There is an Apocalypse at the End of this Story

“Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn’t you tell the world!?” -Dr. Strangelove, or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

Many stories in literature, film, and video games deal with events to prevent the End of the World (in whatever form it might take) or to deal with the aftermath of a devastated planet. Examples of the first include the Pern series, The Fifth Element, and entries in the Legend of Zelda or Final Fantasy franchises. Examples of the other includes The Road, 28 Days Later, and The Last of Us. Preventing the End from coming allows (not exclusively) for stories of the unambiguous struggle between good and evil, life over death, and freedom of will over the cold hand of fate. Coping with a post-apocalyptic world gives storytellers the chance to question what humanity’s true nature is in the face of calamity, whether morality can or should transcend social circumstances, and what there is in pre-apocalyptic society which is best left in the charred ruins of ground zero. Both of these approaches to apocalyptic storytelling deserves discussion, and they might receive treatment in later posts, but for the moment I would like to examine the tale which ends with an apocalyptic event.

While apocalypse-based stories come in many diverse forms and thus have a variety of tones and morals, those which end with an apocalyptic event tend, in my opinion, to have far more of a political or satirical aspect to them than most of their kindred tales in the genre. Why end a story with the bombs exploding, the comet crashing, or the gates to hell opening? Why do the heroes fail to save humanity? The solution lies in interrogating two things: who the heroes or protagonists are and whether humanity is worth saving. If the protagonists are not heroic (at least in a traditional sense) and if humanity is seen as too flawed or their preservation comes at too high a price, then the human race will likely suffer an apocalyptic fate.

Let us take a look at two examples briefly. First, the Cold War dark comedy Dr. Strangelove. This 1964 movie tells the story of a psychotic Air Force general who orders his nuclear bombers to drop their payload on the Soviet Union and the desperate attempts of inept of deranged politicians, scientists, and generals to prevent a radioactive doomsday. They do not succeed in this. As the movie ends, so, too, does our world. But why is this? In one sense, those directly responsible for the end of the world, the bomber crew who unwittingly follow unauthorized orders and trigger a chain reaction that will irradiate the earth for 100 years, are quite heroic. They do their duty as if their country was counting on them and accomplish their mission to the best of their abilities. As the movie’s US president sadly boasts to his Soviet counterpart, “It’s initiative!” They have a strong dose of the everyman in them, particularly the pilot. Those in the leadership, however, are the ones who make a mess of things. Aside from a secretary, we never see a regular civilian. We are only presented with soldiers, politicians, and scientists involved with classified information. Humanity certainly is worth saving, but they are absent. The bomber crew is heroic, but they are inadvertently the instruments of doom. Who are our protagonists? The world’s leaders, but they are not heroes. And so the end comes.

Next, let us turn to another Cold War movie about atomic destruction, though perhaps not an expected one: Beneath the Planet of the Apes. This is direct sequel to the original Planet of the Apes, both starring Charlton Heston. Most people are aware of the ending to the first movie which reveals the story of an ape-ruled planet actually takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth. The ending to the sequel, however, is also noteworthy in its own regard. In the ruins of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, a single atomic bomb still exists, one with the power to destroy the whole planet, bearing the extremely eschatological name “Alpha and Omega,” or “the beginning and the end.” It is worshipped by the mutated descendants of humanity. Taylor (Heston’s character). Tries to prevent the weapon from being triggered when an army of apes arrives to kill the remaining humans. But when Taylor is injured and asks for help from Dr. Zaius (the ape antagonist from the first film), he is spurned. With his dying breath, Taylor activates the bomb, destroying the apes, the humans, and all life on earth. In this act, Taylor repudiates both the humans and the apes. Both are incurably wicked in his eyes. Humans nearly destroyed the earth once; apes seem little better, and they all too prone to the same errors of pride and aggression. He is not heroic in a traditional sense, but that is because both humans and simians are not worth saving. He damns them all in deed, just as he had damned in words the humans responsible for the previous nuclear holocaust at the end of the first movie.

In both of these examples, overt yet non-specific criticisms are being leveled at their audiences and contemporary society. In the first case, doom might come about through incompetence and paranoia among the leadership, despite whatever ideological positions are supposedly at stake. Perhaps the ideologies themselves are driving the leaders to such lunacy.  In the other case, the movie seems to say that any people with the will to use such horrible weapons deserves to be destroyed by them. Perhaps these messages could have been portrayed without complete destruction, and many stories do end with a sense of relief at having narrowly escaped a fate that humanity might well have earned. But by letting the button be pressed, the storyteller gives the unmistakable impression that these things might actually happen, that someone might go too far – a sense harder to achieve when there is a happy ending. Even in stories that have ridiculous means of destroying the world (like Cabin in the Woods), when the world is allowed to die, the audience must ask themselves, “Should it have been saved, could it have been, or is destruction inevitable and, perhaps, appropriate?” By asking these questions, one hopes nihilism does not conquer but rather a desire to become a people both worthy and capable of overcoming absolute destruction.

“In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.” -Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

Postmillennialism: how to work your way to the end of the world

Those familiar only with present-day forms of American Evangelical Christianity will likely have heard of things like the Rapture, the Tribulation, and the Second Coming.  One term perhaps less well-known is “the millennium” which refers to a thousand years of peace and harmony, whether in a literal or symbolic sense.  Perhaps one of the reasons this term is not familiar to many people is because the other words have become so common-place.  Why is that?  Because the idea of the Rapture, the Tribulation, and other apocalyptic terms denoting a cataclysmic End Times represent one particular form of Christian eschatology known as premillennialism.  It is an idea most people, religious or otherwise, are familiar with even if the word is foreign.  Very briefly, premillennialism is based off of passages in Revelation mentioning a thousand years of peace on earth.  Specifically, the view is that terrible things (the rise of Antichrist, the Tribulation, terrible natural, supernatural, and man-made disasters, Armageddon, etc) will happen before Christ returns and ushers in this new Golden Age.  But it is only with the Second Coming that all of the problems on Earth can be solved.  Premillennialism is probably the most common American view of this era (at least among those who know anything about it), and therefore the violence and destruction occurring as a build up towards the thousand years gets most of the attention among both believers and the culture at large.  The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, with its world-engulfing conflict between good and evil, is a prime example of this, both in the views it expresses and as a reason why American culture popularly believes horrible things inevitably must happen before peace will come (at least when talking about the End of the World).

So, what is the alternative?  It seems only natural to think that the world should end in a bang.  Or else, if there is evil in the world, doesn’t the evil have to be removed somehow before there can be peace?  And wouldn’t the evil go down fighting?  So, again, how can one have an apocalypse without an Armageddon?  As you might have guessed, the answer is postmillennialism.

While postmillennialism is by no means extinct, it has severely declined in popular prominence from its height in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  Postmillennialism states that the thousand years of peace will occur first followed by Christ’s return.  I other words, unlike in premillennialism, the evil of the world will cease to exist long before the Second Coming, and this period of peace will be achieved through the works of humanity alone.  Thus instead of as someone rescuing man from his endless sins, Christ returns as the capstone of human self-perfectibility.  It was an idea that had its heyday during the height of Progressive-era campaigns in the 19th and 20th centuries and was closely associated with movements like abolition, universal suffrage, prohibition, public education, urban sanitation, workers’ rights, and other public morality efforts.  The goal at the time was to create a world that would be perfect, morally and technologically, each helping the other.  The driving ideology behind it was that humanity itself was perfectible.  Though we might have erred in the past, now at last we had new technologies, new innovations, new access to scientific truths, and (as was believed) a better understanding of morality than any previous generation.  The ignorance and technologically deficient past had slowly evolved into a happier world, and this progress would never be interrupted (now that we knew what we were aiming at).  This belief in the inevitability of Progress, which was an outgrowth of Enlightenment philosophy, needed only postmillennialism to vindicate it theologically as building towards a new, perfect world that would be worthy of Christ’s return.

Described in these terms – the belief in the inherent goodness (rather than sinfulness) of humanity, aided towards perfection by education and technology – it seems like many today, even among the non-religious portion of American society, would endorse such a concept.  So why is this view relatively uncommon compared to premillennial ideas?  Well, as stated, postmillennialism was popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  What happened?  To put it succinctly: two world wars, one of which included the attempted eradication of an entire religious minority as well as the creation and use of atomic weapons.  World War One seriously harmed European belief in postmillennialism, but Americans saw little of that war and never on US soil.  The true end of popular support of a postmillennial perspective came with the Holocaust.  The senselessness of such atrocities caused people then (and still today) to question how “good” humans are capable of being if one of the most advanced cultures on the planet could have done so much evil.  And was not Third Reich Germany itself postmillennial after a fashion?  It boasted at the time that it would last a thousand years under the control of a new race of perfect humans.  After which…what?  It would collapse?  Unlikely.  I do not pretend to know much about Third Reich propaganda, but more likely they would have claimed that a new era would emerge with a new Christ-like figure to congratulate them on their success – not quite a Christian postmillennial scenario but one based closely on those ideals.  But it did not last a thousand years, and the legacy it left was not one of peace and harmony.  The Soviet Union, likewise, was built upon a(n atheistic) conception of the inevitable progress of humanity, and yet after the war it and the Western world were enemies.  And the atomic bomb?  Aside from the many thousands of deaths merely two weapons created, the world soon found themselves in a deadly stalemate between two world superpowers, each armed with weapons a hundred times more deadly.  The post-war world was a time of fear and paranoia, of loss and confusion over the things humans were capable of doing to themselves.  Hope in human perfectibility receded, and so did the belief that the End would come peacefully as a reward for a long, happy, prosperous life full of nothing but good deeds.  Instead, the world saw that its End could come in nuclear fire.  Even if that did not happen, there could always arise a despot to subjugate, brainwash, and inflict all sorts of horrors on mankind, all in the name of “human perfection.”  So the world discarded postmillennialism.  And that is why the world “apocalypse” often conjures images of destruction and not progress.

The brief sketch of pre- and postmillennialism here is simply that: a brief sketch.  Many of the ideas are grossly simplified, and to say postmillennialism has been “discarded” is not, of course, strictly true.  Some of the ideas of inevitable progress and human perfectibility live on, changing and evolving with the times.  Transhumanism and the concept of a technological Singularity event both can be seen as part of a postmillennial paradigm, even if the religious aspect is gone.  Also, the historical connections and justifications for postmillennialism have a much richer and varied history than is expressed in this post.  For instance, Mormonism grew out of some of these beliefs, and it is still a strong and active faith.  There are so many more ideas regarding both of these two paradigms that I will not get into now.  For instance, it has been said that postmillennialism is inherently more active of a religious stance since it requires humans to work towards perfection while premillennialists simply wait around.  This, however, is not an inevitable conclusion, and there are premillennialists just as if not more involved with attempting to solve world problems than postmillennialists.  Again, I won’t go into it all here, but I wanted to suggest some of the concepts an examination of these ideas carries with it.

While postmillennialism was not on the lips of everyone in the 19th and early 20th centuries, I suggest the next time you come across Progressive Era images or ideas you consider the religious /apocalyptic ideas that may have under-girded their conception.  Also, try to imagine what a Progressive Era apocalypse might look like.  For those familiar with Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis, you already have an idea.