Imagining apocalyptic scenarios is key to overcoming cognitive biases about risk. Totalizing critiques conflate Nazis with anti-war advocates.

The apocalypse is a dangerous political concept. For many of the scholars discussed above, the problems of the apocalypse are enough to dismiss the end of the world as a viable notion in political thought. However, the method of anti-anti-apocalypticism suggests another way of approaching these critiques. The challenges highlighted offer a set of guidelines for developing a defensible mode of apocalypticism. The primary criterion for a viable political conceptualization of the apocalypse is that it should address and mitigate the authoritarian tendencies associated with the end of the world. Given this, some questions emerge: Is it possible to enlist the apocalypse as a force that opens rather than closes possibilities? Or does the declaration of the end of the world necessarily involve restricting political options? These are the concerns that will guide the remainder of the article.

An analogy is useful in terms of clarifying what is at stake in the defense of the apocalypse. Political theorists of the apocalypse find themselves in a similar position to just war theorists. War, given its strong association with death and destruction, cannot be affirmed without qualification. It is an ineradicably dangerous act in the sense that objections to war cannot, even in principle, be entirely rebutted. However, war is sometimes necessary. Given the conflicts in the current world, pacifism is unlikely to be viable in every instance. The “tragic character” of war resides in this tension between the destructiveness of conflict and the impossibility of peace (Evans Reference Evans and Evans2005, 10, emphasis in original). For just war theory, a consequence of this tragedy is that we require normative regulations for deciding when wars should be fought and what kinds of wars should be prosecuted (for overviews, see Frowe Reference Frowe2022; Lee Reference Lee2012).

Apocalyptic politics has a similarly tragic character. It is not only the case that the apocalypse can have dangerous consequences, but it is also the case that these dangers are bound up with the core components of the apocalypse as a concept. Imagining the total destruction of the present political order fosters precisely the authoritarian tendencies described above. The apocalypse has a strong affinity with an uncompromising, all-or-nothing mode of politics in which everything is staked on either hope for the end (as in the apocalypse with kingdom) or fear of the end (as in the apocalypse without kingdom). At the same time, it is difficult to imagine apocalyptic rhetoric disappearing in the near term. There will be political movements, because of the situation in which they find themselves, compelled to imagine the end of the world. Certainly, some apocalyptic movements regard this as a contingent situation. For those who believe catastrophe is followed by liberation, it is possible to achieve a state of peace and harmony where nobody would desire the end of the world. However, at least in the pre-apocalyptic world of the present, the apocalypse, like war, has a tragic character and guidelines on its uses are required to minimize its dangers.

The analogy with war is useful because it offers an indication of the variety of strategies by which to defend the apocalypse. Just war theorists propose that there are different principles that govern the justness of war (Evans Reference Evans and Evans2005; Frowe Reference Frowe2022; Lee Reference Lee2012). To make a judgment about a war, we must study its causes (for instance, is it the last resort?), conduct (for instance, are noncombatants directly targeted?), and consequences (for instance, are the terms of the peace fair to all parties?). My contention is that a similar typology of principles applies to the task of defending the apocalypse. Cause pertains to the particular political context in which the apocalypse is deployed, conduct pertains to the modality of the apocalyptic rhetoric deployed by actors, and consequence pertains to the desired ends of the apocalyptic movement. As an analytic device, the distinction between cause, conduct, and consequence discerns separate ways to affirm the dangerous idea of the apocalypse. In the subsequent sections of the article, I consider how both cause and conduct can be used to defend the apocalypse.

However, the analogy between just war theory and anti-anti-apocalypticism is not perfect. The differences between the two are also instructive. In particular, it should be stressed that the task of considering the consequences of war and the apocalypse is quite different. As Mark Evans comments, “the goal of a just war is a just peace,” such that a war can be considered just insofar that it ends violent conflict (Evans Reference Evans and Evans2005, 9). In negative terms, a similar statement can be made about the apocalypse. The goal of apocalyptic movements is a world where the apocalypse is no longer required, either because the threat feared (such as nuclear war) has been reduced to a minimum or because a fully liberated world (such as Revelation’s New Jerusalem) has been established. However, in contrast to war, it is difficult to make this statement in positive terms. The apocalypse is a means to a variety of different ends, with movements proposing radically different visions of what the postapocalyptic world will look like. To take a few examples already mentioned, environmentalists, antinuclear activists, colonialists, and fascists all employ apocalyptic rhetoric but with different purposes in mind.

The desired consequences of an apocalyptic movement are relevant to considering whether it is defensible. In fact, if the content of the apocalypse cannot be affirmed, then other factors, including its cause and conduct, need not be considered. Obvious cases here are Nazi millenarianism, which imagined a state of Aryan supremacy in which other people had been eliminated or subjugated (Redles Reference Redles2005), and the eschatological visions of European colonizers, which posited the genocide of Indigenous people as necessary for the realization of a new world (Villagrana Reference Villagrana2022). Even if the causes and conduct of Nazi and colonial millenarianism are defensible in the terms described below, they would continue to be indefensible because of their desired consequences. By contrast, a case can be made for affirming the desired consequences of other apocalyptic movements—for example, stopping climate change or preventing nuclear war—and thus, cause and conduct become relevant.

However, given the diversity of apocalyptic movements, it is difficult to draw any general lessons about the apocalypse by considering its desired consequences. Indeed, if the goal of a political movement is indefensible, then it is irrelevant whether it deploys the apocalypse or some other concept for imagining the desired change. More specifically, it is not clear how refining the consequences of an apocalyptic movement addresses the anti-apocalyptic concerns discussed above. That is, apocalyptic movements with the same end may either foster or resist an authoritarian understanding of history. By contrast, as we shall see, cause and conduct are closely attuned to the specific problems that face apocalyptic movements.

CONDUCT: APOCALYPTIC REDIRECTION AND UTOPIAN HOPE

As noted in the introduction, there have been several recent attempts by political theorists to defend the apocalypse from its critics. These theorists have implicitly used the anti-anti-apocalyptic method; they have employed the criticisms directed against the apocalypse to rethink it in viable terms. However, as I demonstrate in this section, they have primarily focused on one strategy for defending the apocalypse, emphasizing the conduct of the apocalypse and deemphasizing its causes. It should be noted here that the conduct of the apocalypse is different from the consequences of the apocalypse. The latter refers to the content of the world desired by the apocalyptic movement, while the former refers to different modes of apocalyptic thinking. To consider the strengths and weaknesses of the conduct-based approach, I focus on two attempts to rethink the modality of the apocalypse: Alison McQueen’s Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Reference McQueen2018) and Ben Jones’ Apocalypse without God (Reference Jones2022).Footnote  4

For McQueen, the most defensible form of apocalyptic thinking is that which accentuates the negative. Commenting on Thomas Hobbes and Hans Morgenthau, she proposes a form of apocalyptic redirection: “They redeploy apocalyptic images and rhetoric to get their audiences to imagine the end of the world in order to prevent it” (McQueen Reference McQueen2018, 195). If the apocalypse is not a vehicle for the realization of a better world but merely a means of avoiding the worst tendencies in the current world, then political movements cannot use it to validate authoritarian actions in the name of achieving perfection. Moreover, McQueen recognizes that, even in the case of apocalyptic redirection, there is a need to guard “against the risk of perverse apocalyptic politics” (McQueen Reference McQueen2018, 205). To this end, she stresses that the negative apocalypse is attuned to the “imaginative challenges” of confronting events like nuclear war, with images of future catastrophe questioning and reforming the “cognitive biases and motivated reasoning” that cause people to “underestimate […] global risk” (McQueen Reference McQueen2018, 203). This implies that the negative apocalypse is self-limiting, highlighting previously repressed issues but leaving open exactly how these matters of concern should be addressed. McQueen’s negative apocalypse raises salient risks for discussion, but it does not propose a single solution to the crisis in question.

Jones’ Apocalypse without God offers an alternative conduct-based approach to defending the apocalypse. In contrast to McQueen, Jones is concerned with the positive moment of the apocalypse. He argues that the apocalypse helps augment ideal visions of just worlds by offering a means of charting “a path from the imperfect present to the seemingly unattainable ideal society” (Jones Reference Jones2022, xi). At first glance, Jones appears vulnerable to the criticisms directed against the end of the world by mid-twentieth-century liberals and postcolonial critics. By emphasizing the utopian moment of the apocalypse, it seems that the end of the world should be hastened rather than forestalled. However, Jones carefully defends his theory against this challenge, arguing that there is no necessary relationship between the apocalypse and authoritarianism. For Jones, the apocalypse with kingdom should be accompanied by an “epistemic humility,” a simultaneous awareness of the uncertainty of the future and an openness to new possibilities (Jones Reference Jones2022, 176). This is an important qualification that addresses the concern that the apocalypse might be used to justify totalitarian and colonial violence. If the end of the apocalyptic movement is conceptualized as uncertain and provisional, then its proponents are more likely to “take a wary view toward justifications for violence that appeal to utopian goals” (Jones Reference Jones2022, 189).

McQueen and Jones refine two major modalities of apocalyptic thinking, negative and positive, such that they address anti-apocalyptic challenges. In the case of the negative apocalypse, this involves using it to raise matters of concern but refraining from offering solutions on how the catastrophe might be responded to, and in the case of the positive apocalypse, this involves treating the desired goal of the apocalypse with a strong degree of humility to forestall the use of violence. In this fashion, revising the modality of apocalyptic thinking helps address the anti-apocalyptic critiques raised above.

A question can be posed here: if both the desired consequences and the conduct of an apocalyptic movement can be affirmed, is this sufficient to affirm the movement as a whole? To consider this issue, we can return to the analogy with just war theory. In the case of war, an armed conflict might have a defensible end (i.e., a just peace) and employ defensible means (i.e., not targeting noncombatants), but this is insufficient to affirm the war. It is also necessary to consider its causes, or the circumstances that have resulted in the war in the first place. A war fought without just cause is indefensible regardless of its goal and conduct. A similar argument can be made about the apocalypse. The discussion thus far demonstrates that conduct is an important factor in mitigating the political risks associated with the apocalypse. There are certain things that apocalyptic movements, once they are active, should and should not do. However, this leaves the causes of the apocalypse largely open. It seems that anybody can employ the apocalypse at any time as long as it conforms to certain rules of conduct. The relative openness regarding causes is worrying because of the political risks associated with the apocalypse. As emphasized above, these are intractable; they can be mitigated but not fully addressed. Given this, it is prudent to consider a variety of ways in which the apocalypse can be controlled and regulated. As I demonstrate below, a cohesive defense of the apocalypse requires guidelines focused on both the conduct of the apocalypse once it has been mobilized and the causes that trigger the mobilization of the apocalypse in the first place.