Naturalizing Apocalypse: Last Men and Other Animals

Abstract

Expectations of a dystopian or apocalyptic future are central to twentieth and twenty-first century culture, and constitute a pervasive influence on popular culture, religious identity, and political ideology. Political scientists, philosophers and literary critics have emphasized the Manichean worldview that underlies present-day concerns with the future: a desire to cast historical events in terms of a struggle between light and darkness, good and evil, until the end of time. 1 ‘The apocalyptic imagination’, notes sociologist John Wallis, ‘has a tendency to conceive the world in starkly dualistic terms [...] There are, in other words, no shades of grey within apocalypticism, nor any moral ambiguity’. 2 Millenarian ideology, according tothisinterpretation, precipitates violence: for the believer, events cohere as part of a universal, apocalyptic plan; actual or perceived opponents are traitors or agents of evil; the sense of an imminent end of history inspires plans of empowerment, and calls for ruthless action. The Revelation of John, with its mythic and graphic description of end-time conflict, provides a compelling context for such narratives of apocalyptic bloodshed. Revelation, according to feminist theologian Tina Pippin, is a source of ‘sublime horror’, a celebration of sadistic violence that casts its shadow on other public expressions of religious faith. 3 In her wide-ranging study of spirit forms, Phantasmagoria, Marina Warner reaches an even bleaker conclusion. For the British novelist and cultural historian, ‘the present disturbing diffusion of this biblical book [Revelation] has a new, unexamined moral force, a redundant nastiness, the kind that many centuries of thought about justice and humanity have striven to put aside’. 4 But not all expressions of apocalyptic culture lend themselves to this interpretation. Unlike other end-time narratives, last man fictions–tales of solitary survivors and of the sudden annihilation of