When I write “Divest from apocalypse,” I have in mind a very specific kind of apocalypse.
The common understanding of apocalypse has been fueled by ancient visions, the imaginations of Dante, and the residual/ancestral memories and fears of people in every generation: pandemics that wipe out villages at a time, wars that decimate generations, hunger that seeps into your bones, sudden and devastating storms, swarming crop-killers, and bloody persecution from fickle and authoritarian rulers. People always die during these apocalypses.
And each of these cases is a reasonable thing to fear. They are, for some people around the world, not just fears but daily life. And for the rest of us, they’re the muse for dystopian treatments in sci-fi, fantasy, and fringe politics. Conventional apocalypse is a vehicle for our worries about the present and about the future.
It sucks in our creative capacity like a black hole and yields nothing but contraction. It’s perfect that we’ve developed bunkers as a practical response to the threat of apocalypse. A bunker is like an underground cocoon: just enough space for me and mine to live in; not enough space for you and yours. It contains all that I might need to survive a blast and immediate fall-out. But there’s not enough room for all of us, and we can’t co-build a civilization with it.
So when I write, Divest from apocalypse, that’s the kind of apocalypse I believe is worth releasing.
But there is another kind.
A useful kind of apocalypse is the “unveiling” of the way things are. It sharpens our perception of how dysfunctional an overtly functioning system is, and it awakens those who’ve accepted our responsibility to build a new reality. This is an apocalypse that isn’t just a cataclysmic end. It need not be about mortal death or decimation. It need not even be dramatic.
What an unveiling will demand is change. It will demand diversion from well-trodden paths and predictable results. It will require creativity and adaptability and community to work out both. It will require courage.
An unveiling calls for leadership, not necessarily leaders from the apex of the old world’s social hierarchy, but role-leadership: the capacity to take responsibility for design, process, action, and outcome, and to mobilize others to do the same once, and again, and again, and again.
I’m not convinced that people need to die for us to wake up. I’m not convinced that people need to suffer for us to recognize we can choose the quality of life we build for each other. I’m not at all sure that violence is inevitable. I am sure that we’ve not yet imagined life and society without it.
Even the New Earth that John imagines on Patmos, one of my favorite visions of what’s possible, has chapters of death in its preface and introduction. Because we imagine violence is inevitable, even Over Yonder, we might pray for life without it, but we’ve got no plan to live without it. Our cups are full.
We have to revise our imaginations and expectations. Until we imagine anew, it makes no sense to hope.