Anticipation Within Apocalypse
Should we now press the alarm button—Greta Thunberg’s “time to panic”—in hopes of cutting through the white noise of climate denialism? Or, to the contrary, should we keep a more positive tone in order to avoid doomsday nihilism? Or neither? Or both? With each new round of “unprecedented” fire or flood, melting or mass migration, we will stretch for language and find the apocalypse—right there where we hope to avoid it.
Catherine Keller: Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances
Can the wétiko sickness be brought to a halt? Labor unions are created and sometimes become corrupt, reform movements appear and then are crushed or subverted, radical parties develop and then create dictatorships, and so on. And the society around us tends to be so mercenary and so superficial that almost every “counter-culture” will become only a new way for the media or the clothing manufacturers to reap profits. And if Yehoshu’a ben Yosef were to return? If he had returned to Europe anywhere from 300 AD to perhaps 1800 AD he would have been very likely burned at the stake. Perhaps he did, and was. As Bonita Calachaw said, “Americans are so narrow at times, that if Jesus was to appear I fear he would find it impossible to pass down the road . . .
Jack D. Forbes: Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terror
“The final blast” by Ashok Boghani
Courtesy of the Creative Commons license. No changes made.
by Christopher Fici, PhD.
The world is ending. The world has ended. How do you feel?
Some of the wisest advice I have heard from elders, mentors, and trusted friends in this time of interruption/transition/contemplation/apocalypse-as-unveiling is the absolute need for humility. All we have are imperfect maps. All we have ever had are imperfect maps. Attempting to love in the time of cholera or corona and whatever is to come next reveals the imperfection of our maps. It reveals the absolute necessity of this imperfection, for in such imperfection, and in the humility it demands, the opening to the next world can be truly anticipated. It is to understand that right now we are living in a Zen koan, which requires a keen sense of beginner’s mind and a devotion to all that is sacred.
Nevertheless apocalypse, either as event or process, is also profoundly terrifying. In revealing the ever-flowing contingency of reality, we are challenged, to the marrow of our spiritual bones, to give up the comforts of our sovereign self. What is our sovereign self? That very self in which, as Krishna explains in the Bhagavad-Gita, “the symptoms of great attachment, fruitive activity, intense endeavor, and uncontrollable desire and hankering develop.” The rampaging sovereign self is both individual and social. The constructive theologian Catherine Keller, in her 2018 book Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public, engages with the German political theorist Carl Schmitt to point out how the binary nature of such sovereignty pits us against each other.
“In his 1927 classic, The Concept of the Political, Schmitt posits that ‘the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.’ Social identity is formed as a unity achieved through conflict. The political ‘we’ in this reduction is produced by a shared antagonism against some Other, some ‘they.’ This is the simplified collectivity of unification, not mere coherence across difference.”
Keller, in her just released work Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances, dares us to consider the experience of apocalypse as that which breaks down and which breaks through “the simplified collectivity of unification.” In Facing Apocalypse she asks of us: “Humans have come out of all balance with each other and with the nonhuman. Has the pandemic pause helped us face this apocalypse? To heed its warning somewhere between the overstated and the unspeakable? ”
Yet we must not do this to celebrate rupture for the sake of rupture. Those on the boot-end of colonization over the last five centuries have gone through and continue to go through multiple interconnected ever-flowing apocalypses. To break apart the sovereign self is not merely to celebrate the sweet taste of anarchy. It is primarily to commit to the sacred work of justice-making.
The work of apocalypse-making must be the work of justice-making as love-making for the beloved communities we must urgently create. The work of apocalypse-making is the work of mindfulness of the precarities and opportunities which open wide before us.
“Apocalypse” by Ashok Boghani
Courtesy of the Creative Commons license. No changes made.
Keller tells us:
“Mindfulness of the apocalypse can keep us from acting it out in private despair or collective inevitability, playing it out subliminally in our economic habits, democratic disarray, and ecological suicide. We have a chance of pausing the self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. And that interruption, prolonged, might prove truer to the original Apocalypse than mere annihilation.”
Perhaps it is the blessing of apocalypse to clearly reveal the infection of wetiko which permeates our consciousness and our commons. The Native American scholar Jack D. Forbes (born of Powhatan-Renape and Lenape ancestry), in his classic book Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terror, describes the wetiko as “a Cree term (windigo in Ojibway, wintiko in Powhatan) which refers to a cannibal or, more specifically, to an evil person or spirit who terrorizes other creatures by means of terrible evil acts, including cannibalism. Wétikowatisewin, an abstract noun, refers to ‘diabolical wickedness or cannibalism.’...Cannibalism, as I define it, is the consuming of another’s life for one’s own private purpose or profit.” In the quote which opens our short essay, Forbes describes the wetiko disease as the corruption of our sincerity, on personal and institutional levels. It is also the profound and deeply-rooted corruption of our theologies, of our fundamental relationship with the Divine. This corruption is so profound that he logically reasons that a returning Jesus Christ would be crucified anew, by his own followers, if he returned to us now to teach again the values and practices of Gospel consciousness.
We need networks of anticipation and the theopoetic art of anticipation to resist the evils of wetiko and to heal the traumas of wetiko. We especially need anticipation and anticipatory communities to create a bulwark against the specific temptations of ecofascism and/or climate totalitarianism. Atomization and alienation which degrade the common good we all depend upon are the breeding ground from which all forms of totalitarianism can emerge. As my favorite Catholic monk, writer, mystic, and activist Thomas Merton wrote in his collection of essays entitled Disputed Questions: “The member of the mass-movement, afraid of his own isolation and his own weakness as an individual, cannot face the task of discovering within himself the spiritual power and integrity which can be called forth only by love.” The anticipator refuses to let her fellow Earthlings remain in this swamp of fear and angst and hatred. She co-creates anticipatory community to provide a haven and a shelter so that each and all can discover within themselves this spiritual power and integrity called forth by love.
“Apocalypse” by Diane MacKillop
Courtesy of the Creative Commons license. No changes made.
This is a love, as the Lutheran ethicist Cynthia Moe-Lobeda argues in her excellent text Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation, which cannot be merely sentimentally oriented primarily to one’s nearest kith and kin. Moe-Lobeda argues that “an adequate theology of love...ensures that even where this intimate and emotional love is not the defining force in one’s relationship with the body politic...This is key. Love must seek structures of justice precisely because it usually is not the primary virtue motivating social relations with the impersonal many.” Such fierce neighbor-love provides a counter-revolutionary weight and balm to the temptations of the atomized and alienated personality to turn towards fascist and totalitarian pathways.