The End of the World
is an invitation
In the 2021 film Don’t Look Up, two astronomers discover that an approaching comet is about to destroy human civilisation. Despite their best efforts to highlight and avert the looming catastrophe, the pair are met with glib indifference and politicians who view the situation as an opportunity to line their pockets rather than save humanity (I know, it’s hard to imagine). As the end of the world draws nigh, denialism runs rampant and the astronomer’s increasingly dire warnings are met with sneering derision.
The film is allegorical, but we all know our world is already dying a literal and spiritual death, suffocating under the demands that humanity has put it under. Last year tropical forest was lost at the highest rate for two decades. 2024 was also our planet’s hottest year on record, and was the first time that global average temperatures breached the 1.5C threshhold. Alongside this planetary crisis, AI industries are attempting to replicate human behaviour, there is also an ongoing genocide in Gaza, famine in Sudan and war in Ukraine.
In the final scene of the film, a small group gather for a final meal and await their fate together. They eat apple pie and somebody says a prayer. Someone comments that the coffee wasn’t store-bought. ‘No I bought it in fresh’ replies the host. At the end of the meal, as the comet’s impact starts to reverberate, one of the astronomers ruminatively comments that ‘We really did have everything, didn’t we?’.
This last image is one that that has stuck with me, because it’s really an invitation to ask ourselves – how would and should we behave at the end of the world?
I’ve been mulling over this question for a while, and I invite you to do the same.
If a comet was coming to earth tomorrow, how would you spend those final moments?
Who would you want to be with?
And what conversations would you have?
What actions, words or feelings would be of most importance?
In the Christian tradition, questions like these are known as questions of eschatology or the study of ‘last things’. It might feel counter-intuitive, but I believe that thinking about the end of the world is actually a helpful exercise for our imaginations. This is because in order to engage with such complex existential ideas, we must mentally disentangle ourselves from ‘normality’ and grapple with the questions that really matter:
What kind of life do I want to have lived?
Have we looked after each other well?
From where do we derive meaning?
When I think about my answers to both sets of questions, I’m struck that they all centre around a sense of connection. Like the people gathered round the table in Don’t Look Up, I think most of us would choose to spend those final moments in the presence of other human beings. In communion with each other. Maybe just talking about the mundanities of our lives and our love for our planet. Some of you might want your pets nearby, or to listen to a piece of music that you find beautiful. Others might attend an end of the world rave, and die surrounded by people who have lived life with the decibels turned up.
Yesterday afternoon I watched a clip of a man who must have been close to my age, trying to comfort his children as nearby bombs and shelling shook the walls of his home in Gaza. He had his youngest in his arms, and was encouraging the older children to lie close to the ground. In the face of annihilation, he was doing his best to keep them calm. In Gaza, the end of the world is already a daily reality, not a theoretical exercise. ‘Gaza has become worse than hell on earth’ the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross told the BBC yesterday. In that hell on earth, families choose to be together, offering comfort and reassurance.
For the Christian theologian Jürgan Moltmann, eschatology is a ‘theology of hope’. In ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ (2004), Emily Griesinger argues that Moltman’s thinking offers ‘a revolutionary refocusing on eschatology as the doctrine of Christian hope, a perspective that I contend offers inspiration and direction for all literary artists and scholars, who wish to push against meaninglessness and despair’. Griesinger goes on—‘Eschatology for Moltmann implies political and economic liberation in this world, which will come about through human solidarity and solidarity with nature.’
One of the issues I have with so-called doomer narratives is that they often serve as a somewhat indulgent distraction and exercise in nihilism. Those putting forward doomsday accounts of our world ironically misunderstand that eschatalogical questions are really questions that concern what we want to be like as humans right now, in this very moment. This is what makes Don’t Look Up a good film; the end of the world is actually framed as a starting point for us to reevaluate our behaviour and actions as a species.
But as of today, Western culture does not seem particularly able to grapple with these ideas and engage the generative side of our brains. Instead, we are increasingly being invited to shut off our imaginations, and to outsource our capacity for critical thought to machine-learning-models that try to mimic human insight. It would seem that our imaginative dexterity is rapidly being eroded.
In a recent commencement speech published in The Washington Post this week, the author and writer Nicole Krauss expressed similar thoughts:
We have lost not just our ability to concentrate on deciphering long passages of written language; we have, I believe, begun to lose our attachments to the meaning of words and sentences, which we once trusted to carry the precious freight of communicating who we are — to ourselves and to each other….Writing and reading are not effortless. But, without that effort, we will slide deeper and deeper into inchoateness, darkness, violence, diminished freedom for all and a diminished state of human being.
‘Diminished freedom for all and a diminished state of human being’. Krauss is not pulling any punches here, and nor should she. We find ourselves, in our daily actions and decisions, at a crossroads. Each time we choose to outsource our thinking we are making a choice about the kind of world we want to live in. Proponents of AI speak of untold efficincies and increased productivity – the usual north stars of capitalism. I’m not sure I want our cultures to become more efficient; I want us to become more comfortable with ambiguity and better at using our imaginations. I want us to become more caring. more human, more hospitable.
Last week I suggested that we could start a BRAVE NEW WORLDS book club. A place to ‘imagine, think-through and wrestle with the world that is on her way’. On the surface setting up a book club seems like a fairly ridiculous response to the many crises that engulf our world – but I’m more convinced than ever that we need spaces in which we can put our minds and hearts on a path which invites and actively engages in criticism, debate and discovery.
Our first book is Rebecca Solnit’s NO STRAIGHT ROAD TAKES YOU THERE: Essays for Uneven Terrain. In the opening pages, Solnit says that ‘sometimes a book or an act or an idea is a gift bequethed to a posterity the giver could not imagine.’ My hope is that the BRAVE NEW WORLDS Book Club plants seeds which will blossom in mysterious, inefficient and unknown ways.
Thank you for reading!
To get a sense of numbers, I’m asking people planning on attending the first book club to register for a (free) ticket through Eventbrite.
You can read my piece ‘Doomerism is dead, long live the imagination!’ here.
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