VARIATIONS ON APOCALYPSE / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

George Friedman's Thoughts: Variations on Apocalypse

By: George Friedman


I have been thinking and writing about the coronavirus in China. In general, I’ve focused on its geopolitical aspect, on its effect on Chinese national power.

But there is something more interesting going on. What is most fascinating about the coronavirus is how it has gripped the imagination of the world.

It has been given a power beyond what it appears to have. In the simplest sense, it appears to be just another of the sort of disease that has troubled humanity since the beginning. But there is a deeper sense in which it has gripped us. It brings with it a hint of the apocalypse, the disease that brings with it the end time, annihilating all that is in an orgy of cleansing death.

The Black Death, the gold standard of apocalyptic disease, originated in Asia. It is said that a trading ship landed at Messina in the 13th century, carrying with it an illness that killed 30 percent of the population of Europe, with life ending in horrid sores and fevers. It was a killing simultaneously awful and utterly efficient.

The annihilation was fearsome, and reasonable people believed that this was the end of humanity. They also sought meaning in that end, some reason for God’s wrath, some sin that had been committed to cause humanity to deserve this end.

They sought meaning in their failure to please a jealous God. That the apocalypse was nigh was clear to them. What they hungered for was not life, but an explanation of what they had done to deserve this. What accompanied preparation for the apocalypse was ruthless self-flagellation for what they had brought on themselves. Indeed, they had brought it on, by allowing rats to roam free and not bathing. But they didn’t know that; they sought a meaning more profound.

Today, we are more enlightened. We do not blame God but the government. Some claim that the novel coronavirus, which the World Health Organization has named COVID-19, is far more murderous than it appears, with the political authorities hiding the truth. Some say that it was caused by foreign countries waging biological war.

But all look to the modern God, the state, some state, or any state, to hold responsible. Someone, somewhere failed to detect and stop the virus in time. As with the Black Death, the idea that diseases come on their own schedule and leave in unpredictable ways is rejected.

What differs is that those who dread the virus don’t blame their own sins in the face of God, but blame the contemporary God, the state, for not protecting them.

The Black Death was worse than the coronavirus. What binds them together is the conviction that in some way they threaten our very existence, that greater powers that were supposed to protect humanity commanded the virus into being. It could have been God; it could have been a scientist.

That the Europeans so many centuries ago blamed their own sins while we moderns blame others is interesting to consider, but more important perhaps is a consideration of the fascination we humans have with the apocalypse.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s there was an intense belief held by the best minds that humanity was on the eve of destruction. Rock music was written with this title. The cause of this catastrophe was overpopulation. By 1970, the Club of Rome, a highly respected gathering of the best and brightest, said the world would no longer be able to feed itself and would be running out of natural resources.

Unless humanity repented of the sin of reproduction, it would annihilate itself. This was a belief that could not be challenged, and those who said not only that it was untrue but that the birthrate would soon plummet were dismissed. The coming apocalypse was written in stone, and those who would challenge it either were mad or would profit from the apocalypse.

What always struck me about this, and virtually every class I took included at least one lecture on this, was that those who argued the apocalyptic view were not actually frightened by it. They loved the role of Jeremiah. They awaited it with the faith of the righteous and, I suspect, were looking forward to the last moment, when they could scream, “I told you so.”

Now, if you expect me to discuss global warming here, not a chance. I learned in the 1960s not to get involved with religious wars. But not only would the population bomb, as it was called, destroy us, but each of us who reproduced would be responsible for that destruction.

The first story of the apocalypse that I know of was the story of Noah. The world had displeased God by its corruption, and God had decided that his creation had to be annihilated.

But God saw virtue in Noah, who built an ark on which he loaded all the animals of the world (don’t ask me about hygiene, this is a metaphor) and his children, and God unleashed a storm that wiped out all other living things. The waters then receded, and Noah refounded humanity.

The story of Noah places the blame directly on humans and says that sin demanded a cleansing of the Earth. It is the theme of cleansing that I think is always embedded in the idea of apocalypse.

The Black Death demanded that Europe cleanse itself, and moral cleansing ended the plague, so they thought. The population bomb demanded an end to reckless and heedless fornication, a remarkably religious dimension to a secular global apocalypse.

The notion that apocalypse originates in vileness and can be ended only by reform and denial of sins is at the root of this mode of thought.

But also at its root is not only the imposition of virtue but also a fascination with the apocalypse and even a yearning for it. These can be grand apocalypses such as those that Christianity promises, or generational apocalypses that Judaism speaks of when it says that in every generation they shall come to kill us.

Both sorts of apocalypse, grand and petty, are filled with dread and with hope. They are also filled with anticipation. I think it is a weariness with the prosaic, a dream of the heroic, and a hope for something more worthy of life for those who are redeemed or survive.

We are fascinated by the coronavirus not only because of its prosaic meaning (another decade, another virus) but also because it has a promise of vastness and that, in the end, we will discover the sins and sinners who allowed it to happen. And because deep in our imaginations, Noah lurks, and we dream of a cleansing of the world and having the privilege to remake it in our own image. It is a small thing with the coronavirus, but Noah’s dream lurks.

There is now a genre of science fiction called “post-apocalyptic” in which humanity is virtually wiped out by something or other, and one or a handful of people struggle to survive and rebuild. The world is filled with evil, be it gods or Martians, but it will be redeemed by them.

What is clear is that the authors, usually quite good, have a longing for the apocalypse, and the best clearly imagine themselves fleeing in rags, turning and reclaiming the world for humans.

Anything that brings a modern dream of the apocalypse with Noah’s is clearly pointing toward something important. We humans hate and long for the apocalypse, and for the cleansing it will bring and the manner in which we will be elevated above all by surviving.

As I said, the coronavirus doesn’t rise to these heights, but the people commenting on it sometimes do.

The fear that this is the big one is coupled with the slight thrill that it just may be.