“And I heard a voice from heaven, like the sound of many waters, and like mighty thunder; and I heard the sound of harpers playing on harps.” This is the Book of Revelation, but the words are no different from those spoken by Americans from the religious revival of the 18th century to the millennial chat threads of today. In America, many horrific endings have come and gone: the Civil War, slavery, two world wars, assassinations, the Dirty War, the storming of the Capitol by hooligans. But the reality is not like that. The world as we know it, in all its beauty and horror, mystery and terror, is still here. But people keep thinking it isn’t. As literary critic Frank Kermode once suggested, the Book of Revelation could be true in another way, or it could only be true.
In the spirit of Kermode, it would be foolhardy not to acknowledge that if our virtual communications networks are filled with lakes of fire and talking heads who speak the language of the Devil, it is because the promise of our political systems and new technologies has faded. And not only that, hot wars, a warming climate, and resurgent fascism are no longer uncommon. And the old, ugly metaphor that humans are the problem has also recently been poured into a new, greener bottle. In 2018, philosopher Todd May wrote: The New York Times May asks, “Would it be a tragedy if there were no more humans on Earth?” What I am about to answer may at first seem puzzling. I would say, at least tentatively, that it might be both a tragedy and a good thing.” In other words, to escape the apocalypse, one must not go through the eye of a needle, but through another apocalypse. For May, the apocalypse is a morally desirable solution to problems such as global warming. Call it misanthropy of a higher order. If anything, the circularity of May’s thinking reinforces his sense that humanity, whether virtual or real, is trapped by its own thinking and devices.
A second strain of contemporary anti-humanism is promoted by tech moguls like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. They dream of new forms of human intelligence that are no longer human, such as artificial general intelligence or an embodied internet. They ask, why privilege the human brain if computing power always threatens to surpass it and make mere human thought unnecessary? But the pessimistic appeal to a “transhumanism” that is decoupled from the brain and therefore pure reason is itself a form of evangelism, an “ideology in the service of oligarchs” rather than “sinners in the hands of an angry God”. Silicon Valley gurus promise a perverse kind of magic, of free thought in a digital paradise and the cultivation of an ecotopia no longer ruined by humans. Musk and Thiel are also harpers who play the harp.
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Forty-five years ago, at what was but a brief moment in the long history of eschatology, the novelist and philosopher Maurice Blanchot argued: How to write about disasters “We are on the brink of disaster, but we cannot locate it in the future,” he says. The reason, Blanchot says, is that disaster “is rather always already past.” Blanchot’s point is that disasters are only recognized after they happen. In this sense, the apocalypse is never the revelation of something new, but rather the revealing of disturbing aspects of the world we already know.
I was reminded of this during the COVID-19 pandemic. As it happens, there was no snow on the ground at the time, but I was thinking of icebergs. “I’d rather have icebergs than ships,” begins the first stanza of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem. Imaginary icebergcontinue,
Although it meant the end of the trip.
I stood motionless like a cloudy rock,
And the whole sea was like a moving marble.
During that time, in all weathers, these words came to me. Imaginary iceberg This is a poem I love, but at the time I couldn’t remember the last time I read it, and yet those first four lines continued to play in my mind’s ear, becoming a phantom poem.
In March, I was in a small city in eastern Germany. The nearest iceberg was at least 2,000 miles away to the northwest. Soon there was little to see, as COVID-19 restrictions reduced my daily walks to short ones between my apartment and my office. Some people complained politely about the restrictions. That changed in April, when anti-vaxxers began organizing weekly protests in Germany’s biggest cities. However raucous those rallies got, they were modest compared with the general response to the pandemic in the United States. The pastor David Jeremiah, one of President Trump’s evangelical advisers, had questioned whether the virus was a biblical prophecy and called the pandemic “the most apocalyptic event that has ever happened.” Many Americans agreed. By mid-March, U.S. publishers were reporting strong sales of books about the end times.
As the weeks of lockdown passed and the apocalyptic frenzy showed no signs of abating, Imaginary iceberg The poem has three eleven-line stanzas, and as it unfolds, the tight rhyme and rhythmic structure established in the first stanza gradually loosens. The only exceptions are the rhyming couplets at the end of each stanza. Bishop reverses the poem’s metaphor, emphasizing self-sufficiency and loss of sight: “The iceberg cuts its face from within.” What begins innocently enough with an obvious statement becomes an allegory about the dangers of valuing the imagined over the imagined, and of cherishing the iceberg, “like a jewel from the grave,” which “saves itself forever and adorns only itself.”
Bishop warns against abandoning the necessary work of perception and understanding for the lure of apocalyptic revelation, no matter how tempting it may be: “We want the iceberg more than the ship, even if it means the end of the journey.” The poem seems to be a warning against thinking that depends on a devastating disconnect between the present and the past. Bishop’s wise warning comes with a gift: even if we end our journey, we can explore the magnitude of the imaginary iceberg with her as our guide.
Scene from the Apocalypse, France, circa 15th century. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
This article was first IWM Post (Spring/Summer 2024). this is, Institute for Human Sciences (IWM).
