Sasha Lilley

Helpful, if not earthshattering (no pun intended). Well-written essays that make the case: predictions of apocalyptic catastrophe can be a useful tool for galvanizing the right, because they confirm the reactionary worldview, and reify the rightwing desire for authoritarianism. But they are not useful for building movements to transform society in a more humane, democratic, ecological, and equitable way. On the left or in apolitical people “catastrophism” merely tends to generate despair and a sense of powerlessness, which results in cynicism, absorption in the trivial, and immobility.

Sadly, the weakest chapter is the one on apocalyptic cultural production. It is narrowly focused on zombies (a fun and fruitful topic however) – but apocalyptic symbols and narratives are a much broader and deeper part of our cultural inheritance, and they resonate far more on a mythic level of understanding than on an historical or political one. Left rationalism would like to see myth defanged by reducing it to history (the chapter’s author quotes Walter Benjamin to that effect) but mythic consciousness is irreducible to historical consciousness because the conception of time is fundamentally different. The left idea that class-conscious rationalism alone is sufficient to nullify deep-seated supra-rational (joyful, transcendental, as well as terrible) elements of human experience is a weakness of much theory, and needs to be reconsidered.
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