Apocalypse 24/7

The peculiar character of our current impasse is that it is at once unprecedented, obscure, and banal as the weather. We face not a day of reckoning, but Apocalypse 24/7. Not a doomsday you can prep for, hack your way out of, or hide from, but your world dissolving around you. Not something with a beginning and end, but the prelude of a new form of life to come, which those of us alive today will never live to see: a promised land not of milk and honey but fire and flood, veiled in ashes and dust, more felt than seen. From an ecological perspective, we have created a new habitat less hospitable to the large bipedal primate we call Homo sapiens. On the ontological level, we have crossed a threshold into a new environing gestalt yet to coalesce, a new world not yet visible from where we stand. From an existential point of view, we face an impasse we cannot see through or beyond. It’s not too much to say that the end of the world is at this point a given and that the question we face is what sort of world comes next, but as with the world we’re born into, what world comes after we’re gone is not something we get to choose. Our struggle is at once more direct and more obscure: how to live out our end.

In their book The Ends of the World, philosopher Déborah Danowski and anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro explore the ontological and metaphysical implications that emerge from contemporary discourses of the end. Among their numerous insights and observations, they make the point that the end of the world brings “the world” into sight in a new way. By pondering the failure and dissolution of our lifeworld, that is, we see the world anew, as a whole, and can construct a plausible fiction of its beginning, middle, and end. The denouement gives narrative shape to what came before. They write: “The end of the world, then. Let us start from the ‘end.’ The formula places us in a paradoxical situation. . . . In a double movement, it drags us in two opposing directions, toward a past and a future that are equally double, each with an ‘empirical’ and a “transcendental” face.”

Perhaps it is just this double movement that explains why disputes about the origins of our contemporary world so often take form around neologisms denominating the future, as with the tired controversy about whether the era in which we live should be called the Anthropocene, the Chthulucene, the Gynecene, the Plantationocene, the Capitalocene, the Trumpocene, or something else entirely. How are we to make sense of these labels except as desperate attempts to constrain the incomprehensibly complex disarrangement of modern temporality and disguise it as a recognizable problem with a recognizable solution, even when, as in the case of Haraway’s Chthulucene, it gestures toward the incomprehensibility it occludes? We may quibble about where and when this world began, which is one way of having the argument about what this world is, but whatever we call it, we must distinguish this world from all the others that have come and gone.

Common usage of the term world confuses, and it’s important to distinguish, following Dipesh Chakrabarty, at least four different ways of talking about our relationship with the spinning rock on which our species’ life depends. When we say “the world” we typically mean the human world, our world, the world as we know it, the collectively imagined global chronotope of the present. This sense of “world” is not an objective description but a subjective one, denoting a matrix of space, time, and meaning inhabited by the beings with and through whom it exists. Our world is the world in which we live, a world that would be unimaginable without us. A “world without us”—a world without humans, that is—would be no world at all.

But our world is also a planet, a globe, and the Earth. We might say, somewhat reductively and with due respect to Chakrabarty’s finely textured analysis, that the globe is political, the planet scientific, the Earth phenomenological, and the world ontological. Thus when we talk about “the end of the world,” we speak almost exclusively in an ontological register. The globe is a spatial conceptualization, not a temporal one, and can only be said to “end” where political collectives no longer have reach—at one time the blank edges of the map marked “Here Be Dragons,” now maybe somewhere between the magnetosphere and the moon. The planet on which the globe is mapped has limits, too, spatially at the Kármán line beyond the exosphere, temporally some five or six billion years hence, when it will be vaporized by the cooling and expanding sun.

The Earth, in contrast, has no end. Our ecological entanglement with the thin layer of the biosphere, being a phenomenological affair—as Heidegger put it, “the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal” dwelling-ground of Man—exists as long as does that being for whom the environing phenomena exists, which is to say as long as there are people dwelling in it. We are Earthlings, as Bruno Latour has argued, in some sense perhaps inescapably Earthbound, despite our adventures in the vacuum of space. Only the ontological world, which is to say the socially constructed world, existing through human culture in time, can truly be said to come to an end for us in any meaningful way.

And what does it mean for something to end? To end is to finish, to come to completion, to cease, to no longer exist in the same form. Physics tells us that while mass and energy change into each other, nothing is ever lost, so from a cosmic point of view, to end means merely to change. But we do not live our lives from a cosmic point of view: we live in mortal bodies, among mortal bodies, forced to contend with the mystery of death, which is almost certainly our profoundest sense of the end of anything. We might even say that “the end,” any end, is a metaphor for our own, as Frank Kermode argues in his book The Sense of an Ending.

So what could it possibly mean to say “the world is ending?” For Kermode, steeped in medieval apocalypticism and Wallace Stevens, such a proposition is not so much an attempt to describe reality as it is an aesthetic effort to establish a “fictive concord” between one’s own mortality and some larger pattern of existence—an attempt, we might say, to feel a little less lonely about dying. We could push Kermode’s subjectivism further and argue that the claim that “the world is ending” is no more than a narcissistic projection of one’s own despair on a planet-sized screen. Yet such an interpretation feels hopelessly inadequate to a moment when the end of civilization as we know it seems all too plausible. If we want to make sense of the proposition that “the world is ending” as a statement about reality, we must reckon with what it would mean for “the world” to “end.” If we take “the end” as a euphemism for “death,” then we could take “the end of the world” to mean human extinction or at least significant mass death. If we take a more nuanced view, “the end of the world” might indicate nothing more or less than the transmutation of our collectively constituted sense of the present: a “new world,” a new now, a different collective sense of being.

The end of the world is a fiction insofar as it’s a judgment in the form of a narrative, constructed with symbols and synthesized from experience, emotion, and sense data. It expresses, as Kermode would say, a concordance between the speaker’s transient being in the present and their sense of participating in a larger pattern, overlapping with any number of historical, geological, and religious stories about the past, and stamped today with the image of the planet, the “pale blue dot” we know so well from pictures, the globe whirling on its brass spindle. Which is to say that a being and its world are forever wrapped up in each other: “There is no person without a world,” and there is conversely no world without a person. A world exists insofar as someone gives it life, even if only in their imagination.

My “world” differs from yours, yours from Nancy Pelosi’s, and Pelosi’s from that of a twenty-seven-year-old Bangladeshi lab tech. Nevertheless and despite what are likely significant differences between each person’s sense of their “world,” “the world” also points to something at least notionally shared by every living human being, a mutually constructed and concurrent coexistence happening within recognizable bounds. No one says “the world” to mean Neptune or the Incan Empire. One might say “the world” to mean specifically the planet Earth but only within a shared understanding of planetary history: what a dogmatic Creationist means by “the world” will differ from what a Gaia-worshipping neopagan means by the same phrase.

My point is that as much as the end of the world is a fiction, it is also the end of a fiction, or rather the end of fiction as such: in the individual case, the narrative of a life; in a collective sense, the weave of narrative, concepts, metaphysics, and myth that gives shape and meaning to reality. The “end of the world” signifies the conclusion of a story and in its determinateness indexes the empty possibility outside and beyond narrative. As much as the end of our world allows us to conceive of that world as a discrete whole, it also forces us to see it as a monad in the void—as one transient world among many. Thus we can hardly make sense of the idea of the end of the world without attending to all the other worlds that ended before our own.

The worlds of various paleolithic hunter-gatherer, fisherfolk, and cultivator tribes ended with the emergence of imperial cities and large-scale organized agriculture. So, too, ended the preliterate world of the eastern Mediterranean brought to life in Homer’s Iliad, long before Plato was himself witness to the end of the world that followed Homer’s, as literacy transformed Greek conceptions of meaning and being. The world of Laozi and Confucius ended with the tenth-century collapse of the Tang dynasty. Countless worlds were destroyed forever through the so-called Columbian Exchange, including the feudal world of medieval European Apocalypticism. The world of the Umayyad Caliphate, the Zoroastrian world, the Aboriginal world, Chaco World, the world of the Tokugawa shogunate, the Mayan world, even the patriarchal, Eurocentric world of donnish sophistication in which Frank Kermode felt so at home—all these worlds are gone, even as they live on in the ruins of the past and the inherited lineaments of the present.

Thus although our impasse is unprecedented in scope and consequences, it is not without historical analogue. This is not the first time the world has ended, nor the first time a people or culture has had to deal with the collapse of its lifeworld and the loss of its concepts. Human culture has recorded and pondered such catastrophes again and again.

The conquest of the Americas, in which countless worlds were destroyed forever, stands out with particular salience. Pursuing this insight, many look to Traditional Ecological Knowledge, indigenous epistemologies, or practices of decolonization as sources of salvific potential in the face of our impasse. As Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta writes in his book Sand Talk, “Perhaps we need to revisit the brilliant thought-paths of our Paleolithic Ancestors and recover enough cognitive function to correct the impossible messes civilization has created.” Building on the work of Walter Mignolo, British geographer Mark Jackson argues that decolonial critique, “epistemic disobedience,” and “border gnosis” grounded in indigenous knowledge can open a liberatory cultural politics focused on “care, attention to flourishing, and . . . disobedience to hegemony.” Perhaps the most popular version of this argument comes from biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer in her evocative book Braiding Sweetgrass, which assures us that by “becoming indigenous” and “learning the grammar of animacy,” we may “choose the green path,” defeat the “Windigo” of extractive capitalism, and come to live in sustainable reciprocity with nature.

The terms deployed here are complex, used in sometimes contradictory or controversial ways, and rarely clearly defined. Fikret Berkes offers one definition of Traditional Ecological Knowledge as “a cumulative body of knowledge, belief, and practice . . . handed down through generations through traditional songs, stories and beliefs” that is “concerned with the relationship of living beings (including human) with their traditional groups and with their environment.” Yet as Kyle Whyte points out, “a scan of environmental science and policy literatures reveals there to be sufficiently large differences in definitions of TEK” as to “obstruct the possibility of moving toward a consensus on the best definition.” One problem anthropologist Joseph Gone and others have identified is that the concept of indigenous epistemology gathers distinctly different cultures under a single broad category, Indigenous, defined primarily in its opposition to another broad category, variously invoked as White, European, American, Colonial, or Western, and begs important questions about how we might identify indigeneity on its own terms, how and whether indigenous epistemologies survive colonization and the imposition of literacy, and how to understand the relations of so-called indigenous peoples to non-European civilizing conquerors from southeast Asia to Islamized Africa to the Aztec Empire.

In the face of gross injustice, ecological catastrophe, and civilizational collapse, there is a powerful appeal in returning to indigenous ways of knowing. Such arguments align with those of other thinkers, such as anthropologists James Scott, David Graeber, and David Wengrow, ecologist Paul Shepard, philosopher John Zerzan, and writers Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, all of whom assert in their different ways that modern humanity lives in a fallen state and that prelapsarian human life was qualitatively better, more sustainable, and more spiritually whole. Some, like Kingsnorth, tend to see humanity’s fall from grace in industrialization, while others, like Scott and Zerzan, argue that humanity’s original sin was the development of large-scale agriculture. Graeber and Wengrow make a more sophisticated argument that cultural identity as such, emerging out of political differentiation between competing social groups, generated violent conflict that led to fixed hierarchies, slavery, and the erosion of what they identify as the three “basic forms of social liberty.” And while not all of these thinkers explicitly make the anarcho-primitivist argument that we should dismantle modern civilization, many of them do, and the ideal is implicit throughout.

“We can go back to nature,” Shepard writes in Coming Home to the Pleistocene, “because we never left it.” Shepard argues that the hunting and foraging cultures that evolved over many thousands of years in the Pleistocene remain genetically predominant and accessible today. “White European/Americans cannot become Hopis or Kalahari Bushmen or Magdalenian bison hunters,” Shepard grants, “but elements in those cultures can be recovered or re-created because they fit the heritage and predilection of the human genome everywhere.” In a more Heideggerian register, the anarchist philosopher John Zerzan writes, “What we have forgotten may be recovered. Unfolding origin, a journey to origins, is possible. Every authentic choice takes us nearer.” More recently, Graeber and Wengrow argue somewhat paradoxically that increased scientific knowledge about the human past can help us recuperate our primordial “freedom to create new and different forms of social reality.”

Heideggerian anarcho-primitivists, paleo-ecologists, Romantic pessimists, and activist anthropologists may seem like strange allies for critical race theorists, self-appointed caretakers of indigenous knowledge, and advocates of decolonization, but as Robin Wall Kimmerer points out, “Traditional ecological knowledge is not unique to Native American culture but exists all over the world, independent of ethnicity”—even in Europe. Indeed, as numerous scholars have argued, including political scientist Cedric Robinson, the first indigenous people conquered by European colonizers were European peasants, and some of the first Traditional Ecological Knowledges colonized by “Western epistemologies” were the “cumulative bod[ies] of knowledge, belief, and practice . . . handed down through generations through traditional songs, stories and beliefs” of pagan Britons, Gauls, Teutons, and Slavs. Expropriation of peasant land, enclosure, and colonialism were inextricably bound up together in early capitalism in a reciprocal dynamic Foucault called the “imperial boomerang.” The conception of land as individual property rather than a locus of negotiated privileges and obligations emerged in England only in the sixteenth century, didn’t take firm hold for another hundred and fifty years, and was bound up in contemporaneous phenomena like written recordkeeping, the spread of literacy, colonial surveying, New World land claims, financial risk management, the Protestant Reformation, disputes over ancestral land rights, witch trials, and dispossession. In the words of Belgian medievalist Henri Pirenne, “Europe ‘colonized’ herself.”

“And this also . . . has been one of the dark places of the earth,” observes Charles Marlow of Victorian London, then capital of the civilized world, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day.” Marlow paints a vivid picture of a Roman commander going up the Thames, feeling “the savagery, the utter savagery” of the ancient Britons closing around him—

all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

These opening lines of The Heart of Darkness—or rather, the beginning of the story within the story—cast an ambivalent but illuminating light on the ideas under discussion, particularly the hope that if we could only escape back to indigenous, pre-modern, pre-agricultural ways of being, we might find redemption. The novel’s central intellectual drama depicts the civilizational double bind thoughtfully explored by Claude Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques and astutely diagnosed by Sylvia Wynter and others: the tragic awareness that the recognition of our common humanity cannot bridge the ontological divisions structuring social relations. Just as “White European/Americans cannot become Hopis,” Kurtz cannot become a Congolese, Gilgamesh cannot become Enkidu, Roman cannot become Barbarian, Christian cannot become Pagan, Settler cannot become Savage, White cannot become Black, and Civilized cannot become Indigenous. As Marlow put it, “There’s no initiation . . . into such mysteries.”

Those of us who live in modern, literate, global civilization are incapable of rewilding ourselves, uncivilizing, going native, or decolonizing the Anthropocene. We cannot change at will our “embedded and embodied relations with our other-than-human kin and the land itself,” consciously transform “our understandings of ourselves as human,” or rip up our civilization by the roots and degrowth it into a pastoral Eden. The issue is not whether such a choice is preferable, merely whether it is possible. There can be no doubt that so-called indigenous ways of relating to the land and coexisting with the nonhuman were sustainable, so to speak, for hundreds of thousands of years before the development of large-scale agriculture, empire, literacy, and fossil-fueled industrial capitalism, even if, as archaeologist Steven LeBlanc argues, “the idea that Native Americans, as well as early humans the world over, lived in ecological harmony is pure fantasy.”

Despite the clear limits of the racializing stereotype of the “ecological Indian,” animist thought framing human and nonhuman relations through intersubjective kinship indubitably offers a more integrative ecological-cultural matrix than modern extractivism. Further, it may be granted that any imagined alternatives to fossil-fuel capitalism may inspire novel social formations, no matter how impossible they might be in practice. In the final analysis, however, solutions to catastrophic global warming and ecological collapse that depend on Traditional Ecological Knowledges, becoming indigenous, decolonizing the Anthropocene, uncivilization, or anarcho-primitivism—all of which might be seen as versions of an apocalyptic Myth of Renewal—offer no concrete programs or effective tools and face insurmountable conceptual difficulties of which these four are salient: we have never been modern; indigeneity is always local; we cannot become illiterate; and the total violence required for such a vision to be achieved is ethically unsupportable.

The pithily phrased idea that “we have never been modern” we owe to Bruno Latour, from his book of the same name. His point was that modernity has not made humans “rational” but merely shifted the coordinates of our metaphysics. We “moderns” not only believe in unseen forces that shape our lives but appeal to them through intricate rituals with as much care and passion as any Chacoan sky priest tending his kiva. We are not secular rationalists, that is, but the devout followers of deities like “the market,” “the nation,” “democracy,” and “race,” committed to the ancestral Myth of Progress, and perennially engaged in the ritualistic performance of complex ceremonies and sacrifices to sustain material relations around wholly metaphysical conceits.

The first problem with the Myth of Renewal is that there is no question of “going back” to pre-modern embeddedness in an animate lifeworld, since we are all already embedded in an animate lifeworld today and thus “becoming indigenous” wouldn’t mean simply returning to the old gods but killing the new ones. Such a spiritual revolt would no doubt find proponents, but it would also spark opposition, and the question of how to deal with any progressivist rump offers no easy solution. Even if you solve that problem, perhaps through conversion by the sword, you still face the question of which gods should rule in the new dispensation: Noqoìlpi the Gambler? Cōātlīcue with her skirt of snakes and necklace of hearts and skulls? One-eyed Odin? There is, after all, no universal indigenous pantheon, nor do indigenous beliefs coexist in some postmodern cosmopolitan multiverse, where Thor and K’uk’ulkan can team up to fight Dr. Doom.

Indigeneity is always local, and not merely local but embedded in specific ecological and geophysical affordances. Potawatomi are not Aztecs, Nambikwara are not Inuit, and Paniya are not Celts. To flip Latour’s famous apothegm: we have never been indigenous. The abstract universality in the idea of indigeneity criticized by Joseph Gone and others not only conflates distinct peoples and times, but flattens and elides the specific ecological relations that make a Shoshone a Shoshone and not a Naskapi Cree, or a neolithic Majiayao farmer who they are and not a Thuringii of the Central European wald. This problem is made even more complex as climate change transforms ecosystems, habitat ranges, and weather patterns, and local ecological knowledge slips out of sync with lived reality. Tragically, the massive ecological perturbations caused by global warming are making indigenous ways of knowing less adaptive and less sustainable, because the lands to which particular ecological knowledges have adapted are changing so rapidly. This phenomenon can be most clearly seen today among Arctic peoples, whose traditional hunting grounds are changing or disappearing and whose traditional ways of living on the land are becoming impracticable.

The various lifeworlds of various indigenous peoples emerged through meaningful relations to specific ecosystem features, particular species of flora and fauna, and reliable regional climatological patterns. All these aspects of reality are now in flux, sometimes catastrophically. We cannot simply return to an animist world rich in meaning when that world has been stripped of the diversity and richness of nonhuman life in relation to which said meaning emerged, while our own daily practices remain embedded in an anthropogenic world of industrial technology, specialized labor, and complex social hierarchy.

Which is to say that modern humans are alienated from nonhuman nature today not by bad ideology or the wrong narratives but by the material structures of industrial life. We don’t hunt our own food. We don’t grow our own corn. We don’t make our own clothing, tools, or homes. We don’t produce our own heat. We are protected from most climatic variation. Our doctors treat illnesses with sophisticated pharmaceuticals and technological apparatuses. Our survival does not depend on close attention to the land, the plants around us, our animal kin, or the weather, but on attention to traffic, the market, and social media. And the meaning of our world is mediated not by the language of animals, plants, earth spirits, and sky gods but by text and images on pages, screens, doors, walls, billboards, and gas pumps.

To evoke Fanon by way of Tuck and Yang, we must recognize that “decolonization is not a metaphor” and that the scale of disordering violence that genuine “decolonization” would demand outstrips anything advocates of indigenous epistemologies or uncivilization are likely to accept, since it would be indistinguishable from global genocide. Indigenous ways of knowing and living have never in the history of the planet supported more than fifty million human beings at once; to envision humanity “becoming indigenous” in any real way would mean returning to primary oral societies with low global population density, lacking complex industrial technology, and relying primarily on human, animal, and plant life for energy. It would mean bringing down the entire system within which we now live—tearing down skyscrapers, blowing up gas stations, burning books, smashing screens, and dismantling complex machines, including harvesters and freezers and centrifuges—and letting more than 99 percent of Earth’s current population die. As Fanon writes, “You do not disorganize a society . . . with such an agenda if you are not determined from the very start to smash every obstacle encountered.”

“Every obstacle” in the case of “becoming indigenous” means not only the intractable facts that we have never been modern, that indigeneity is always local, and that we cannot become illiterate. It means not only oil companies and corrupt politicians and the high priests of economics and industrialization. It means “not just our energy use . . . our modes of governance, ongoing racial injustice, and our understandings of ourselves as human”—not only the roots of plantation logic in forced literacy, centralized agriculture, and private property—not only the possibility that it may be “too late for indigenous climate justice,” in the words of Kyle Whyte, because decarbonization and environmental justice are not the same and perhaps even contradictory—but much more. “Every obstacle” means the material infrastructure of our lives; “every obstacle” means streets, houses, computers, cars, planes, medicine, cheap energy, cheap food, modern dentistry, refrigeration, central heating, electricity, synthetic-cotton blends, toothpaste, printing presses, PDFs, email, and university indigenous studies programs. Thus while pre-modern indigenous social formations are doubtlessly more ecologically sound than the ones offered by progressivist capitalism, the only path to reach them lies through the end of the world. And as much as we may be obliged to accept and even embrace such an inevitability, committing ourselves to bringing it about is another question entirely.

Excerpted from Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress by Roy Scranton, published by Stanford University Press, ©2025 by Roy Scranton. All rights reserved.