One of the main fantasies, I’d argue, that animates apocalyptic stories goes something like this: what if a thing happened, and that thing—that Rapture, that plague, that asteroid blistering toward Earth—was so bad or so extreme that, for once, all of us were on the same page? True, we might not agree about what that page means. Nor would we necessarily know how best to respond to its message. Some might see in it a call to mutual aid; others, an invitation to religious fanaticism, to hand-wringing nostalgia, to cynical predation. Apocalyptic stories are not short on tropes for imagining how humans respond to crisis. Even so, these stories suggest, at least on one thing we’d all agree: a crisis did happen. A rupture occurred. Something fundamental shifted in the bedrock of the status quo, and now the old is out for good.

Bring on the brave new world.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these kinds of stories lately, stories that narrate change by asserting a binary difference between before and after, pre and post. Partly it’s an occupational hazard. The first chapter of my dissertation is about exactly this topic—about how authors of apocalyptic fiction compose the shock-and-awe spectacle of abrupt cataclysm. How, the chapter asks, do these authors do it? And why? What’s the utility of narrating catastrophe as sudden and complete rather than as slow and unevenly distributed? To illustrate the stakes of these questions, much of the chapter focuses on fiction from the US far right and the 1990s militia movement. There, as freedom-loving patriots respond to apocalypse by donning ammo belts and army-surplus fatigues, ready to bring the fight to postapocalyptic looters, globalists, and so-called cultural Marxists, it’s not difficult to imagine the ideological appeal of a world that ends with a bang.

After all, at least with a bang, you know when it’s OK to resort to violence. At least with a bang, you know, as a young conservative put it to Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk late last year, when it’s OK to “kill these people.”

But work is not the only reason I’ve been preoccupied with these stories. Maybe it’s not even the primary one. In what can only seem a bathetic come-down relative to the high drama of apocalyptic mayhem and right-wing revolutionary violence, I’ve been thinking a lot about the distance between where I find myself now and where I was in 2015, when I first came on board the post calvin. In some ways the distance is not so great. I may not be a newlywed, but at almost thirty, I am still happily married. Likewise, after seven years, I may be a lot more cynical about graduate studies, but I am still, in fact, a graduate student. In other respects, however, I feel as though a whole lot has changed—and changed in ways that could be, from a sufficient vantage, measured in terms of a binary before and after. A pre and post. Changes in disposition, changes in politics, changes in belief.

But then I ask myself: change relative to what, exactly? Before what? After what?

The fantasy underlying apocalyptic stories like The Road, World War Z, or Station Eleven is that the characters know how and when the world shifted—when the status quo was overthrown, when the ancien régime gave way to the nouveau. Or, to draw an unlikely but perhaps apropos comparison: it’s no mystery when, in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s words, the world turned upside down. But when exactly did the world turn upside down for my thinking about labor organizing? About socialism? About queer sexuality and the church? It would be hard to overstate the distance between where I once stood on issues important to the conservative Christian contexts that shaped me—even to those far right, militia-aligned contexts—and where I now stand. Yet even as I can recall moments that informed my development, I can remember no definite thresholds or light-bulb moments. No revelations, no world-ending crises. Certainly no events like that of Saul on the road to Damascus. Just the slow, uneven accretion of change, in fits and starts, over the course of seven years.

So where does that leave me—leave us, in the end? Where does it leave us, for the end? It’s tempting here to attempt an immediate resolution to the uncertainty—to reach for a lesson or insight that reconciles this essay’s messy reflections about apocalypse, about change over time, and extracts from that messiness a hard-edged truth. I hesitate to do so. Indeed, if it’s true, as I think it is, that certain political agendas thrive under conditions that imagine change as abrupt and absolute, a definite before and after, I’m not convinced that such change is in fact the norm for most people. More often, I think change is experienced uncertainly, ambiguously.

If anything, it’s more honest then to conclude this post not with an insight but with a question: How do you narrate to yourself how you have changed? How do we—how do we as a reading community, as a nation, as a globe—narrate to ourselves how we have changed?

And, finally, why?

2 Comments

  1. Katie Van Zanen

    I have (also for work reasons!) been thinking about similar things, Ben. In two cases: my fear of an absolute climate change apocalypse when in fact what seems most true is that it will be continue to be an uneven one, and one in which the acute problems are in fact not as important as the slow-burning ones. And in an interview between Jen Hatmaker and Casper ter Kuile in which she asks about a before and after in his religious life, and he says it shows the evangelical in her– most (all?) spiritual and religious change does not happen suddenly, but slowly. And, of course, always thinking about the construction of crises and moral panics– so I recommend the podcast You’re Wrong About again if you haven’t listened

    Thanks for this hard-earned clarity.

    Reply
    • Ben DeVries

      I’m grateful for the generous engagement, Katie. 🙂

      Your comment puts me in mind of two things. On the evangelical side, I’m wondering about the centrality of “born again” stories–the experience of a sort of seismic, spiritual shift in how people experience Christianity. It’s not something I’ve got any experience with, but the binary, on-off description of it definitely feels relevant.

      The other thing you made me think of–this time more on the climate side–was a book! It’s called Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, by Rob Nixon. You’d probably dig it: it’s all about uneven, hard-to-narrate violence vs. media’s preference for spectacular kinds of violence. I’m teaching part of the intro for a film class this semester–happy to share the file if you’re interested!

      Also: big thanks for the podcast rec. I’ll give it a listen!

      Reply

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