The Light We Carry With Us: Part II

(Read Part I here.)

Globalization and Thinking the End of the World

Theorists often point to World War II as marking the death of our belief in a utopian future—a sharp cutting-off point between the young days of the earth, and a sort of grim second life for humanity defined by postmodern ideology which itself is (post) apocalyptic. M. Keith Booker identifies “a loss of utopian vision [which] can also be associated with the social, psychic, and cultural fragmentation that Jameson and others have association with postmodernism” (5). And James Berger goes so far as to position the second half of the century as a sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland, wherein the looming specter of nuclear holocaust, and the concept, and vision of holocaust itself, has created a new era defined by dystopian, apocalyptic, and post-apocalyptic fears (Berger xiii). In short, the “senses of the end of this or that,” which Frederic Jameson links so closely to a cultural logic of late capitalism, have become dominant. And this equation is traceable to a point. However, while the post-trauma that rocked the human psyche in the aftermath of near-nuclear world war has had a tremendous shaping influence on the past half-century, I’d like to be done with posts- in general, which seem to me to be easy enough to remove from the conversation without encountering a lack of things to say. Instead, I would like to point to the onset of globalization as having been much more significant in the development of a fascination with public apocalypse, the fear of nuclear war a symptom of a larger new consciousness at play which has far more to do with the evolution of apocalyptic fears than with those goons of postmodernity, capitalism and technology. It is the happening of globalization itself, rather than, say, the writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard, which has propelled the discourse of fragmentation, heterogeneity of culture and experience which has exploded grand narratives and called objectivity into question, and simultaneously, it is the dialectically opposite fact of the world as a single place, and humanity as a single, invested species, which sets the stage for what comes after.

While post-thinking has been an interesting foray into wrapping our critical noggins around the changes wrought by globalization over the course of recent decades, it is perhaps not a useful enough tool to carry us forward. If we are as plagued by fears of a public, collective end to our world as cultural currents would seem to indicate, then we are, paradoxically, parts of a whole that is fragmented, a subjectivity that has become objectivized, and more concretely, a commodification of history and culture spurred by a capitalist ideology that in the very violence of what David Harvey calls “time-space compression” has actually brought us—us people on the planet—closer together. The fact that, as Harvey puts it, “money and commodities are themselves the primary bearers of cultural codes” (111) has served to make the transmission of those codes more accessible. While post-thinking is right to fear the culturally homogenizing effects of global capitalism, this increased accessibility may be fundamental to a new conception of humanism. We may be different, but we are all inextricably connected now, and this connection, inevitably, ups the stakes of the human project, and demands critical and discursive tools that not only frame the present, but prepare us for the future.

It’s no coincidence that a growing sense of our connectivity as a global culture should come hand-in-hand with an increased apprehension of the future. Following Frederic Jameson’s sense of the abandonment of “thinking of future change to fantasies of sheer catastrophe and inexplicable cataclysm” (46), Harvey links postmodernity and capitalist culture to a “loss of a sense of the future except and insofar as the future can be discounted into the present” (104). However, other theorists posit that we are more aware of the future now than ever before. Following economist Robert L. Heilbroner’s thesis in Visions of the Future, Nick Bostrom argues that since World War II, conceptions of the future have changed to take into account how rapidly technology is altering our understanding of and engagement with the world. Replacing the industrial revolution-era belief that the future was predictable and controllable is the sense of a rapidly changing present poised to bring about dramatic, frightening, and abrupt future shifts that are difficult to anticipate (Bostrom 7). I find this latter theory on technologized society’s engagement with the future more intriguing than Jameson or Harvey’s. While our awareness of the planet as a single place has been defined by the disorienting and compressing realities of technology-driven warfare and capitalism, a newly growing concept of humanism, situated in a global context, is also developing, and it is from this reality that the true depths of a future-focused apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic contemplation springs. The more we learn about the world around us, the more humanity—and the planet itself—becomes a project that we are all working on. Concomitantly, the idea that the whole world could end before we’re finished said project gains substance, solidifies, not only with a study of the future, of extinction risk, of technology, of transhumanism, but through the stories we tell about how it might be if the world were to end, and then, what would become of our families, this planet, all these humans? What would become of us?

It is in this contemplation of us—an us that has the potential to comprise every person on the planet—that postmodernism becomes not so much a cultural dominant as a transitory phase between what came before and what comes next—a placeholder as the world scrambles to adjust to a new global consciousness. If there can be an us, if there is some sort of great and unified human project, then maybe, we think, we can be saved. We can avoid the fire and brimstone, the nuclear bomb, or the environmental cataclysm, the alternative too terrible to contemplate, except, of course, that we do contemplate it. Ever since before Euripides took every single thing there was to take from Medea, and simultaneously turned her into something other than human, we’ve been contemplating it. The only difference now, with the onset of globalization, is that we’ve been slapped in the face by the outer extremes and inner reaches of humanity, and now we can imagine what it would be like to lose not only our own, but every last shred of it.

(Go to Part III.)