Another wonderful piece, Jack! To be honest, I've never been able to get into zombie apocalypse fiction because something about its fundamental sensibility just didn't work for me—and now you've really teased it all apart into why that is! It's fascinating also to see how dearly it maps onto the worldviews of Christian mythology.
Much of this also resonates quite strongly with some of the themes I've been exploring in my own series of essays on our situation of ecocide and its relationship to storytelling (in a more generic sense: not only intentional fiction but also cultural paradigms).
I actually had a quick look at your series before writing this. Your comment about how in the Walking Dead nothing ever changes stood out to me - just how often post-apocalyptic worlds have this sense of eternity about them. Like eternal damnation.
One of the silver-linings of a religious upbringing is that it's made me very sensitivity to anything that reminds me of Christian theology. Western culture is deeply imbued with Christian modes of thought, albeit remixed and adapted. It really is only a few generational steps from deep apocalyptic religiosity, to seeing the Atom bomb as Biblical apocalypse made real, to seeing environmental issues as apocalypse.
Having written this I'm seeing this mode of thinking everywhere now, to the point of absurdity - "Go vegan or go extinct!" "Civilization will collapse in 2035!" It's the same as Christian fire and brimstone preachers. I'm really struggling to read apocalyptic stories now. They make me laugh.
Eventually this series might get around to finding alternatives to apocalypticism, as my process of self-education continues.
Yes, I too am looking for some kind of alternative to apocalypticism of the sort you describe so well here. Isn't it astonishing to realize how deeply ingrained our cultural stories are within us, so that we have difficulty seeing the world a different way—that is, recognizing alternative framings or narratives we might build out of the same circumstances? Well, I will keep reading your thoughts on it as you go and as we both continue to ponder. Cheers!
Another wonderful piece, Jack! To be honest, I've never been able to get into zombie apocalypse fiction because something about its fundamental sensibility just didn't work for me—and now you've really teased it all apart into why that is! It's fascinating also to see how dearly it maps onto the worldviews of Christian mythology.
Much of this also resonates quite strongly with some of the themes I've been exploring in my own series of essays on our situation of ecocide and its relationship to storytelling (in a more generic sense: not only intentional fiction but also cultural paradigms).
Happy to have helped!
I actually had a quick look at your series before writing this. Your comment about how in the Walking Dead nothing ever changes stood out to me - just how often post-apocalyptic worlds have this sense of eternity about them. Like eternal damnation.
One of the silver-linings of a religious upbringing is that it's made me very sensitivity to anything that reminds me of Christian theology. Western culture is deeply imbued with Christian modes of thought, albeit remixed and adapted. It really is only a few generational steps from deep apocalyptic religiosity, to seeing the Atom bomb as Biblical apocalypse made real, to seeing environmental issues as apocalypse.
Having written this I'm seeing this mode of thinking everywhere now, to the point of absurdity - "Go vegan or go extinct!" "Civilization will collapse in 2035!" It's the same as Christian fire and brimstone preachers. I'm really struggling to read apocalyptic stories now. They make me laugh.
Eventually this series might get around to finding alternatives to apocalypticism, as my process of self-education continues.
We'll see how that goes. ;-)
Yes, I too am looking for some kind of alternative to apocalypticism of the sort you describe so well here. Isn't it astonishing to realize how deeply ingrained our cultural stories are within us, so that we have difficulty seeing the world a different way—that is, recognizing alternative framings or narratives we might build out of the same circumstances? Well, I will keep reading your thoughts on it as you go and as we both continue to ponder. Cheers!