I read Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back while quarantined in my apartment in New York, bedridden and feverish with what doctors told me was probably COVID-19. The Irish writer Mark O’Connell has had the unhappy luck of publishing a book about the apocalypse during a global pandemic, the kind of accidental topicality no writer would pray for and no publicist, however skillful, could obtain.
Is O’Connell the literary beneficiary of a “black swan” event or merely ahead of the curve? For some time, I’ve noticed a shift in the cultural register: As the data about global warming becomes more and more alarming, left-wing circles begin to sound like the kind of right-wing survivalists they regarded, until recently, with amusement or outright contempt. Now, with the United States paralyzed by a modern-day plague, everyone — Right, Left, or otherwise — is suddenly steeped in the language of survival and apocalypse. Supermarket shelves are stripped bare. Gun sales are skyrocketing. The New York City government is burying people in mass graves. Instead of fearing the Trump administration’s authoritarianism, many liberals seem worried the government isn’t authoritarian enough to face the crisis. We’re all preppers now.
O’Connell’s first book, To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, looked at the Silicon Valley tech barons attempting to buy immortality. The subject of his second book, the end of the world, follows naturally. Unlike many of the people he profiles, however, O’Connell, a socialist, is motivated less by fear of a pandemic or an Earth-shattering meteor than by his anxiety over climate change. Like all good writers, he decided the best therapy for his “future-dread” was literary confrontation. He offers Notes from an Apocalypse as “a series of perverse pilgrimages, to those places where the shadows of the future fall most darkly across the present.”
These pilgrimages take him to New Zealand, where billionaires such as Peter Thiel have been buying properties where they can ride out global unrest; Chernobyl, which, in recent years, has become a magnet for disaster tourism; a conference in California for the colonization of Mars; South Dakota, to meet a right-wing survivalist selling doomsday bunkers; and the Scottish Highlands, where he does a wilderness meditation program organized by left-wing anarcho-primitivists.
O’Connell focuses much of his critique on the “prepper” subculture, which, in his telling, is right-wing, apocalyptic, and almost entirely white and male. Wraparound sunglasses, he notes, seem to be the prepper’s unofficial tribal badge. “Preppers are not preparing for their fears,” he argues. “They are preparing for their fantasies.” There is significant truth in this, as well as in the related argument that many survivalists are preparing for the crises they want — dramatic, masculine scenarios in which they defend their families against marauding hordes — rather than incremental and less sexy crises such as global warming. It is also undeniable that, as O’Connell argues, a lot of survivalist ideology is tightly wound up with racism and conspiracy theory.
But there are some problems with O’Connell’s critique of preppers. The most obvious is that, as the rest of us fight in Walmarts for toilet paper, preppers look vindicated. The broader problem is that O’Connell tends to treat preppers as monolithic and interchangeable with right-wing survivalists. That characterization doesn’t account for apolitical or left-wing preppers. It is also, in its depiction of preppers as individualistic to the point of psychopathy, incomplete: Some of the preppers I’ve encountered have seemed like neighbors anyone would be lucky to have. And what about groups such as the Mormons, whose prepper ethos is deeply communitarian?
The TV show Doomsday Preppers figures heavily in the book as a primary source, but O’Connell seems unaware that most actual preppers view the show as a caricature, made for entertainment value only, and regard its subjects with the same amused detachment that nonpreppers do.
O’Connell is on stronger ground when wrestling with his familiar adversaries, the futurists and technolibertarians of Silicon Valley. His investigation into the burgeoning space colonization movement is particularly compelling. The reason that people such as Thiel and Elon Musk are so interested in outer space, he argues, is not only self-interest (Mars is Earth’s New Zealand, the ultimate bug-out site) but also ideology: space, for them, is a blank canvas, free of pesky laws and governments and taxes and poor people.
In this respect, of course, self-interest and ideology look suspiciously complementary. The rest of us are doomed to endure whatever ravages the 21st century may bring, such as heat waves, mass migration, deindustrialization, and global inequality, but these billionaires will have their escape pods. The apparent optimism of this “future-nostalgia” — O’Connell’s term for the futurists’ worldview, with its echoes of the Cold War space race and, before that, European imperialism — is actually cynical and deeply fatalistic. Their zeal for colonizing space is an admission they have given up Earth for dead.
Space colonization also raises profound ethical questions, he notes. Permanently settling Mars, for instance, would mean subjecting a generation or more of children to the crippling effects of a new gravity system as well as to intense radiation. The decision to birth and raise children outside Earth is a choice those children won’t have a say in and a crucible they probably wouldn’t choose.
O’Connell is a skillful writer and a nice stylist. Although Notes from an Apocalypse incorporates significant first-person reportage, the book is more a project of cultural criticism than a gonzo dispatch. That’s a mixed blessing; O’Connell’s ruminations can become repetitive and ponderous. Despite its occasional streaks of dry humor, this is a rather morose book with lots of passages such as: “All systems inexorably tend toward total entropy. Ice caps, political orders, ecologies, civilizations, human bodies, the universe itself. In the long run, everything is nothing.”
Not exactly a cheerful thought. Of course, as the star economist of our current crisis, John Maynard Keynes, once said: In the long run, we are all dead.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
