Two concepts of apocalypse and apocalyptic history today

ABSTRACT

An apocalyptic imaginary appears so frequently in debates on climate change and the Anthropocene that it might be considered the dominant historical narrative of our time. However, when dealing with apocalypticism, biblical references are not always appropriate. In this article, I argue that we are dealing with two different concepts of apocalypticism, and that the new apocalyptic history is not a negative version of the religious apocalypse. Second, I also argue that the new apocalyptic history nevertheless seems to revolve around the idea of the promise as a specific historical way of binding the past, present and future into a coherent history that, ironically, seems to open up a dialogue with the history of theology.

KEYWORDS:

• End of the world
• apocalypticism
• eco-catastrophism
• promise
• apocalyptic imaginary
• futures

1. Introduction

Especially among commentators on the Anthropocene, ‘there has been much flirting with apocalypse lately’, François Hartog (2022, xxi, 210) writes in his history of time. Zoltán Boldizsár Simon (2020, 120) confirms this observation and stresses that his theory of unprecedented change and epochal events is not associated with ‘the way medieval Europeans lived in anticipation of the Second Coming and the end times’. Ernst Käsemann’s famous formulation that the ‘apocalyptic was the mother of all Christian theology’ (Käsemann 1969, 102) shows that introducing the term ‘apocalypse’ immediately triggers the debates on secularization and the way the books of Daniel and the Revelation of John have recurred in the works of modern writers.

However, apocalyptic images of an end, imminent or projected far into the future, merit attention also from historians and philosophers of history. Apocalyptic scenarios of the future make up a counter-history opposed to both conventional histories about the future as a time of endless possibilities and risks and contemporary theories of the future in the Anthropocene as a time of unprecedented disruption between the present and the past (Simon and Tamm 2021, 7). No one can deny that apocalyptic images have played an important role in modern history. There has been an unprecedented outpouring, especially in North America, of apocalyptic stories and images in popular culture since 1945, and the production increases the closer we get to our own time, writes Lorenzo DiTommaso (2014, 503). The period between 1914 and 1945 ‘witnessed two catastrophic world wars and the Holocaust, as well as the Great Depression and the 1919 pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide’ but never saw the volume of apocalyptic fiction and discourse that has emerged in the last 50 years. Since apocalypticism sometimes travels incognito under the word catastrophe today, it is urgent to try to get a grip on what is at stake when apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenarios appear in historical writing and imagination.

There are, therefore, a couple of issues that must be addressed. (1) It is not spelled out clearly enough that we are dealing with different concepts of the apocalyptic today and that the new apocalyptic history is not a negative version of religious apocalypses. They are conceptually separated by their relation to the world as habitable space (sections 2–3). (2) The new concept of apocalypse seems to open up for a history of humanity as engaged in an existential project to let the future remain an open space and time. It promises futures in response to the threat of a plurality of endings that will lead to the end of the world. It is, therefore, intimately connected to the ongoing debate about the meaning and value of historical time (sections 4–5).

2. Religious and secular apocalypses

The Greek word apokálypsis means to unveil, disclose, reveal, and since the early nineteenth century an apocalypse is also a specific literary genre. Classical apocalypses had two centres of gravity: either revelations of otherworldliness or the end of history and the end of time (Collins 1979, 16). In narratives focused on the former, mysteries like heaven and hell were revealed to humans. This was the case for an eighteenth-century apocalyptic visionary like Emmanuel Swedenborg, who in enormous tomes told the world of his amazing tours through heaven and hell, guided by angels. Some of these volumes were read by Immanuel Kant, who, rather than revealing otherworldly mysteries, focused on the apocalyptic end of history in its secular form. God’s kingdom was an ethical community, and the course of human history showed the way to its realization.

As a way of understanding the temporal and spatial orientation of human existence, classical apocalypticism starts from the idea that a transcendent reality remains closed to human cognition. However, prophets and seers have the capacity to reveal something of its mysteries. The factual reality in which humans live is de facto constituted by suprahuman forces of good and evil tied up in combat beyond the capacity of human interference. A final showdown between these forces is imminent. Since humans are incapable of changing the outcome of this battle between cosmic forces, they can only prepare themselves for what is to come, especially since the end of time is near. The central component of this kind of apocalypticism is transcendence of the world (Collins 1979, 9). This world will end in calamity and be replaced by a new world in which human life continues in an entirely new shape and according to new rules. Since nothing can prevent the apocalypse, this vision of history is deterministic. In the classical version, the apocalypse is something to hope for since it brings a final judgment and redemption. It also means a complete renunciation of this world.

Catherine Keller, who has long studied apocalyptic thinking, argued 30 years ago that figures from the book of Revelation have infused Western tradition so deeply that it is possible to read the apocalypse as ‘the essential subtext of Western history’. When the apocalypse is seen as cultural heritage from the canonical biblical texts, we are ‘already there, in apocalypse – in its narrative, its aftermath, its compulsion, its hope’. The apocalypse is ‘a script’ we habitually enact whenever we approach an edge, a cutting point, a more-than-everyday threat (Keller 1996, 9, xi, 12–13). As DiTommaso (2014, 479) and many others have shown, this kind of apocalypticism returns in secular form in modernity. In its secular form, apocalyptic transcendence is translated into history as the utopian or dystopian end after a period of conflicts, wars and revolutions that bring either reconciliation or continued suffering in a post-apocalyptic world. In modernity, especially after 1800, this turn toward historical processes caused by human activities marked a fundamental crisis for the idea of otherworldly redemption. In the secular version of apocalypticism, transcending the world means starting over after a climactic ending that upsets the normal and habitual order of life or society.

Especially in academic contexts, the apocalyptic script is a resource still used to make sense of social and natural disasters, and it has become a cultural convention. We see this when Teresa Heffernan, following Frank Kermode’s discussion of the sense of an ending, argues that the apocalypse in modern popular culture became synonymous with catastrophe and that ‘in the history of both its religious and secular usage it is intrinsically linked to the emergence of a better world, to revelation and disclosure’. However, the significance of ‘post-apocalypse’ changes in a secular age, she argues, when religious ideas are thought to belong to the past. In this sense, ‘we live in a time after the apocalypse, after the faith in a radically new world, of revelation and unveiling’ (Heffernan 2008, 6). But this also means that the post-apocalypse is nothing but the negation of the religious apocalyptic. Even those who live after religion are tied to it; the lost faith still haunts the present.

Hartog also seems to suggest that it is the ancient concept that is summoned today. His characterization of the present as an age that suffers from a cultural malaise he calls presentism is but a description of a culture that cannot or dare not focus on the future anymore. The future is threatening, and an ‘apocalyptic effervescence’ sets the mood of Western culture (Hartog 2022, 222). Like Heffernan, he points out that the word ‘apocalypse’ has been inflated and become a shallow synonym for catastrophe and destruction. In a tired culture like the present, vaccinated against futurism, people are stuck in catastrophic thinking without transcendence (Hartog 2014, 32). However, it seems that in the idea of the Anthropocene, Hartog finds a new hope, a new opening for Chronos as an endless future time horizon, which challenges all previous ideas of historical time, including the dismal presentism of our era. Through its vastness alone, geological time might help break the complex time-knot of presentism that inhibits action today. The history of time in the West has shown an ‘ineluctable bond’ between Chronos and the apocalypse. ‘So at a moment when Chronos once more slips between our fingers – more slippery than ever – we can scarcely be surprised that the ancient figure of the apocalypse, ever poised for action, should be summoned, whether explicitly or not, accurately or not, crudely, or crisply. It all happens within a sort of nebulous apocalyptic aura’ (Hartog 2022, 223). Once again, the old figure returns. In Hartog’s reading, the references to apocalypticism in debates on the Anthropocene and climate change and its impact on historical thinking is a recycling of an ancient pattern; theology is activated to understand the present.

An interesting case is Bruno Latour’s apocalypticism. According to him, modernity was a religious epoch. Being modern meant living post-apocalyptically, that is, as if one had already entered a new world. The moderns’ faith in progress, as revealed in history and the entrance into a new epoch, defined by a temporal break between the past and the present, created an era that constantly moved forward towards a better future. Relying on Eric Voegelin’s concept of immantization, which was an aspect of his support of the theory of secularization (see Styfhals, 70–6), Latour describes modern people as both alienated from their surroundings and fully focused on innerworldly welfare. With the Anthropocene, the climate crises, and the ongoing sixth mass extinction of species, our world has mutated. Now it is time to reactivate the apocalypse as an instrument of change. The apocalypse should not be placed behind us (as the entrance into a secular modernity suggests, according to Latour), and it is not waiting ahead of us. We must rather imagine that we are living in it.

[We] have to return to apocalyptic language, we have to become present again to the situation of terrestrial rootedness, and this no longer has anything to do, as you will have understood, with a return to (or respect for) ‘nature’. To become sensitive – that is, to feel our responsibility, and thus to turn back on our own action – we have to position ourselves, through a set of totally artificial steps, as though we were at the End of Time, and thus give Paul’s warning its meaning: ‘ … For this world in its present form is passing away’ (1 Cor. 7:30–31) (Latour 2017, 212–13).

This quotation clearly shows that the activation of the apocalyptic is an instrument for a historical (temporal and spatial) reorientation towards the terrestrial. It is time to recognize, once again, that we are waiting in fear and trembling for a new order to come. When talking about the apocalypse as the end of time, Latour refers to the classical eschatological figure that humans are living just moments before the world will be destroyed and replaced by a new one. Then, the Earthbound will replace the Human. Thus, the classical concept of the apocalypse is reactivated. The fact that Latour directly refers to Paul suggests that he wants to reuse the religious images for theoretical and political purposes in the contemporary crisis. Hartog recognizes this when he calls Latour an unorthodox Christian apocalyptic, formed by Pauline-Augustinean theology. Latour insists that the apocalypse should be thought in its Christian meaning as a transition to the completely new – no longer as Paul’s ’already-not-yet’ but rather as ’already and again’ (Hartog 2022, 224–5). Latour’s apocalypticism thus becomes a version of a secular transcendence. This world, alienated from Gaia, must be changed so that we can enter a new world ruled by other logics, and arguably a better world than the current one. We can become ‘Earthbound’, in a fundamental sense connected to Gaia, the Earth system that reacts to what the human species does.

3. Old and new apocalypticism

In all the examples above, we encounter secular (or secularized) versions of classical apocalypticism. They formulate different versions of the wish or dream of radical change so that a better world can emerge. However, as everyone familiar with apocalypticism in modernity knows, this is not the whole picture. There is another apocalypticism that has nothing to do with transcending the world or entering an ‘afterwards’ where humans rebuild communities and find new ways of survival. Many among those who comment upon the apocalyptic discourse already formulate this concept but never spell it out clearly. For instance, DiTommaso remarks just in passing that today the apocalypse is conflated with the end of the world. The idea of the end of the world has nothing to do with the apocalypse as defined by the ancient sources, he writes (DiTommaso 2014, 478–9). Yet today, when we hear about apocalyptic futures, the end of the world is what seems to be on many people’s minds. Hartog also writes that we are dealing with two concepts of the apocalyptic, but he never takes the final step of actually pronouncing this insight. Instead, he notices that ‘a special version of apocalypse’ emerged after the First World War, one that was ‘stunted and wholly negative’, an apocalypse without rebirth or the new beginning promised by the classical sources. ‘This is apocalypse as cataclysm ending in the extinction of humanity’ (Hartog 2022, 179). However, if this ‘version’ of apocalypse is only a negation, it remains tied to its classical (positive) model. The same interpretation is found in Klaus Vondung’s analyses of modern uses of the idea of the apocalypse as a catch-word for catastrophe (Vondung 2018, 39, 49). He interprets this popular usage of the word apocalypse as a ‘docked’ or cropped (kupiert) apocalypse, a destruction without renewal or rebirth (Vondung 2000, 5; 2018, 27, 31), as if only the first half of the apocalyptic script is used.

I am not sure that this is the right conclusion. It rather seems to me that we are dealing with an entirely different apocalypticism, only superficially related (for instance as a structural similarity) to the biblical sources or by the recycling of images handed down in a predominantly Christian culture. It rather seems that we are dealing with a conceptually distinct apocalypticism because it relies on another understanding of what it means to have a world and live historically – towards an open future that now threatens to close.

Both Hartog and Vondung refer to Günther Anders’ interpretation of the new era inaugurated by the detonations of atomic bombs. After 1945, Anders wrote, an apocalypse of human self-making is a real possibility. We live not at the end of time but at the time of the end, always waiting for what is already here to destroy us. We are thus living in the last age, because beyond this new ending, there are no more worlds in waiting. As an effect of this unprecedented situation, we have become anti-apocalyptics, creatures never seen before. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we exist in an age of respite, of ‘‘not yet being non-existing’’ (Anders 1962, 493). Our collective responsibility is to make sure that time is extended so that the end will not come. The end must synchronize with the present so that it is not waiting ahead of us but is already here as a possibility that we have to be aware of (Anders 1962, 493; see also Palaver 2014, 84–87).

Anders was one of the first authors to formulate what this implied in terms of future threats and expectations. The nuclear disaster was an event that could come because the possibility of its realization was present. I am less convinced than Hartog and Vondung that this is best characterized as a docked version of the classical scheme. What the presence of nuclear arms and their imagined climatic effects in a global war and today’s eco-catastrophism have in common, despite their differences as events, is a concern for the conditions for a habitable world. Just like scenarios of world destruction caused by natural forces, like the theory of global heat death or an asteroid colliding with Earth with devastating effects (exemplified by the extinction of the dinosaurs), nuclear winter and eco-catastrophism are scenarios with the same concern: the disappearance of a habitable world for a dominant species. These scenarios are not, as far as I can tell, an offspring or a negation of the biblical tradition and its hope of rebirth and renewal. In their modern context, they are rather threatening futures based on a specific historicity: that a life lived historically means facing a risky and sometimes unpredictable future. The infinite future offers no hindrances to human progress or human capacity to bring about destruction for themselves. Random events and catastrophes as well as consequences of human actions (intended or unintended) must be handled. Precautionary measures, arts of prognostication, and building institutions that can limit or prevent the most devastating effects of the worst-case scenarios are crucial for a life lived in such circumstances. In such a historicity, where the transition from the past to the present is about learning from disruptions that bring forth something new and experiences that create stability, what is ultimately at stake is the habitable world and the human capacity for self-destruction. This is not about living in hope that the imperfections of the world, if not other means are available, can to be replaced by a new world after the destruction of the old. Living historically within such a framework means eyeing a future perfection or utopia – or dreading such a new situation. In either case, there is still a world in which humans can live (physically or spiritually).

We should at least consider the possibility that we are dealing with another concept of the apocalyptic than the one we have learned to appreciate as a legacy of Christian theologies of history. In order to distinguish the new from the old apocalypticism, and avoid words like ‘negative’ and ‘secular’ apocalypse, which relates it dialectically to a positive (and preferred) model of transcending the world, we can preferably call it end-of-the-world apocalypticism so that is not estranged from popular imagination (for an overview of end-of-the-world theories, see Körtner 1995, 107–94). In the end-of-the-world apocalypticism, the end of the world means that humanity no longer has a place to dwell. Therefore, the world must be preserved as the only place where humans are known to be able to survive. This outlook might not originate in a love of the world, but at least, it recognizes its value for humans. The end is both a projected point in the future and an evaluation of the present world as worth saving.

After Martin Heidegger, world is usually thought of as an existential-ontological concept and as a place of care, since caring decides the temporal sojourn of human beings in the world they have found themselves born into (or thrown into). Caring makes us interested in the present as a time and space to watch over. We must pay attention to signs of imminent change while constantly worrying about tomorrow. Although the Anthropocene has fundamentally changed the meaning of the relationship between the human world and nature than anything Heidegger thought, caring for the world is still crucial in the new state of affairs ‘By destroying the world’, Monika Kaup rightly says (2021, 52), ‘apocalyptic thinking reveals the core essence of the order of the world. It lays bare the constitutive principles of the meaningful world as the space in which humans dwell and understand things, including its social, political, and economic structures’. As Kaup shows, this is a major concern in numerous post-apocalyptic narratives in popular culture today where humans continue to dwell after civilizational breakdown because they still have a world which can support them, albeit in a reduced or altered form. In the new, or other, concept of apocalypticism we encounter today, destruction is about the conditions of there being a world in the first place. After all, the world is no longer, as in Hannah Arendt’s (2018, 126) famous image from the 1950s, that which only creates a protective wall against a surrounding sublime nature. In apocalyptic history today, the concept of world is entangled with the stability and function of the biosphere.

This is not a negation of the classical apocalyptic vision. This is not about transcending this world and entering a better or worse but definitely different one or about recreating civilization after social breakdown. It is about the loss of conditions that make a world for humans to dwell in possible. The new apocalyptic history is about the end of the world in this fundamental sense.

4. New apocalyptic history: an example

An apocalypse is always announced. Some say it will come. The announcement distinguishes an apocalypse from a catastrophe, which is an event or series of occurrences that no one is able to forecast. An apocalypse is therefore nothing completely new; it is not grasped retrospectively but told in advance. Announcing that an apocalyptic end will come or might come is a way to trigger action in the present. Therefore, apocalyptic announcements are always political in the sense that they want to change things or alert people that their lives might not remain the same. And they become historical when the idea of the end is part of the past-present-future nexus.

An illustrative example of this is gleaned among researchers associated with the Stockholm Resilience Center. In their texts, the track leading up to the end displays a variety of temporalities and the end-of-the-world is a plurality of endings that might be prevented by decisive changes in current practices. The historical mission they present for humanity to enter upon is to ensure that the conditions for a habitable world for the human and other species remain. When Johan Rockström et al. (2009) presented the idea of planetary boundaries and a safe operating space for humanity in an article in Nature, later quantified in a study published in Science (Steffens et al. 2015), a history was created that combined the path of human civilization during the Holocene with the dramatic changes of the new period, the Anthropocene (see Steffens et al. 2011). Staying within planetary boundaries is decisive for the stability of the planet and the biosphere and the fate of human civilization going forward. If crucial tipping points are transgressed, increased temperatures will ultimately lead to a state that no human civilization has experienced before. ‘Hothouse Earth is likely to be uncontrollable and dangerous to many, particularly if we transition into it in only a century or two, and it poses severe risks for health, economies, political stability (especially for the most climate vulnerable), and ultimately, the habitability of the planet for humans’ (Steffens et al. 2018, 8256).

This is as close as one gets to an announcement of the end of the known world. If temperatures continue to rise, there will follow not only social and political instability but also an increased risk that the Earth will be an inhospitable place for humans and many other species. This might happen within a few centuries. ‘The planet can cope with this state – it has been there before – but it would crush our civilization and with it any aspiration of good lives for future generations on Earth’ (Rockström and McGaffney 2021, 220–21). If the Earth system reaches tipping points, new diseases affecting plants, animals and humans, droughts and epic floods will result. The deeper into the Anthropocene we step, ‘such apocalyptic floodings becomes increasingly plausible, if not inevitable’ (Rockström and McGaffney 2021, 104).

It is symptomatic that tropes from the Bible, such as Noah and the flood (Rockström and McGaffney, 104) and the four horsemen (Kemp et al. 2022, 6), appear when human societies are affected before the projected end. In this context, however, the tropes support a different concept of the apocalyptic than they once did. Rockström et al. project an end time as a fixed, undesirable future that will come unless we act to prevent it. Thus, the worst scenario is not the end of the world but the situation before it, the multiple endings that people will have to deal with when the biosphere no longer supports human habitation. The end of the world itself, if such a situation is thought in the abstract, is probably not a final cataclysmic event but just a ‘slowing down’ prior to collapse (Kemp et al. 2022, 6). A ‘lexicon for global calamity’ includes unprecedented heat waves, droughts and other extreme weather events, undernutrition and famine, social and political turmoil and conflicts (Kemp et al. 2022, 4, 6). The end of the world might seem like a relief in comparison with this unequally distributed suffering (Folke et al. 2021, 845–47).

In the 1940s, Jacob Taubes (2009, 85–86) wrote that ‘with each new apocalyptic wave a new syntax is created’, which made the old world seem strange to the new. In apocalyptic times, times ‘are truly out of joint’. If we have another concept of apocalypticism at our disposal today, which is not about transcending the world or entering a post-apocalyptic world, but about threats to the world as a human dwelling place, it entails a different understanding of time. Not only can non-linear processes rapidly change the normal course of events, but the ‘unprecedented geological speed’ by which the carbon pulse is measured today, Luke Kemp et al. write, exceeds the levels that triggered earlier mass extinction. The Earth is speeding towards a state that ‘last prevailed in the Early Eocene, reversing 50 million years of cooler climates in the space of two centuries’ (Kemp et al. 2022, 3). Geological time is measured at a historical scale. When geological time moves faster than the time of political change and human history, we know that time is out of joint. It unsettles the meaning of an imminent destruction of the world.

Given the massive interest in multiple temporalities and their entanglements in contemporary historical theory (see Chakrabarty 2018; Jordheim 2022; Simon and Tamm 2023), the plurality of times in contemporary apocalypticism is especially noteworthy. That is also why Jakub Kowalewski’s attempt to make sense of the syntax of apocalyptic time, to borrow Taube’s phrase, is so important. In order to handle the political and moral questions associated with the climate crises and the fate of the human worlds, an apocalyptic vision of the future must start from the idea of multiple and non-simultaneous temporalities, he argues. According to him, the problem haunting eco-catastrophic scenarios today is that they do not consider postcolonial perspectives deeply enough. The climate crises are not an ongoing series of events that humanity faces together but mirror the history of imperialist practices that now create an unequal temporal and spatial distribution of critical events. Inspired by Louis Althusser, he argues that the interconnected but simultaneously dislocated and non-contemporaneous temporalities suggest that ends of worlds happen ‘at different points in each timeline’, although they would all ‘belong together within an apocalyptic historical conjuncture’ that determines their relative position to each other (Kowalewski 2023, 28).

All these temporalities and timescales – from the geological records, the human history of generations and the slowness of politics and economy to the urgency of preventing the crossing of critical thresholds – make up the temporal complexity of the contemporary moment. The apocalypse will not be one singular, sudden event but will consist in plural endings, unevenly distributed spatially and temporally. This is what Eva Horn (2018, 13) meant when she spoke of the peculiarity of climate change as a catastrophe without event. And the current dilemma in the particular historical conjuncture we are in today, is, of course, how the entangled temporalities obstruct the prevention of the imagined endings by being out of sync. That is the new normal in an apocalyptic history today. It is therefore not a paradox that even though the future has been vastly extended by the sheer amount of geological time that lies ahead of us – which ought to make the idea of an imminent apocalypse less convincing – there is a sense of alarm. Change is too slow, and time is running out. As we saw above, the world might transform into hothouse conditions in only a century or two. From a human perspective, the final end might be far off chronologically speaking, but it is there, looming on the horizon, and must be postponed, pushed further into the future. And it looms there because of past actions that human civilizations will have to catch up with.

Since inaction breeds calamity in modern visions of the future (Horn 2018, 8), passivity, especially among the richest of the human islands, will bring convulsions, suffering and turmoil. This shows the difference between the new apocalypticism and the old. In the old apocalypticism, the apocalyptic revolutionary thinks the current state of affairs is not worth saving, and welcomes destruction. Those who want to restrain the apocalypse and save the world from destruction (and the new state that will follow afterwards) will have to make sure that existing institutions prevent it from happening. In the new apocalypticism, the situation is reversed. Preventing the ends demands radical changes in energy systems, agriculture and ordinary people’s behavior. Revolutionary measures work to preserve a world worth saving because it is the only world available to human beings as we know them. Therefore, I think Delf Rothe both has a point and misses the target when he reads a theological script into the debate on climate catastrophe. In his interpretation, Rockström et al. become secular representatives of an eschatological vision that includes the katéchon, the thing or person that according to 2 Thess. 2:5–7 contains both the destruction of the world and also its transcendence (Rothe 2020, 152–3). However, the apocalypticism that Rockström et al.’s texts present is not about passing from one state to another, as if human beings can enter a new and different world after the end, but about the conditions for the existence of a habitable world. Their undeniably revolutionary demands for political, social and economic reorientation suggest what measures are needed to hold the biosphere in a balanced state. It is, if you will, political realism. Theirs is a future where generations to come can live relatively comfortable and healthy lives, ‘develop and thrive’. However, such a vision cannot be upheld unless there is ‘a safe and just planetary operating space’ (Steffens et al. 2015, 737, 745).

This demand for (radical) action to preserve the world also reads as a rebuke to those who think apocalyptic visions paralyze political action. ‘The apocalypse is an unstable, unbearable position that might be conceptually appealing but not practically endurable’, Willem Styfhals writes apropos Hans Blumenberg’s critical perspective on the political relevance of apocalyptic imaginaries. Although apocalyptic tropes allow us to look at the world from another perspective and liberate us from the grip of old realities, it is illusory to believe that such imaginaries will provide stability and duration. ‘The apocalypse always has to be pushed further into the future or indeed back into the past to make it compatible with the continuation of the world. The eschatological worldlessness as such is incompatible with a continued existence in this world. Therefore, it cannot give rise to a worldly political programme’ (Styfhals 2022, 77). That might be the case in the old apocalypticism, but not in the new. Inaction will lead to the end of the world.

5. The promise of history renewed

Even if worst-case scenarios are imaginary and speak to our worst fears, planning ahead and taking precautionary action is a rational approach to an unknown future. Prevention became a major aspect of the modern way of handling the threat of future catastrophes, although it often turned out to be a failure. Thus, there is a need for fictions and narratives of end-game scenarios. They turn the future into ‘a field of action’, as Jenny Andersson points out (2021, 24), a terrain already ‘marked by various ways of foreclosure’. As attempts to incite action, they are also narratives of hope that things will and can be solved. However, if the future ahead of us is open and to some extent plannable but always unpredictable, as modernity held, this openness is radically different today. End-of-the-world-apocalypticism challenges the historical time of modernity. The modern idea of historical time presented the future as a space for projects and discoveries. The future was a new and foreign land of yet-unknown resources for human civilization and individuals to explore. The idea that ‘History’ progresses towards an open future where human civilization will be materially and intellectually richer than before has few defenders today, although it has not disappeared among the times in use for interpreting human temporality (Simon and Tamm 2023, 9–18). Especially in the Anthropocene, this vision of history is untenable since the climate change situation is the very outcome of the capitalistic consumerism and exploitation it supports (see Gregory 2023). The new historicity that starts from the plurality of times is full of debts and haunting presences from the past that set limits for future explorations. Today, the future is mortgaged by the history of human civilization. We are, the argument goes, in debt to the future because human civilization has already used up so much of the Earth’s resources and changed the conditions for biosphere integrity and regularity (see Ekström 2022, 324–5). In this situation, an idea of history must handle the tension between the threat of multiple endings, which have already started to happen, and the hope that the future will remain open.

This is where the old figure of the promise returns. As Horn (2018, 174) rightly describes the situation after the demise of historical time as progressively moving towards better futures, ‘the future is no longer a promise, but a threat, the “end of the world as we know it”’. Still, the promise is remarkably central in today’s apocalyptic histories, just like they were in secular histories of the kind mentioned by Horn, and still are in religious apocalypses where the end of the world is promised by God (see Folger 2022). What the promise revolves around is the vision of openness, of preventing the closure of the future. The promise to keep the future open is a direct response to the threat of apocalyptic endings that will destroy the conditions of a livable world.

This is evident in the intergenerational political-moral project of planetary or biosphere stewardship, as promoted by Rockström and other scientists. This is not only about governing and control; it is also a historical project to be worked on for generations to come. Planetary or biosphere stewardship is about ‘changing the course of history into sustainable pathways’ that will give humanity a safe space for millennia to come (Folke et al. 2021, 858). That includes changes to the energy system that cuts emissions, transformation of forestry and agriculture so that these sectors can become greenhouse gas sinks, and reconceptualization of the relationship to the environment. Planetary stewardship demands global attention to ‘managing nature actively to promote multigenerational human wellbeing’ (Rockström et al. 2021, 2). It is based on care and the ‘cultivation of a sense of belonging in the biosphere’ (Folke et al. 2021, 853). It is a bit unclear how Rockström and others think this stewardship should be organized institutionally, but regardless of the form, the stewardship is a kind of contractualism. It starts from the recognition that the future is not an open space and time but already mortgaged by past and present human actions. In order to be efficient, planetary stewardship must reach beyond current parliaments’ willingness to live up to accords on emissions and protection of critical biomeres. Despite Rockström’s quip that ‘time is not on our side’ (Rockström et al. 2021, 4), this kind of stewardship model implies a historical binding where the past (what has been agreed upon) must be remembered forward and recognized as legitimate by yet-to-be-born individuals who must be willing to honour a commitment they have not signed. In other words, there has to be a history of a promise, upheld by institutional structures such as historians, that supports the intergenerational agreement by reminding of its presence as an ongoing commitment. Such a binding commitment is about freedom; ‘as long as the thresholds are not crossed, humanity has the freedom to pursue long-term social and economic development’ (Rockström et al. 2009, 475). This is a vision of a historical time of entangled temporalities that also includes the risk of temporal endings, but that still offers an open future. If the promise is kept.

Although there is no space left to go into this problem any closer here, the message is that humanity has a responsibility for the world beyond the present. Although none of the authors above intend to formulate a philosophy of history, what they present is a vision of history for an end-of-the-world apocalypticism. This apocalyptic history is about conflicts of interests, about the choices people from many different places around the globe will have to make, both in the near future (the next few years) and in the long term (for generations to come) in dialogue with what we know of the temporalities of the biosphere and the Earth system. As history, end-of-the-world apocalypse promises that the images of fearsome struggles in a world that becomes more and more inhospitable must not prevent politics. The whole point is rather that the freedom of the foreigners who come after us to change their world and live their lives differently if they so wish must not be restricted by our inability to ensure a safe dwelling place for human beings. This makes apocalypticism not only prophylactic or an imaginary we use in order to be wrong (Anders 1972, 197; Latour 2017, 217; McQueen 2018, 187, 195), but part of a historical project where each generation can evaluate what has been done to maintain ‘a safe operating space’ for action. Although this history faces the threat of utopianism, as if all of humanity have the same interest of preserving the world and agree on the value of freedom, this is a central aspect of the history and politics of the climate crisis today (Nordblad 2021, 343), and it seems to me that it plays an important role in end-of-the-world apocalypticism as well.

6. Conclusion

If narratives of imminent or immanent endings of the world are dominant scripts in the debate on the Anthropocene and the climate crises, those who are interested in how history orients human beings temporally ought to discuss the conceptual frames of such narratives. As is apparent from the examples above, it is not enough to study the use of apocalyptic images borrowed from the tradition of Enoch, Daniel or the book of Revelation, or adopt theological concepts as interpretative grids through which to read contemporary positions as if they are secular versions of ancient patterns of thought. The conceptual structure of contemporary apocalypticism should be discussed as a narrative in which human civilization and the biosphere are intertwined into a history of promise. In this apocalyptic history, the end of the world is not a transition to a new, post-apocalyptic state where human beings continue to live under vastly different conditions, but the disappearance of a world in which humans can dwell. Since the message of the new apocalypticism is that human existence is not necessary to either the biosphere or the Earth, human beings will have to preserve the world by caring for the relative stability of the biosphere that their world depends on. If we only think about apocalypticism from the matrix of the history of theology and its rich arsenal of images and interpretative concepts, we misunderstand the complex and challenging apocalyptic history that many people believe they live in today.

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Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by At the End of the World: A Transdisciplinary Approach to the Apocalyptic Imaginary in the Past and Present, a research program funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (M–22–0018). Open access funded by Uppsala University.

Notes on contributors

Torbjörn Gustafsson Chorell

Torbjörn Gustafsson Chorell is professor at the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University. Specializing in modern intellectual history, his publications include topics in historical theory and philosophy of history. He is a member of the research program At the End of The World and studies the way apocalyptic imaginaries are related to ideas of history and historical time.