- LAUREN BERLANT CRUEL OPTIMISM AND NEW YORKER ARTICLE MOVIE
- LAUREN BERLANT CRUEL OPTIMISM AND NEW YORKER ARTICLE FULL
Indigenous scholars and activists have long shown us, through actions and words, that other ways and worlds are possible. Whether it is embedded immutably in universal law, Homo sapiens DNA, or is simply one tendency among many that finds expression when conditions allow it, our kind’s penchant for needless killing, cruelty, hoarding and other vicious acts in the interest of self-service has been a central concern for almost every major system of thought in every era. Both works ask the questions: What might the costs of survival be, and whom amongst us might achieve it?
If that seems grim, consider another sci-fi take: Chinese author Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy explores “dark forest theory,” which postulates that any civilization, upon the realization that another exists, is bound to respond by attempting total annihilation or subordination of the other, lest it be destroyed or enslaved first. In Butler’s novel this contradiction is discovered by gene-manipulating aliens who save the last of our species, cure us of cancer - and then, due to our apparent inability to refrain from the eventual self-destruction that is the hierarchy’s inevitable outcome, preemptively absorb and re-mash us. Science fiction writer Octavia Butler, whose work interrogates power, survival and the limits of the human, named in her Xenogenesis trilogy Homo sapiens’ apparently fatal central contradiction: intelligence and hierarchy.
LAUREN BERLANT CRUEL OPTIMISM AND NEW YORKER ARTICLE FULL
Is this, then, the full spectrum from which we might choose our teams for the apocalypse, comprised of preppers, nihilists, technocrats, eugenicists and denialists? Meanwhile, unsurprisingly, social Darwinistic arrogance has inspired those wealthy enough to contemplate pursuing cartoon-evil-villain survival strategies for themselves are unabashedly doing just that, as exemplified by Elon Musk and various zillionaire preppers who’ve fled for New Zealand or custom built bunkers. People nonetheless remain attached to that desire, which becomes an obstacle to their flourishing. Scholar Lauren Berlant termed the term “cruel optimism” to describe the way that post-WWII, US liberal-capitalism promised “the good life” in the forms of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality - and even while it consistently fails to deliver on those promises.
LAUREN BERLANT CRUEL OPTIMISM AND NEW YORKER ARTICLE MOVIE
There’s hopelessness, and hope - both artifacts of the habit of feeling and acting like the lead character in the fictionalized movie that is life. And that’s just the US.Īs the nation’s birth rate plummets to an all-time low, we may wonder if we should mourn or celebrate.
What possibly are we to do here in our new normal, where seasonally orange skies rain ash from burnt forests, flash floods murder us in our homes, a deadly virus mutates, thanks to the proliferation of fake news and inequality comparable to that of pre-revolution France in 1788? All this layered upon a violent, continued and expanded police occupation of economically abandoned communities of color and the ongoing exoneration of white vigilantes.
It is a story of Western civilization, of other empires, of tyranny and tyrants and massacres and plagues.įor artists and storytellers, what can be made of apocalypse? Apocalypse is a persistent fear-fantasy of Western civilization even now as we teeter at the edge of what may be the end of the Anthropocene. Ultimately, apocalypse is a story that we all already know. Maybe it’s a haunting, a reminder to those who have forgotten, that every empire falls. Maybe our collective desire for and fascination with apocalypse is, for some, a reasonable and relatable desire to leave behind all the trappings of a particularly brutal last 500 years, give or take. For this reason, leftists and religious devotees alike have long been enraptured by apocalyptic potentiality. But at the heart of the draw to the apocalypse, a rupture, a break, an end, is also a yearning for a beginning, a reboot, transformation. Apocalypse thinking may seem passive, and perhaps it is.
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