Archetypes for the apocalypse

Zombies really, really freak me out. They’re supposed to, of course, what with the moaning and the brain-eating. And, with escalating climate chaos, the apocalyptic future they often inhabit looks increasingly familiar. You know, the one you’re trying not to think about—superstorms, water and food shortages, mass-migration, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the like. But the root of my fear is neither zombies nor climate change per se.
It isn’t the prospect of being forced to make do with less stuff, less comfort, less coddling. I’m not especially green—I like my fancy (high carbon footprint) coffee and chocolates, unnecessarily-large living space, beach vacations, and so on—but if they go away I doubt it’ll impact my happiness in a meaningful way.
It’s not the injustice of the unequal distribution of suffering that will inevitably come when we start running out of food and water and medicine and power.
Nor is it what will happen to the earth. I love trees and whales and alpine meadows as much as the next guy (born in Berkeley, CA in the early 1970s), and, yes, life is a precious and ineffable miracle, but if a tree dies of aberrant climate-induced parasitism in the forest and no one’s there to see it….
Nope, it turns out what really freaks me out is… you. Specifically, it’s the idea that when our deceptively insecure infrastructure begins to fracture and our social fabric starts to fray, people will become unfeeling, selfish, and dangerous; that community will no longer be viable. In other words, what most scares and upsets me is that too many people will become like zombies. And I’m pretty sure this explains their explosion since the turn of the millennium. They are our deepest fears about each other come to (un)life just when we are forced to begin anticipating an unprecedented challenge to civilization (brought about, I might add, by our own selfish appetites).

I believe these fears are, if not universal, then very widespread and I think it’s worth considering the ways people are dealing with them. Here are a few I can think of:
1. The survivalists
If we’re going to have to compete with each other, why not play to win? We know from The Hunger Games that the winner will be the person who spends all their time with a bow and arrow out in the woods hunting rabbits, right? Not surprisingly there’s an entire subculture (and economy) that’s built up around this idea. The games our children play reflect this cultural fascination with staying alive by skill, parents are sending their kids to camps to prepare (under the warmish, fuzzyish guise of wilderness skills), and of course camouflage has been “on trend” for a while now.

1b. The survival-ish
There are gentler and hipper versions, of course. You can keep bees and raise chickens in your rapidly-gentrifying urban backyard, for example. I’m sure there are lots of valid reasons people do this—those eggs are probably tasty and I hear we need more bees—but I think deep down it’s a way of recasting survivalism as a full-bearded path to a simpler time.
2. The partiers
The aesthetic and attitudinal antithesis to all that drab seriousness is electronic dance culture. If the future seems bleak and there’s nothing you can do about it, why not dress up, take some happy pills, and enjoy the present moment? It’s relatively harmless, with some downright utopian strains, but also with a telltale undercurrent of violence in the music.

3. The deluded
Or we can try to pretend it’s not happening. I definitely understand the desire not to face up to what’s going on—like I said, it freaks me out too—but it’s disheartening to realize that there are people who are still, unbelievably, driving Hummers and muscle cars. Not to mention that in a resource-scarce world what you’d really want is probably something reliable and fuel-efficient. Like a bicycle.

4. The profiteers
I have nothing to say to those who are actively working to maintain an inequitable and unsustainable way of life in order to feed their own greed except to please cut it the fuck out.

OK, so far I’ve been pretty dismissive. What, then, are some positive responses?
5. The activists
Many brave, brilliant, and committed people—activists, scientists, artists, teachers, lawyers, designers, etc.—are fighting to avert impending badness (often, not coincidentally, by trying to fix the badness that’s already here) or at least to make it a little less apocalyptic. These people are heroes.

6. The humanitarians
I realized recently that there’s another way to deal with the situation and it directly confronts the very thing that scares me the most — people losing their humanity. I’ve long thought of charity and other humanitarian aid as at best treating the symptoms of the world’s problems rather than dealing with root causes and at worst enabling injustice by taking the edge off. But I can now see the lasting value in these efforts. By embodying the opposite of zombies — showing kindness, compassion, generosity — we remind each other how to remain human.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still completely freaked out. I still have moments of despair at the world I’ve brought my children into. And I’m still afraid of the zombies in our midst. But it helps that I’ve found a way of directly confronting my personal anxiety and I hope, in a small way, of making the future a little bit brighter and (metaphorically) a whole lot warmer.
