In the spirit of John Green’s book of the same title, our theme for the month of October is “the Anthropocene reviewed.” Writers were asked to review and rate some facet of human experience on a five-star scale.
Back in 2020, as The Anthropocene Reviewed podcast was rounding the final bend on its three-year run, John Green released an episode titled “Humanity’s Temporal Range.” The episode marked a break from precedent. In contrast with past reviews of things like Mario Kart, hot-dog-eating contests, and QWERTY keyboards, “Humanity’s Temporal Range” proposed a review of the unthinkable—or, maybe better, a review of the absolute limit of what is thinkable. What does it mean, the episode asked, to know that humankind will one day cease to be? What does it mean that we have a shelf life? And how should that shape our living now?
I recommend the episode. A superb essayist, Green approaches questions of apocalypse, climate change, and extinction with seriousness, sure—but also with good humor and generosity and a principled refusal of despair. Listening to it during the early days of the Covid-19 lockdown, I felt … not reassured exactly, but a little less lonely, a little less alone in my fear. “The always unpredictable future now feels truly terrifying in its uncertainty,” as Green admits at the top of the episode, “and I’m left feeling, to borrow a line from the poet Paige Lewis, all stopped up with dread.”
Yes. Many of us were.
Yet that terror and dread do not get the final word in “Humanity’s Temporal Range” speaks volumes about how Green would like us to relate to the future.
By contrast, that interest in the Doomsday Clock has surged in the last few weeks would seem to indicate quite a different relation to the future.
The context for this surge isn’t difficult to discern. Channeling Donald Trump or Kim Jong-un, Russian president Vladimir Putin recently threatened tactical nuclear strikes, should the West retaliate against Russia for annexing parts of the Ukraine. The US in turn—and especially Joe Biden, speaking at a Democratic fundraiser—has responded by warning about a looming “nuclear Armageddon.” From there, news coverage all but wrote itself. Journalists have drawn pointed connections to the Cuban Missile Crisis and have wondered aloud how these latest developments might influence the Doomsday Clock. “Nuclear Threats and What They Mean for the Doomsday Clock,” reads one headline. “Doomsday Clock Today: Are Putin’s Threats Pushing It Closer to Midnight?” asks another.
This fascination with the Doomsday Clock isn’t surprising. An internationally recognized Cold War-era symbol, the Doomsday Clock has, for almost eighty years now, provided a script for narrating the planet’s proximity to nuclear annihilation, not to mention national conflicts between the US and Russia. The Clock first appeared in 1947, on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. There, it was (and today remains) an elegant and necessary warning against the dangers of nuclear proliferation—a quarter-slice of a clock face, with hands poised scant minutes from midnight. Artist Martyl Langsdorf, spouse of a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, designed the first iteration of the Clock. She set the hands to seven minutes to twelve.
Subsequent adjustments to the Clock have more or less repeated Langsdorf’s apocalyptic urgency. Only briefly, in fact—and that for just a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union—did the Bulletin’s back-of-the-envelope geopolitical assessment reflect any optimism about the course of nuclear history. But that period proved little more than a deviation. Far more often, the Clock has given vent to a slowly spiraling sense of despair.
In light of that spiral, it can be tempting to seek shelter—or anyway a conclusion—in the bunker of casual dismissals and ready-to-hand deflections. Nuclear Armageddon didn’t happen then, so why would it now? Plus, I’ll confess: for someone like me, born after the Cold War, such objections come fairly easily. Perhaps I should be more concerned about nuclear war. Probably I should be. But nuclear saber-rattling à la Putin, Kim, Trump, or Biden does not—yet—have the emotional immediacy than it does for, say, my parents or grandparents. Among millennials, I don’t think that makes me exceptional. Many of us find ourselves more worried about other crises: the warming planet, fascism and Christian nationalism, economic collapse.
Even so, while the Trinity Test may be less of an influence on how I dread the planet’s future, I cannot deny the fact that I dread it. Nor can I ignore the ways in which the direction of my dread matches that of the Doomsday Clock—matches, really, a wider sense of societal dread, of which the Doomsday Clock is merely a condensation. For instance, what does it suggest that I, like the Clock, tend to imagine catastrophe as a problem for the future, not as something that happened in the past or that might be ongoing in the present? What does it suggest that I, like the Clock, tend by default toward deepening pessimism—that most days the only way I can imagine a drastically different world is through that world’s abruptly getting worse?
And how, in the end, despite all the wrong the Doomsday Clock indexes, does one cultivate hope? How does one “choose,” as Green writes—choose, as though it were simply that easy—“to believe … that we are not approaching the apocalypse, that the end is not coming, and that we will find a way to survive the coming changes”?
I’m not sure. Yet.
Till I figure it out, if I figure it out, I give the Doomsday Clock one and a half stars.
Ben DeVries (’15) graduated with degrees in literature and writing. He and his wife Jes, a fellow Calvin grad, live in Champaign, Illinois, where Ben is looking to add some letters behind his name. On the academic off-seasons, he reads fantasy and works as a glorified “go-fer” at the Champaign Park District. He’s been known to make a mean deep-dish pizza.
