By Tyler Austin Harper, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College
“Do you think we’ll need to buy guns?” The student’s question seemed to drop the temperature in the room by several degrees. I was at a dinner with fellow academics, a few college students and a guest speaker who had just delivered an inspiring talk about climate justice.
Sensing confusion, the student clarified: Planetary catastrophe was inevitable in the near term, which means people would soon be living behind walled communities. Since Republicans would be armed, she said, she just wanted to know how to keep the people she cared about safe. The guest speaker took a moment to process this information, then suggested that the student worry more about growing vegetables than about buying guns.
That conversation has stuck with me over the years not because the student’s views were unusual but because they’ve become commonplace. The literary scholar Paul Saint-Amour has described the expectation of apocalypse — the sense that all history’s catastrophes and geopolitical traumas are leading us to “the prospect of an even more devastating futurity” — as the quintessential modern attitude. It’s visible everywhere in what has come to be known as the polycrisis.
Climate anxiety, of the sort expressed by that student, is driving new fields in psychology, experimental therapies and debates about what a recent New Yorker article called “the morality of having kids in a burning, drowning world.” Our public health infrastructure groans under the weight of a lingering pandemic while we are told to expect worse contagions to come. The near coup at OpenAI, which resulted at least in part from a dispute about whether artificial intelligence could soon threaten humanity with extinction, is only the latest example of our ballooning angst about technology overtaking us.
Meanwhile, some experts are warning of imminent population collapse. Elon Musk, who donated $10 million to researchers studying fertility and population decline, called it “a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” Politicians on both sides of the aisle speak openly about the possibility that conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East could spark World War III. Donald Trump has made “the N-word” — he hastens to specify “the nuclear word” — a talking point at his rallies. The conviction that the human species could be on its way out, extinguished by our own selfishness and violence, may well be the last bipartisan impulse.
In a certain sense, none of this is new. Apocalyptic anxieties are a mainstay of human culture. But they are not a constant. In response to rapid changes in science, technology and geopolitics, they tend to spike into brief but intense extinction panics — periods of acute pessimism about humanity’s future — before quieting again as those developments are metabolized. These days, it can feel as though the existential challenges humanity faces are unprecedented. But a major extinction panic happened 100 years ago, and the similarities are unnerving.
The 1920s were also a period when the public — traumatized by a recent pandemic, a devastating world war and startling technological developments — was gripped by the conviction that humanity might soon shuffle off this mortal coil.
Understanding the extinction panic of the 1920s is useful to understanding our tumultuous 2020s and the gloomy mood that pervades the decade.
Hearing that historical echo doesn’t mean that today’s fears have no basis. Rather, it is crucial to helping us blow away the smoke of age-old alarmism from the very real fires that threaten our civilization. It also helps us see how apocalyptic fears feed off the idea that people are inherently violent, self-interested and hierarchical and that survival is a zero-sum war over resources. That suite of ideas is traditionally associated with political conservatism, though it can apply as easily to left-wing climate doom as to right-wing survivalist ideology. Either way, it’s a cynical view that encourages us to take our demise as a foregone conclusion.
What makes an extinction panic a panic is the conviction that humanity is flawed and beyond redemption, destined to die at its own hand, the tragic hero of a terrestrial pageant for whom only one final act is possible. The irony, of course, is that this cynicism — and the unfettered individualism that is its handmaiden — greases the skids to calamity. After all, why bother fighting for change or survival if you believe that self-destruction is hard-wired into humanity? What the history of prior extinction panics has to teach us is that this pessimism is both politically questionable and questionably productive. Our survival will depend on our ability to recognize and reject the nihilistic appraisals of humanity that inflect our fears for the future, both left and right.
As a scholar who researches the history of Western fears about human extinction, I’m often asked how I avoid sinking into despair. My answer is always that learning about the history of extinction panics is actually liberating, even a cause for optimism. Some of these earlier panics were caused by faulty, misinterpreted or creatively applied scientific developments. New paleontological and geological theories stoked a rash of extinction discourse in early-19th-century England, for example, and experts ginned up fears of famine and population explosion in the 1960s and ’70s. Other moments of paranoia, like the various spasms of nuclear-induced distress during the Cold War, were grounded in all-too-real threats. Nearly every generation has thought its generation was to be the last, and yet the human species has persisted. As a character in Jeanette Winterson’s novel “The Stone Gods” says, “History is not a suicide note — it is a record of our survival.”
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Contrary to the folk wisdom that insists the years immediately after World War I were a period of good times and exuberance, dark clouds often hung over the 1920s. The dread of impending disaster — from another world war, the supposed corruption of racial purity and the prospect of automated labor — saturated the period just as much as the bacchanals and black market booze for which it is infamous. The ’20s were indeed roaring, but they were also reeling. And the figures articulating the doom were far from fringe.
On Oct. 30, 1924 — top hat in hand, sporting the dour, bulldog grimace for which he was well known — Winston Churchill stood on a spartan stage, peering over the shoulder of a man holding a newspaper that announced Churchill’s return to Parliament. He won the Epping seat the day before, after two years out of Parliament. The dapper clothes of the assembled politicians and his wife in heels and furs were almost comically incongruous with their setting: a drab building with dirty windows and stained corrugated siding. It was a fitting metaphor for both the decade and for the future prime minister’s mood. Churchill was feeling pessimistic.
The previous year saw the publication of the first of several installments of what many would come to consider his finest literary achievement, “The World Crisis,” a grim retrospective of World War I that laid out, as Churchill put it, the “milestones to Armageddon.” In September1924, one month before his Epping election, two other notable events in Churchill’s intellectual life — one major, one minor — offered signs of his growing gloominess. The major event was his decision to run for Parliament as a constitutionalist with Conservative Party support, marking the end of his long affiliation with the Liberal Party and the beginning of a further rightward drift. The minor event was the publication of a bleak essay that argued new war machines may soon wipe out our species.
Bluntly titled “Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” the essay offered a dismal appraisal of humanity’s prospects. “Certain somber facts emerge solid, inexorable, like the shapes of mountains from drifting mist,” Churchill wrote. “Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination.”
In an eerie foreshadowing of atomic weapons, he went on to ask, “Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings — nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?” He concluded the essay by asserting that the war that had just consumed Europe might be “but a pale preliminary” of the horrors to come.
That Churchill had human extinction on his mind at the same time that he was contemplating the Conservative Party’s offer may or may not be an accident of biography and history, but it is telling all the same. The essay — with its declaration that “the story of the human race is war” and its dismay at “the march of science unfolding ever more appalling possibilities” — is filled with right-wing pathos and holds out little hope that mankind might possess the wisdom to outrun the reaper. This fatalistic assessment was shared by many, including those well to Churchill’s left.
Around the same time that Churchill foretold the coming of “means of destruction incalculable in their effects,” the science fiction novelist H.G. Wells, who in his era was also famous for socialist political commentary, expressed the same doleful outlook. Writing from Easton Glebe, his sprawling, ruddy-bricked Georgian home on an equally sprawling estate, the writer applied himself to the dark art of prophecy. When he was not playing with toy soldiers in the verdant garden or, on rainy days, teaching eminent guests the barn game — by all accounts, a pleasant diversion that involved a large ball and an ever-changing set of rules — Wells was busy contemplating the rather less merry prospect of human extinction.
“Are not we and they and all the race still just as much adrift in the current of circumstances as we were before 1914?” he wondered. Wells predicted that our inability to learn from the mistakes of the Great War would “carry our race on surely and inexorably to fresh wars, to shortages, hunger, miseries and social debacles, at last either to complete extinction or to a degradation beyond our present understanding.” Humanity, the don of sci-fi correctly surmised, was rushing headlong into a “scientific war” that would “make the biggest bombs of 1918 seem like little crackers.”
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