Unknown Miniaturist, English Apocalypse (1250s)
The obsession we have with the end of the human species is perhaps even more pronounced than our obsessions with violence, sex, and death. Perhaps ironically then, what makes us different – and supposedly far superior to other animals – is our ability to know that we will eventually die. We insist we are better than other animals. We are indeed an unusual species, a species endlessly enraptured by narratives of our own demise. There is a growth industry in images of total annihilation and destruction. Television, popular culture, film all are permeated with human-centered narratives of end times. “Religious apocalypticism and its secular counterparts may differ in terms of underlying premises and the details of doomsday, but the proponents of such beliefs – whether tele-evangelists, authors of best- selling paperbacks on Biblical prophecy, seers of the Virgin Mary, New Age Visionaries, Hopi prophets, survivalists, or futurologists – agree that catastrophe is imminent.” (Wojcik 1997: 2) As Daniel Wojcik writes in The End of the World As We Know It: We cannot agree on much, but people agree that the end is near, the end is coming, and the end is usually defined as the end of people and human civilization. All are narratives of human-centered destruction some invoke the end of the earth, and some portray the end of people and human civilization but all embrace, and seem to enjoy visions of the end. The plethora of doomsday scenarios and apocalyptic narratives are far too numerous to list, from religious scripture and Revelation, to secular visions of end times, to the myriad, often bizarre and insane sounding predictions of the end by various individuals and groups. This is something that often goes unnoticed, but it is especially notable in apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic and depeopled futuristic visions. Human beings are placed at the center of events and narratives, even narratives that don’t involve human beings. They are set in the future, and almost all revolve around human-centered stories complete with often similarly violent narratives, inevitable tropes of conflict, judgment, drama, and resolution, the stops we require of any genre or tradition in human narrative form.Īt the center of apocalyptic vision we find, perhaps predictably, a human-dominant form of speciesism, revealing a widespread, almost universally held belief in the dominance of human beings as a species.
Indeed, apocalyptic events permeate a plethora of grand narratives from myriad cultures and textual sources that prominently, almost ecstatically, feature and carefully describe the gory details of our violent end times. Human-centered popular folktales of Apocalypse and Doomsday narratives of every imaginable scenario are undeniably as powerful and plentiful as they have been from the beginnings of human narrative tradition.
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