THE NECESSARY APOCALYPSE

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Indigenous apocalypse gave rise to our world.

The topic of an apocalypse is something Anti-Indigenous Civilizations (AICs) are obsessed with. Almost every year, a blockbuster film is dedicated to imagining the end of our world, usually through spectacular violence. It’s weird if you think about it. Why is a culture that’s so concerned about touting its superiority dedicated to imagining its violent end?

Also, why are the new life forms humans encounter in these masochistic imaginaries always bent on ending human life with extreme prejudice? What kind of culture would popularize its gruesome death over and over and over again?

Perhaps this phenomenon of AICs exists because its founding necessitated the gruesome, ongoing, violent end of the cultures that were present beforehand: the cultures that were offered the awful choice of assimilating or dying.

I think our culture has a very keen and substantial sense of guilt for how we were founded and how we must exist. Just like a person who takes up whiteness is aware, often entirely subconsciously, of the harm white supremacy does to non-white people, our culture is keenly aware that it exists at the continued expense of Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty.

There is no United States of America without the genocide of hundreds of Indigenous cultures. The English first had to conquer/assimilate and destroy dozens of Indigenous peoples living on what became the British Isles before becoming “Great” Britain. Scores of Indigenous peoples had to be killed off, integrated, subdued, and forced into the longest-lasting AICs in human history in what’s now known as China. And the struggles of those surviving cultures to remain independent continue.

Truckloads of generational trauma and injustice in the name of “progress” are what I believe our culture is processing through our apocalypse obsession. Many of us find it entertaining, including yours truly, but it’s also really friggin weird.

I’m sick of AIC apocalypse stories.

Have you read The Three Body Problem by Lui Cixin? Perhaps you’ve seen the critically acclaimed Netflix show based on the novel? Either way, this book — the first in the trilogy — is a triumph of science fiction. I also find the story arc incredibly depressing and highly cynical, so much so that after finishing the series, I decided to stop consuming alien first-contact stories from AICs.

Too many of these stories follow the same deathwish arch where humans meet technologically superior aliens that immediately decide to try and wipe the humans out. We die in the millions, a hero arises just in time to triumph over the villainous aliens — who are simply a more deadly version of the colonizing forces of humanity — and what’s left of humanity goes right back to rebuilding a profoundly unequal society.

Cixin’s books don’t follow this arch completely, but the technologically superior genocidal aliens are an essential character of the novels.

I’ve found somewhat of an exception in the works of women of color, namely Octavia E. Butler’s series, Lilith’s Brood, which begins with the book Dawn. In this book, aliens arrive on Earth in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse to save what’s left of life on the planet. The relationships between the alien race and what’s left of humanity are much more complex and cooperative than what gets so commonly envisioned in mainstream alien first-contact stories.

The series is worth a read, a rare exception in USian literature of this genre.

Overall, I’m just sick of the depressing vision AIC culture celebrates. I no longer feel the triumph of Randy Quaid flying an F16 into the belly of an alien vessel in the movie Independence Day. The devastation colonizing extraterrestrials inflict is morally defensible, and again, I find it weird that we keep reimagining our cultural comeuppance.

Perhaps I’m disturbed by the stories because the suffering we reap is indiscriminate and unfair. Among the millions killed, the overwhelming majority are people who’ve historically been violently excluded from institutional power. When the Cloverfield monster lays waste to New York City, I kept thinking about the scores of Black and brown people violently sequestered in under-resourced, highly concentrated urban communities, dying by the millions. Meanwhile, the wealthy white elite are perfectly positioned to become the heroes they imagine themselves to be.

Isn’t there a better way to imagine an end to our world?

The apocalypse we need, not the one we want

In an article published in WVU magazine, I said some years ago that I don’t think we can have new iPhones every year and save polar bears. The idea I was getting at was the tradeoff that comes with modern technological conveniences and the health of our ecosystem. I don’t think we as a species have the collective skills and wisdom to have a rapidly developing technology and a sustainable natural environment.

Perhaps that will change one day. As my friend often argues, the only way to have a chance at solving our tendency to destroy the natural world is to keep advancing our technology until we develop ways to reverse our harm.

My biggest worry about this idea is that the planet and/or our species will be in such poor condition that we won’t be able to leverage our knowledge to prevent our extinction. We certainly can’t return to how we lived 10,000, 100, or even ten years ago. We are changing the world and learning things that make us a different species from the one that started living on the savanna three-plus million years ago. Each significant advancement brought about a new apocalypse, an end to one way of living for a new way.

COVID was an apocalypse of sorts. Not only for the families devastated by deaths caused by the virus but for the way we had been practicing work. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were an apocalypse for the ways our airports functioned. The subsequent Patriot Act has fundamentally changed how the U.S. executes national security.

Do you remember when you had to navigate streets, roads, and highways without your cell phone or look through The Yellow Pages to find businesses? The introduction of the iPhone was an apocalypse of so many cultural norms that we barely even remember changing.

Ending the private healthcare system for a public service that citizens pay for through taxes would be an apocalypse. Banning assault weapons, legalizing all drugs, and disqualifying convicted felons from running for president (like that would ever happen!) would be a series of apocalypses.

Universal basic income, adequate paid time off for birthing parents, a four-day work week, and pay equity across gender identities would end the work culture in the U.S. Cutting the defense budget by 2/3 in the next 15 years to provide high-quality public education for all living in the U.S. would end both military and education culture in this country. Reparations for the descendants of enslaved people…Let me stop. That will never happen! (But the U.S. did give reparations to enslavers).

Divesting the cattle industry that takes up nearly half of the land of the U.S. and honoring treaty rights with Indigenous nations would signal a chance to end settler colonialism.

Learning to hunt deer began the apocalypse of beef consumption in my home.

My point is that many of us agree that things in USian culture have, could, and should end. An apocalypse is not inherently harmful, and some apocalypses of ideologies, like heteropatriarchy and white supremacy, are necessary for the world many want to see. But, we are anxious and scared of losing certain conveniences and systems because many of those systems make our lives bearable in this society. It’s all we’ve known, and we’ve been socialized to believe no alternative could be better.

But if we haven’t examined the tradeoffs of the conveniences we enjoy and the suffering required to have such things, then what moral ground do we have to stand on to insist that our culture is the best there ever has been or could be?

The technology of the new iPhones is dope, but if Tim Cook decided that in order to reduce the impact these devices have on our human and non-human relatives, we could only have new iPhones every five years, would I be willing to accept that? Would the board of directors at Apple accept that? Would your financial portfolio that expects a 5% annual return, in part because of the stock it has in Apple, be fulfilled?

Starting your apocalypse

I think the world we have made and gotten used to needs to end, but I don’t think that means millions have to die in the apocalypse I have in mind. Humanity doesn’t need to end; it simply needs to be transformed. AIC cultures probably won’t survive, but that’s no significant loss if we have the time and space to imagine something different. Besides, millions of people die every day in AICs around the world for a lifestyle only a tiny minority, by design, can realize.

Ending our world is the only way to save it, and for the most part, we simply have to walk away from the familiar things we know aren’t working. It's easier said than done, especially when we’re co-dependent on the status quo. There’s almost no modern technology I’m prepared to simply walk away from. We haven’t built a garden we can wholly subsist on, and I’m only a halfway competent hunter/forager.

But we’re working on all of that. Perhaps in the next 2-4 generations, if we have that time, my descendants will have the skills and practice to walk away successfully.

This is the secret dream of The Wild Kitchen.

To be ready for the necessary apocalypse so that there’s hope to build something sustainable in the aftermath.

How are you creating apocalypses? How are you working to put an end to the things you no longer want to see?

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-Jonathan