This is part 15 of a series on world-building Climate Change scenarios for fiction.
In part 11 we discussed the apocalyptic narrative, how people default to framing climate change as the apocalypse, and how this frame can often be a bad fit for climate change.
However, it’s not all bad.
That traditional End of the World religious narrative has been around for centuries for a reason. Modern apocalypse stories are often a crude and ugly adaptation of something that started out with a much greater depth of meaning.
Here we are going to reclaim the apocalypse. You might call this The Apocalypse for Optimists. It’s a lot more hopeful than you might think.
Modern apocalyptic stories focus heavily on destruction, or in religious terms, the Sin and the resulting Divine Judgement. A typical End of the World disaster movie will focus on drawn out gee-whizz scenes of cities exploding in nuclear fire, robots crushing human skulls, and the brutalized remnant of humanity being overwhelmed by the zombie hordes. This is all very exciting, but in terms of meaning, rather empty.
The traditional religious apocalypse narrative is not merely an orgy of destruction. It contains two other aspects:
1) Revelation
2) Salvation
The word apocalypse originates from the Greek apokalyptein "to uncover, disclose, reveal." The idea that apocalypse is about disaster is a modern notion. The original apocalypse is about knowledge and what you do with that knowledge. Prophecy. Insight. Knowing your place in the grand narrative of history. The apocalypse is a revelation leading, hopefully, to salvation.
For example, in Christianity that revelation teaches us mortals about the true nature of the universe (created by God with man made in his image), then reveals God’s plan of salvation (Christ’s sacrifice for our sins, the resurrection of the dead, and creation of a new Heavens and new Earth). The intended response is that you, the recipient of the message, understand the revelation and therefore join in with the salvation plan. No catastrophe ever comes to you – via the revelation you get saved.
Disaster is not a core component of apocalypse.
The Bible itself plays around with the apocalypse narrative in the story of Jonah, seemingly aware that we have a habit of getting fixated on the destruction while forgetting the entire point of revelation. The story of Jonah is basically a satire of this entire misanthropic tendency.
It’s a short tale. A joke.
Jonah is selected to deliver divine judgement upon the wicked city of Nineveh. Immediately the typical story goes off the rails. Jonah runs away. He himself causes divine judgement upon a himself and a ship, resulting in the goodhearted sailors sacrificing Jonah to save themselves. God mercifully saves Jonah via a giant fish, which vomits him back onto land.
Then we go in for attempt number two at divine judgement against wicked Nineveh.
This time Jonah does the standard apocalypse spiel: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned!” Again the story goes off the rails. The city repents. The King himself repents. Even the farm animals repent. God has compassion and forgives the city. No catastrophe happens. Revelation leads to salvation.
Now the apocalyptic misanthropy kicks in.
Jonah gets pissed off at God for not destroying Nineveh (he gets melodramatically angry to the point of suicide). Jonah even goes and waits outside hoping to see the city get annihilated by divine wrath.
Instead of destroying the city God reminds our prick of a prophet that God does in fact care about people (and also farm animals). Get over it Jonah. Indeed, God goes so far as to identify the people of Nineveh not as evil, but as incompetent—unable to tell their left hand from their right. End of story.
The only person who ever suffers in this story is Jonah himself.
We might sum it up thus: the point of the apocalypse is salvation, not destruction. In an apocalyptic story destruction is entirely optional. Destruction is a failure mode—the result of missing the point of the revelation.
A deeper aspect of this revelation-salvation story is how evil is treated. Apocalyptic stories, much like Jonah can get fixated on human evil. Some of these stories seem to consist of little more than continuous descriptions of human evil, coupled with a sort of horrified pleasure in watching it all burn down.
While plenty of religious folk also get stuck in this ugly view, again the traditional religious view of human fallenness includes more depth. Humanity is not merely in need of punishment, but in need of healing. Some people frame Hell less as a state of punishment than as a state of permanent separation—a breaking of our primal relationship with God (i.e. love, creativity, the universe, etc). In Christianity this idea of healing is found in the notions of salvation followed by a lifelong sanctification, that is the process of overcoming our fallen nature. This process is the entire point of the religious life (or at least it’s supposed to be, but as the author of the Book of Jonah seems to have known, we often miss the point).
Cliché modern apocalyptic stories seldom get anywhere near this kind of depth. Like the prophet Jonah, they are stuck in a misanthropic death wish. Apocalypse means destruction, nothing more. We sit outside the city, and watch it burn.
By chance I recently saw one apocalyptic movie that actually treats apocalypse in this deeper revelation-salvation manner: City of Ember.
This is a family movie about an underground city built to survive the “End of the World”. Now, years later, the city is falling to pieces and threatened with imminent destruction. The politicians are corrupt and no one will listen. So far so good.
But now, instead of becoming an orgy of destruction with people getting crushed to death or murdering each other in the dark over the last scrap of food, this threat become the impetus to discovery. A revelation. An unveiling of the true nature of their world.
The truth that had been forgotten.
This revelatory knowledge then provides the path to salvation, in this case literally a way out from darkness to light. The threatened destruction of the city is rendered moot, as a new horizon of possibility and life is opened—a vast redemptive expansion of life.
City of Ember might be middling as a film (and I can’t speak to the original books), but it gets this style of apocalyptic narrative bang on.
This revelation-salvation story reflects a fairly common occurrence in real life—the way crisis reveals truth and can trigger reforms that lead to enhanced life, or if denied lead to a terminal catastrophe.
A good example would be a health diagnosis. Getting told you are pre-diabetic is a revelation. The true nature of your body and lifestyle can now be seen as unhealthy and flawed. If the revelation is denied catastrophe comes. Full diabetes sets in with potentially life-threatening effects. Alternatively the revelation is a spur to a new life. Unhealthy habits are discarded, a greater and more fulfilling life is created.
Uncovering histories of family abuse also fit this frame. The revelation sweeps away lies and mistruths. People are not who we thought they were. The meaning of past events now becomes clear. Things suddenly make sense. But, if the revelation is suppressed catastrophe might occur. Perhaps the abuse gets worse. Perhaps a victim dies. Alternatively the revelation could be a spur towards healing, justice and new life.
Climate change fits this pattern too. Indeed, when people use the apocalyptic mode for climate change they often seem to be reaching towards this sense of revelation and salvation. Science has revealed the truth, now we must work out our salvation with fear and trembling.
But when people are unclear on what that revelation actually reveals, or they’ve given up on salvation then all we have left is Jonah waiting to see Nineveh get burnt to the ground in a 3D surround-sound Technicolor omnicidal entertainment experience. Zombies eat everyone’s brains. Existence goes to Hell.
Therefore to tell this story we need to know: what is the revelation, and what is the salvation? Let’s consider some possibilities.
The revelation:
This goes far beyond the simple fact that climate change is happening, rather we are talking about fundamental revelations about the way of things. Perhaps we might explore the true nature of our economic system (as in Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything), or our history of colonial exploitation (as in Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse), or maybe it’s agriculture, or maybe it’s hierarchy, or maybe it’s patriarchy. How you answer this question will depend on what you believe climate change has revealed.
The salvation:
To reach the depth of meaning appropriate to the apocalypse we need to grapple with ultimate questions. Technical plans about solar panels just don’t reach that level. We are talking about meaning, purpose, destiny. How to live a good life. How to create a good world. The revelation has uncovered something fundamental about our world. Our salvation must be similarly fundamental.
As we saw earlier, the apocalypse still has problems when applied to climate. However, this root aspect of revelation-salvation is the one part that really does apply. Climate change is a revelation that breaks fundamental assumptions that society has long held about the world. In that revelation grow the seeds of hope—the possibilities of salvation.
Can we achieve that salvation? Maybe. Maybe not.
Either way it’s much more optimistic than just sitting around depressed, misanthropically waiting for Nineveh to burn.
Next time we’ll continue getting literary, looking at various modes of story-telling that might work for climate change.
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