Apocalypse Now/Soon/Never! Delete as appropriate — non-fiction apoca-lit reviewed

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Curious

7 min readOct 8, 2020

Some really brilliant books have been published already in 2020. I am thinking of Stephanie Kelton’s Deficit Myth and Zachary Carter’s Price of Piece, a bio of John Maynard Keynes. In the coming weeks, I am going to publish a few posts reviewing some of these. I’ll try to organize it around a few themes: apocalyptic writing, economic narratives past and future, and polarisation and politics.

The next post will cover economics, including The Deficit Myth, Money for Nothing, Extreme Economics, and Noam Chomsky’s co-authored Climate Crisis and the Green New Deal. But I am quite partial to apocalyptic yarns and will begin with three books that take the apocalypse as the main theme but in very different ways. In Notes from an Apocalypse, Mark O’Connell, an optimistic, funny, thoughtful writer, thinks the smart money is on the apocalypse and introduces us to a collection of oddballs prepping for the end of days. O’Connell senses these people have one thing in common: they never really believed much in the organised society project.

In Precipice, Toby Ord goes several steps further and calculates the chances of apocalypse this century with a neat logic and precision.

And finally Bjorn Lomborg’s False Alarm asks, “What apocalypse?” To be fair, he only explores climate but despite all evidence to the contrary, Lomborg concludes climate change is not particularly serious. And if it turns out to be serious we’ll probably adapt just fine because we will all be rich. He concedes that if he has miscalculated and it gets really bad we can probably handle it with a massive geoengineering effort. By way of example of something really bad he points to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. If that crosses a tipping point and destabilises it will require some sort of emergency action. Unfortunately for Lomborg and everyone else, each day that passes more data streams back from the South Pole that indicates this particular eventuality is already underway. Lomborg is right to rubbish claims that climate change will be the end of humanity, but if we follow his advice we will lose the most valuable of assets for a healthy society and a strong economy: a stable planet.

Rating system: 5 stars = buy it, 1 star = burn it

Notes from an Apocalypse

Mark O’Connell

★★★★★

Mark O’Connell takes us on an odyssey both physical and metaphysical worthy of Homer or James Joyce. This is a journey into the worlds of those preparing for the apocalypse in one way or another. O’Connell senses many of the people who identify as “preppers” never really bought into the idea of organized society in the first place. It is something they have been forced to conform to, whether they like it or not. Their notion of freedom is firmly grounded in self sufficiency.

But this group is quite diverse and entrepreneurial. We meet the real estate developers in Dakota buying and renovating bunkers to allow the wealthy to enjoy the apocalypse in some considerable luxury. We head to the New Zealand South Island where billionaires are buying up vast tracts of land to grow food and eke out a bleak existence with Lord of the Rings DVDs (there will be no streaming services during the apocalypse) until the northern hemisphere becomes hospitable once more. We travel to the Chernobyl exclusion zone to join a tour guide taking a group of apocalypse tourists to see the sights. (The language used here, of “the zone” and “stalkers” is strangely resonant with Tarkovsy’s 1979 film Stalker.)

O’Connell takes us to Pasedena where a group of largely aging white people discuss plans to colonize Mars. The author dwells at some length on European expansionist plans over the previous centuries. America is, after all, built on an expansion myth. But we cannot go any further west. Then where? Like colonialism of old, the colonization of Mars is increasingly being driven by private companies bending the arm of governments when needed. Is Space X the new East India Company? Like America, capitalism is also based on an expansionist narrative. And it is these two big ideas — colonialism and capitalism — that is probably driving the race to Mars now . Noble thoughts of scientific curiosity or creating a multi-planetary species may prove a façade.

Capitalism has bred a new type of libertarian personified by Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and investor in Elon Musk’s business ventures. Thiel is the ultimate Alpha Prepper. Vast tract in NZ: tick. Investment in Mars hardware: tick. O’Connell argues that several billionaires like Thiel have been influenced by a book called the Sovereign Individual: mastering the transition to the digital age published in the late 1990s. I confess I had never heard of it. The book was co-written by William Rees-Mogg, former editor of The Times, and James Dale Davidson. Rees-Mogg is the father of British oddball politician Jacob Rees-Mogg — a Brexit architect. It was largely ignored when first published but has now reached some sort of cult status among libertarians.

The Sovereign Individual’s core thesis is that technology, which libertarian disciples are pumping billions of dollars in to, will bring democracies to their knees. A Guardian summary describes it thus: [The authors] predicted that digital technology would make the world hugely more competitive, unequal and unstable. Societies would splinter. Taxes would be evaded. Government would gradually wither away. “By 2010 or thereabouts,” they wrote, welfare states “will simply become unfinanceable”. In such a harsh world, only the most talented, self-reliant, technologically adept person — “the sovereign individual” — would thrive.”

The Sovereign Individual has attracted a following among Silicon Valley types and paranoid intelligentsia with a misanthropic bent. It seems a bunch of very influential, powerful people are reading it as a prophecy. Instead of actually using their influence to veer off this course these billionaires are in some way fuelling it by promoting their libertarian values, sinking cash into Facebook, and hatching plans to escape to New Zealand, to their own offshore island retreats or to perhaps in a few decades, to Mars.

O‘Connell gently pokes fun at the people he meets but he is rarely if ever harsh. He acknowledges that the smart money is on the apocalypse. We live in a world of worst-case scenarios. He takes us on a brief trip to the Scottish Highlands to attempt to somehow reconnect with the planet. Here in an isolated valley he is forced to contemplate nature in a new way and has an entry-level stoner revelation: everything on Earth is in a constant state of flux, the clouds up above to the vibrating blades of grass. His reflections are annihilated by a screeching fighter jet that screams through the valley.

Towards the end of his odyssey, O’Connell brings us back to Dublin, his home to explore what it means to bring up children on a planet clearly knocked out of whack — the pitter patter of tiny carbon footprints — as he says. I must admit I am going through the same thought process here in Stockholm as my two children, now 11 and 14, try to make sense of the world they are inheriting. I am surprised they are not more traumatised by events, particularly as “apocalypse” is part of my job description in some way. We discuss things openly but perhaps not too openly. For years, come bed time, I would tuck them in with a “science of the day”, often I would talk about the science in my day, the magic of the Earth system, or the diversity of life. Some days though, as ice sheets collapsed, oceans slowed down, and forests burned, I would instead talk about whale fall on the ocean floor or black holes at the centre of distant galaxies.

As the book draws to a close, O’Connell raises Dr Seuss’s The Lorax published in 1971. In one of the best lines of a book with many, many good lines, he describes it as post-apocalyptic fiction for pre-schoolers.

Strange times.

Notes from the Apocalypse: a personal journey to the end of the world and back on Amazon.

The Precipice: existential risk and the future of humanity

Toby Ord

★★★★★

What are the chances of an existential catastrophe either striking humanity, or being sparked by a few of our number, this century? We are talking about a catastrophe so deep and widespread that it ruins humanity’s long-term potential. It turns out it is 1 in 6, according to Toby Ord’s calculations. The biggest risk of a genuine existential catastrophe is probably AI, says Ord from his perch at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. But pandemics and biological weapons are right up there with AI. We may not be taking these threats as seriously as they deserve, warns Ord, pointing out helpfully that the Biological Weapons Convention — a global agreement to protect humanity — has just four employees, and budget smaller than the average turnover of a single McDonald’s restaurant.

Of course we need to be a little cautious about over-emphasizing existential risks at the expense of other risks. Climate change, even on a hothouse Earth trajectory, is probably not an existential risk that could wipe out civilization, but it could dent our potential considerably. Ord’s point, though, is well taken: we should at least raise these issues a little higher on the agenda. Few would quibble with that.

This is a great read and Ord is a wonderful companion on this journey through catastrophic risk.

Ord’s existential risks and their approximate probabilities of whacking civilization this century.