one is by Matthew Festenstein, who is professor of Political Philosophy at the University of York where he is the former Director of the Morel center for Toleration and the head of the Politics department. And it will be Harry reading out his article.
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Hobbes Alive in the Last of Us Politics after the End of the World the following article has spoilers for the first series of the Last of Us, but by no means do you have to have watched the series. There's a lot of philosophy in there too. The timber has been cut, the oil has run out, and the plantation soil no longer supports crops in the devastated landscapes explored by the anthropologist Anna Lowenhout Singh in her book the Mushroom at the End of the World. In this global state of capitalist precarity, we don't have choices other than looking for life in the ruin. The vision of the fungal terminus in the Last of Us is more terrifying but equally final for viewers of the show. Following the game provides 21st century dystopia of societal collapse and the destruction of the modern state, reflecting deep seated anxieties about pandemics, climate change and authoritarianism. I want to suggest, though, that its politics are rooted in a 17th century moment when the idea of the modern state first crystallizes. In particular, the Last of Us dystopia emulates the vision of a state of nature developed by the most powerful early modern writer on the state, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and it follows Hobbes in his suspicion of collective political action. The Last of Us is set in a United States ravaged by a fungal pandemic that has transformed most of the population into zombies and destroyed the social infrastructure. A fascist military authority, Fedra, controls some cities opposed by the rebel fireflies. But beyond these zones, it is open country where individuals and groups try to survive as best they can. Joel, a middle aged smuggler, must escort a teenager, Ellie, across this landscape. She seems uniquely immune to zombie bites, and their mission is to reach a Firefly medical team who may be able to use her as a cure. As well as the Fedra dominated cities, we are shown some different kinds of organisation. Couples who were protected by dense fortifications or wilderness, a communist haven, a religious cult and a city that has overthrown Fedora. We live in a golden age of dystopian fiction, as the historian Jill Leopold has pointed out. Whether it's climate change, technology, pandemic, political authoritarianism or other social transformations, there are no shortage of raw material for the dystopian imagination. Even very pessimistic dystopias such as W.E. 1984, the Handmaid's Tale or the Wall allow us to entertain thoughts of resistance to authoritarianism. And in the young adult versions, such as the Hunger Games books, these are often central. Last of Us, however, belongs to another tradition, the family of dystopian narratives that most closely cleave to an imaginative device from early modern physical philosophy, that of the state of nature. What would society look like without a state or political order? In particular, it belongs to the counter revolutionary strand of this, most famously articulated by Hobbes in Leviathan and other political writings. For Hobbes, the state of nature is a condition of permanent emergency, a moral black hole in which you are entitled to do whatever it takes to survive, and in which you are vividly aware that others have the same entitlement. This makes meeting a stranger a terrifying risk. The natural condition of mankind is famously not only miserably deprived, but a state of war. In such condition there is no place for industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of earth, no navigation or use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing. Such things require much force. No knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death and the life of man. Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. This state of nature story tells us why we would or should consent to political order. It is to escape this disorder, which he saw as concretely embodied in civil war, that we should embrace the order provided by the sovereign. Hobbes view was and remains a contentious account, not only because his seemingly gloomy picture of human nature, but because his disenchanted vision of political authority. We should obey the state because it protects us from the state of nature, not because it's divinely ordained, the special expression of our national identity or morally exemplary. The state is just a device to help us manage escapable human plurality and disagreement. At the forefront of Hobbes imagination were the civil wars that have wrecked the British Isles and led to the execution of Charles I, the establishment of Oliver Cromwell's republic and ultimately the restoration of the monarchy. As contemporaries were quick to register, it's an account of authority that can be used either royalist or parliamentarians in order to support their cause and was accordingly treated suspiciously by both sides. What crucially matters for Hobbes is that you don't try to act politically to constrain or overthrow an established authority, since that will pitch you into the state of nature and attempts to do so are products of feverish ideological fantasy. The Last of Us recasts much of the Hobbesian state of nature as a post apocalyptic dystopia and accompanies it with Hobbes political scepticism. One way in which Last vs Dystopia tracks Hobbs state of nature is in his vision of the disorder that follows State collapse, constant vigilance, fear of strangers, grinding poverty, political violence and abusive righteous self righteousness are all features of the Last of Us landscape that Hobbes would have instantly recognized in the Last of Us's State of Nature. The trustworthiness of strangers is rare and fragile. In one of its most acclaimed episodes, the survivalist Bill opts not to kill or turn Frank away, who's been caught in one of his traps and falls in love with him. Throughout their lives together, the two bicker amicably about people's trustworthiness. But the story leaves us no doubt that a condition of their happiness together, what Hobbes calls commodious living is the effectiveness of the defences for the fortified compound in which they live. There are other features shared by the Hobbesian state of nature and the dystopian landscapes of the Last of Us. While Hobbes vision of a state of nature is speculative, he says that a reader could get an idea of the state of nature from contemporary America. Contemporary to him. Thirty years after Hobbes, John Locke, offering his rather less brutal conception of the state of nature, tells us in the beginning all the world was America. This of course is the vision of America as a political blank slate ready to receive the alleged benefits of settler colonisation and its great cinematic art form. The Western and Last of Us features horse riding, frontier outposts, sleeping under the stars, mysterious strangers and much else from the genre. Like many western heroes, Joel think of Gary Cooper in Man of the west or Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven has a past he wants to redeem but whose skills he has to use to survive and protect Ellie. The Last of Us also shares Hobbes scepticism about collective political action that challenges political authority. The revolution in Kansas City, which overthrows Fedra, pays the price for overthrowing established order, as it turns out that they've been keeping a lid literally on an underground zombie horde even before the new regime is wiped out. Though it has speedily degenerated from a popular festival into a spiral of petty authoritarianism and personal revenge, their leader's brutalization at the hands of Fedora meant they couldn't help it. A sympathetically betrayed Fedra collaborator explains Henry betrayed Michael the Christ like revolutionary leader who is succeeded by his sister Kathleen. While everyone agrees on Michael's qualities of forgiveness and understanding, his actual role in the story is to trigger Kathleen's quest for vengeance and the collapse of the revolution. As in most zombie fictions, lurking behind this particular experience of friendship or hostility is an overwhelming terror of an inarticulate and voracious horde. One of the unusual features of the zombies in the Last of Us is their exceptional capacity for collective action of a sort, they are linked in networks so that harming one rouses a horde networked, fast moving and relentless. It's hard not to see zombies as a figure for online mobs, but they also belong to an older tradition of what Hobbes calls multitudes seized by a mad desire to destroy their friends and protectors. We can see this Hobbesian perspective at work in what looks like the most anti Hobbesian theme of the story, the messianic role afforded to Ellie. On the face of it, the story endorses the Firefly's view that Ellie, or at least her excised brain, can save humanity when Joel decides instead to save her, in the process wiping out yet another hapless band of would be revolutionaries. We may think of this as love overcoming civic duty. There is another way of seeing this ending though, in keeping with the show's Hobbesian themes. While we are repeatedly told by Marlene, the leader of the Fireflies, that Ellie has the potential to save the world, it's not clear whether this is something we should trust. After all, we are only shown medical staff of about three people who seem to work based on some pretty hasty scientific inferences and who have only a devastated research and clinical infrastructure. The Hobbesian logic of the Last of Us tells us to be skeptical of the firefighters claims. People who believe that they personally possess or know the secret for salvation are dangerously self righteous from this perspective. Like David, the religious leader who turned out to promote cannibalism as you do. The wild hope that there is a magic bullet for political disorder that works with the efficacy of the penicillin that treats Joel completely upends Hobbes account to since it suggests that nature provides its solutions in the form here of Ellie's immunity. When Joel saves Ellie from the fireflies, then he reasserts the Hobbesian view and destroys Marlene's fantasy that nature itself provides the solutions and resources to transcend disorder. So is the Last of Us pro Fedra from this Hobbesian perspective. After all, it represents an established authority. No Kansas City Fedra collapses and Boston Fedora is seen as killing, uninfected and itself unstable, corrupt and riven by revolutionary violence, perhaps on the way to ending up like the failed Kansas City. For Hobbes, authorities that pose a similar risk to you as the state of nature itself, whether because they're going to kill you or because they're collapsing, don't carry much legitimacy. By contrast, of course, the walled Wyoming encampment to which they pursue Tommy is presented as providing a successful vision of collective life organized along communist lines and with limited resources, at least for the narrative. Joel and Ellie are immediately housed and given whatever they ask for is located in a famous tourist destination. The narrative couldn't be clearer that this is a holiday in the ruins. It's a utopia within a dystopia and like all utopias, glosses over the distrust and disagreements that generate the need for a state to begin with. The pessimism in Last of Us Dystopia lies not or not only in its landscape of a globally warmed pandemic, but its stark vision of the political options in which such a world and the deep skepticism about politics of change. Whether this matters politically is the extent to which, like Hobbes, State of Nature. This is a speculative fiction that both expresses and informs the cultural imagination of our current predicament. Hobbes wants to pull the rug out from under ideas of collective political agency and to instill a fear of it through the image of the state of nature. It is part of the power of the Last of Us that articulates this Hobbesian worry. It is difficult, however, to imagine confronting and addressing the social anxieties that underlie dystopian fiction such as the Last of Us, such as Things landscapes wrecked by capitalism without having some trust in the possibility of successfully acting together to create things.
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The next article was written by the I editorial team and will be read out by me.
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The Attraction of Apocalypse the Philosophy of Our Fascination with Disaster by the IAI Editorial team. A virus is released from an experimental laboratory in Cambridge which causes uncontrollable and deadly rage in its victims. When it infects the people of Britain, they transform into a zombie like state, resulting in mass carnage and the eventual collapse of society. In the middle of this, a man named Jim awakes from a coma to find London Mostly deserted 28 days after catastrophic events first struck. If this scenario sounds familiar, that's because it's the plot of 28 Days Later, a film by the renowned director Danny Boyle which explores a post apocalyptic scenario brought about by a deadly virus. This film, like a very great many others in the disaster genre, was not only a considerable success in box office sales, it also received a number of awards and spawned sequels 28 weeks later and 28 years later, a graphic novel 28 days later the Aftermath and was credited with beginning a revival of zombie films. Despite its popularity, the film's poster leaves you in no doubt that watching this film will be terrifying and ought to disturb you. However, in the process it will also entertain and titillate you. At the time of writing, we are facing a worldwide pandemic due to the COVID 19 virus and normal day to day life has become impossible. We face distressing events such as the illness itself, the possible death of loved ones, a rise in mental illness due to anxiety and social isolation over long periods, and the catastrophic loss of jobs due to the shutdown of normal social activities. Many have deep concerns about the future economic effects of this virus. With all the unavoidable political, social and psychological effects, it's no surprise that most of us want this escalating crisis and nightmare to end as quickly as possible. Living through this crisis is neither entertaining nor titillating. Disastrous or apocalyptic scenarios have been the subject of films, plays, comics and novels for decades. Stories and films which depict man made and natural disasters as well as post apocalyptic scenarios have long been the subject of some of the most popular forms of entertainment. Think for example of the spate of iconic disaster films that were produced in the early 1970s airport the Poseidon Adventure, the Towering Inferno and Earthquake, given the reality of such scenarios, would be undeniably dreadful and shocking. Why is there a widespread fascination with the portrayal of such dark and terrible situations? First, it is clear that events, stories and occurrences which are evil, dangerous or frightening grab our attention much quicker than those that are good, safe and calming. Bad news always travels fast, and watching or reading any news bulletin, you immediately notice that it consists almost entirely of bad or worrying news. There is a good evolutionary reason for this. We pay closer and more avid attention to those phenomena that can harm us, since our primary concern is to stay safe and well protected from such dangers. This motivation goes some way to account for our fascination with moral evil, how those morally very worst kinds of actions and persons might deleteriously affect our well being. However, this concern with our well being is not the only reason we're fascinated and entertained by disaster scenarios. This genre of entertainment generally has its focus on the trials of an individual or group of people facing the terrible effects of a disaster or the post apocalyptic scenarios of savagery, fear and hunger. A Hobbesian state of nature where life is sure to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. These stories are ultimately about how said individual or group faces this enormous challenge. They are narratives of survival and endurance, and they are where we find heroes and cowards, given the terrible choices and sacrifices that need to be made in order to survive. We are fascinated by how individuals overcome terrible odds and endure appalling hardships, yet survive the ordeal to begin worthwhile lives yet again. It's worth noting that disaster films with no heroes and where no one survives usually lack the popularity of those that offer redemption and hope. But why are these disaster stories so attractive to us? The reason is that they provide a break from the mundane and ordinary day to day problems of basic existence. Events following terrible calamities force those dealing with the aftermath to violate cherished and widespread social boundaries and moral prohibitions. The usual rulebook for how to behave towards others becomes obsolete and even a hindrance. In these desperate times, people must find new ways of responding to some of the worst moral dilemmas and unavoidably and tragically get their hands dirty. For example, whom does one save when this unavoidably requires the betrayal of others? Is survival at the expense of others a moral way to act? How ruthless should we be in order to keep our loved ones safe? To act well under such circumstances requires courage, resilience, determination, self sacrifice and a practical wisdom not often, if ever required in normal situations. So our fascination here is motivated in large part by a morbid curiosity. How will and should people behave in such situations? What would I have done in the same scenario? Do I have the requisite character, the courage and the determination to do what is necessary for survival in such terrible scenarios? How ought I to be judged for necessary actions that violate valued moral norms? There may be another reason why we find the disaster genre so interesting. Such stories provide the means to imagine the unthinkable, but in a safe and sanitized way. We're motivated to do this because we seek a release from our worst primal fears. Just as watching or reading tragic plays enables a catharsis, the disaster genre delivers relief from deeply repressed emotions or unexpressed fears we have for our loved ones and ourselves. The disaster genre can satisfy our morbid curiosity while providing a safe space to internalize and come to terms with such events. Watching a film such as 28 Days later about a deadly virus destroying society is far less stressful and terrifying than being in lockdown while a virus actually plays havoc with our lives. Finally, while it may feel perverse to be entertained by disaster stories, we do not, on the whole, find them fascinating or entertaining because we are bad or evil people. There are undoubtedly some people who simply enjoy this genre of movie for the certain frisson of excitement that comes from imagining what the protagonists are enduring. But this is not the only, or even the most prevalent response from people living peaceful and stable lives. These narratives do more than offer a quick thrill. They alert us to the moral conundrums that would occur in such situations and how they threaten the very ideals and values we hold dear. Our interest in this genre of entertainment provides a safe window through which we can assess the values and character traits that really matter to us, those which tend to be oversimplified, forgotten, ignored, or even denigrated in good times. We know in some deep sense that disasters, both natural and man made, are never far away, as demonstrated by the ongoing pandemic we face today. The human condition is one where, without warning, we can be plunged into scenarios which undermine our well being and ability to live a decent and civilized life. To be concerned about this is both natural and sensible and why our interest in disaster films and literature is unlikely to wane in the future.
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And now for our final article, written by Florian Musnjung, who is professor of Comparative Literature and Vice Dean International for Arts and Humanities at University College London. And it's Avi reading out this one.
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Daydreaming of Apocalypse why do we crave dystopia by Florian Muskung with daily news of war, atrocity, earthquakes, cyclones, and record breaking temperatures. Who needs fictional narratives of Apocalypse? During the early months of the COVID 19 pandemic, a version of this question enjoyed unexpected popularity. Cultural pundits claimed that readers were fed up with dystopia and post apocalypse and predicted that speculative fiction would go out of fashion for at least a decade. Lockdown and fear, so the argument went, left people craving for stability and familiarity. Experiences of loss and feelings of disorientation were too widespread and for many, too raw to find expression in genre literature. Instead of fantasizing about zombies, it was said, readers would turn their attention to the intimate details of everyday life or engage in the great classics from Middlemarch to War and Peace. Surely the last thing that anybody needed in the midst of a global pandemic were fantastical versions of their own unsettling experiences cast in the fictional language of post apocalypse. In June 2020, Penguin published a survey of more than 1,000 readers which appeared to confirm this idea. 60% of participants declared that they had no interest in stories about the pandemic, while a quarter announced that they would never again pick up a dystopian novel. Commentators leapt on the news. The collective experience of real planetary emergency, they declared, had made literary fantasies of global catastrophe irrelevant. This was, of course, nonsense. Post apocalyptic narratives did not die out in the early 2000s. Zombies remain popular across media and languages and continue to delight those in search of hackneyed, predictable plots while also providing rich inspiration for more original, creative forms of storytelling. Some of the world's most popular writers, including Isabel Allende, Louise erdrich, and Emily St. John Mandel, have written fictional narratives over the pandemic, drawing from the traditions of fantasy, the gothic, and science fiction. In brief, the unstoppable rise of the post apocalyptic in literature, film, television, video games, scholarship, artwork, and music has disproven the claim that audiences in times of real emergency turn away from fictional narratives of doom. The opposite turns out to be true and continues to be the case, as can be seen, for instance, from the recent success of HBO's serial television drama the Last of Us. So why, in times of trouble, are we fascinated by post apocalypse? Or is the genre inherently escapist, as some have argued? Or should we treat its popularity as the expression of a deep seated desire to come to terms with life on an unpredictable, dangerous, and heating planet? Is apocalypse literature a form of new ecological realism ideally suited for a world that bears a troubling resemblance to the dystopian fantasies of earlier generations. In their co authored volume, the Ends of the World, philosopher Deborah Danowski and anthropologist Eduardo Viveros de Castro stress that the enjoyment of fictional apocalypse until recently appeared to be a privilege of the relatively affluent planetary elites, upwardly mobile middle classes and more generally inhabitants of the global north, who imagined themselves safe from the environmental and social consequences of of civilizational or climate breakdown. Film studios and publishing houses kept these audiences entertained with a seemingly interminable stream of near identical narratives of apocalypse. In an atmosphere of otherwise unperturbed optimism about the future, people found it easier to fantasize about the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Cultural theorist Ivan Calder Williams has described this public and commercial interest in apocalypse as a schizophrenic obsession with civilizational collapse and mass death in a world that believes itself to be never ending. Apocalyptic blockbusters, for Williams, are visions of frozen decay, a halted approximation of the process of disappearance that serves only to insist on stasis. The unfolding climate catastrophe has made it difficult for anybody to imagine that our familiar world will simply go on. As Danowski and Viveris de Castro point out, global environmental breakdown will drag with it a sizable portion of the human population, obviously beginning with the destitute masses that inhabit the ghettos and garbage dumps of the world system, but ultimately hitting the majority of human and non human life on the planet. End quote. While this definitely puts a damper on our enjoyment of apocalyptic movies, it also has consequences for the scholarly study of apocalypse. Present day narratives of planetary collapse no longer belong to any particular philosophical, cultural or religious tradition. They are not the exclusive domain of Judaism and Christianity, or even of those self styled moderns who, in Bruno Latour's words, coined the idea of man as a being par excellence, capable of extricating itself from nature thanks to its soul, its culture or its intelligence. End quote. In other words, the apocalyptic imagination is no longer limited to any given worldview or set of values. It cannot be reduced to a single motif, genre, medium, or horizon of expectation. It has become, in Deepesh Chakrabarti's terms, shared catastrophe, which appears darkly relevant to all potential victims of environmental collapse and therefore to all present and future people on earth. The universal relevance of apocalypse creates the conditions for two different and antithetical forms of cultural engagement. In his seminal study Archaeologies of the Future, Frederick Jameson draws a neat distinction between utopian impulses and fantasy as wish fulfillment. The former, according to Jameson, emerges where speculative writing seeks to tackle a concrete political situation, responds to specific dilemmas and offers to solve fundamental problems to which the utopian writer believes himself to hold the key. The latter, by contrast, remains firmly focused on the artist's or reader's subjectivity and private history. Quoting from Sigmund Freud's essay Creative Writers and Daydreaming, Jameson highlights three fundamental characteristics of wish fulfillment. First, a thoroughly egocentric narrative structure. Second, a sense of provinciality and omnipotence Nothing can happen to me. Finally, a rigorously dualistic worldview which divides the world into helpers and to enemies. Significantly, these characteristics are also common to many cultural traditions of post apocalypse, from millenarianism to gaming and from survivalist counterculture to the particularly repetitive subgenre of Last man fiction, with its characteristic focus on regenerative violence, virility, and procreation as a male duty towards the species. Egocentrism, moral dualism, and fantasies of omnipotence recur in reactionary worldviews that are frequently associated with the apocalypse, the belief system of ethno nationalists, evangelical fundamentalists, tech tycoons, apologists of white power, and so on. For these groups, events cohere as part of a familiar universal apocalyptic script. Actual or perceived opponents are agents of evil. Expectations of social collapse inspire fantasies of cataclysmic violence or hubristic dreams of interstellar world making. Apocalyptic daydreaming might therefore be described as an inherently reactionary cultural practice. On the other hand, James reflections of utopian impulses also provide the basis for a different and more rewarding engagement with post apocalypse. He reminds us that narratives of catastrophe can also read as reflections on the contingency of hegemonic belief systems and on the vulnerability of social and political structures. In this way the genre may be used and has been used, to outline concrete strategies of progressive political and social transformations. Recent examples of this include Kim Stanley Robinson's the Ministry of the Future, Nende Okrafor's Lagoon, Diane Cook's the New Wilderness, and Helen Marshall's the Migration, to name but a few. It is important to acknowledge the wealth and inspiring diversity of apocalyptic traditions in their potential for radical politics. Cultural interest in the end of the world's spirit spans many periods and contexts, from Gilgamesh to 21st century films and novels such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road or Michael Henneke's The Time of the Wolf. Christian eschatology in its earliest forms was an act of discursive resistance against empire, a gesture of a radical hope. This important fact may not fully transpire in contemporary consumer culture, but it has never been forgotten, especially in the global south and among the world's most vulnerable human communities. Beyond the familiar dichotomy of apocalyptic escapism and fatalistic acceptance, we can still find numerous different ways of conceiving the ends of the worlds narratives that can serve and have always served as an inspiration for critical, creative and political practice.
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Thank you very much for listening to Philosophy for Our Times. Hopefully you won't be having any nightmares tonight, but if you do, please feel free to get in contact with us via the email in the show notes, and you can tell us all about the terrifying dreams that kept you awake all night. But until next time, stay safe, lock your doors, and don't play with any Ouija boards.