Did you make any jokes, last night, about the world ending?
I know I did. In the kitchen, I said to my dad that I'd bought some vegan hot dogs "as a treat, in honour of the impending nuclear apocalypse."
Whether vegan hot dogs constitute a worthy final meal is beside the point - my joke was met with a reply in the same vein: "Oh, I forgot that was on tonight! I think we're watching something else."
What does it mean, that we react in this way?
Is it a case of 'laughing through the pain,' or is it something more sinister?
***
In her book In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, Wendy Brown writes that Western society is becoming increasingly nihilistic. Written in 2019, the book charts something which has only gotten more relevant since:
"When a Martin Luther King Jr. speech about public service is used to advertise Dodge trucks during the Super Bowl, when Catholic clergy are revealed to have molested thousands of children while their superiors looked away, when “moral values” politicians are exposed for consorting with prostitutes or making abortion payments for mistresses—these things bring not shock, but a knowing grimace, nihilism’s signature."
Her examples of nihilism-inducing acts by the political classes seem quaint by today's standards - 'consorting with prostitutes' and paying for a mistress' abortion have very little shock value compared with the dizzying depravity uncovered by the Epstein files, or the genocide in Gaza.
Our capacity for moral shock is fading away - of course it is, we've watched hospital after hospital after hospital get bombed to smithereens while babies got shot in the head with total impunity, on a global livestream, for several years now. And not only have we watched it all, we've watched the entire political class of the Western world cheer Israel on, sending them planes and locking up protesters on their behalf.
For much of the world, very little (if any) of the revelations about the depravity of European and American political leaders were actually experienced as 'news'. Native Americans are pretty familiar with the image of American presidents as genocidal; Iraqis are under no illusions about the imperial ambitions of the UK and US. Palestinians never needed to be told that European politicians care nothing for their lives. And the history of British imperialism in China, the US in Latin America, the Dutch and French in Africa, the British in Ireland and India and Pakistan, and the great mix of all of the above everywhere else, has essentially sealed off the possibility that the violence of 'Western civilization' would ever come as a surprise. By now, everyone expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Everyone, that is, except the West.
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I couldn't get off my phone yesterday. The tension of Trump's 'Truth Social' line, "An entire civilization will die tonight," combined with various opinion pieces about how that was an unambiguous declaration of the intent to use nuclear weapons, made it impossible to think about anything other than 'the end of the world'.
Owen Jones's coverage in particular, with his repeated insistence on the world-ending implications of Trump's definite reference to nuclear intentions, got to me. But that coverage swam in a sea of memes about how people had just gotten married, or promoted, and now 'world leaders' were making all their efforts meaningless by turning the world into a montage of missile-firing attack helicopters.
This is not the first time I've worried non-stop about the end of the world: most of my activism with Just Stop Oil was propelled by a deep fear of the 'civilizational collapse' that global warming will bring. I told audiences at my talks that there was no point doing anything at all except civil disobedience until fossil fuel production was brought to a halt - because why get a job if there will be no economy in a few years?
There is some truth in this. There is also, and this is the dangerous bit, a heavy dose of nihilism.
***
It shouldn't take an apocalypse for us to care what happens to Iranians. The fact that the US and Israel bombed a girls' school in the opening hours of this war, back in February, should be enough.
The fact that, for a lot of people, it does take the threat of global nuclear war for them to actually start paying attention to the news, says a lot about where our capacity for empathy's at.
Most of us sit somewhere in the middle: sometimes, the news has capacity to shock us still. We'll see an image of a drone strike in Lebanon, the quivering and dust-covered face of an infant, bleeding body partially blurred, rushed from the rubble by a relative, and even though we've seen countless images like it by now, we'll stop, and we'll sigh, and we'll scratch our forehead, and we'll turn the TV off, and we'll look out at the street, and stare at the swaying of a leaf on our neighbour's tree, and we'll let our soul adjust itself to a horror it will never digest.
Sometimes.
Other times, we'll make jokes about vegan hot dogs at the end of the world. We'll make the whole thing about ourselves, about how much it cost to fill the car up this morning, about how much this whole kid-bombing thing has put a real downer on our sunny weekend; we'll make memes about how we just wanted to make enough money to pay rent, and now Israel has blackmailed Trump via the Epstein files into blowing up the world.
(The Epstein blackmail stuff is nonsense, by the way - since when did Trump ever need blackmailing into doing something violently stupid?)
Climate anxiety is an overwhelmingly white phenomenon. As Sarah Jaquette Ray writes, that's because, due to global warming, "people who had been insulated from oppression are now waking up to the prospect of their own unlivable future" - everyone else was already aware white supremacist capitalist patriarchy would likely cause their premature death. Her article points out that it is "a surprisingly short step from “chronic fear of environmental doom”... to xenophobia and fascism." When anxiety is exclusively anxiety for personal safety, and totally unmoved by dangers to other people, what emerges is isolationism. A fascist politics of self-preservation.
I'm not saying my jokes with my dad last night were 'fascist' - I am saying that the over-emphasis on apocalypse and global nuclear war across our society, rather than on the actual consequences for Iranians living with the constant fear of bombs, speaks to a solipsistic culture - as one particular post has put it: it's a privilege to pay the costs of this war at the petrol pump rather than with your life. It's important to pay attention to this, because narcissism quickly turns to nihilism, and nihilism is only a few steps away from fascism.
***
Wendy Brown makes it clear that nihilism is what drives the upper classes toward destruction: "Perhaps we are witnessing how nihilism goes when futurity itself is in doubt. Perhaps there is a form of nihilism shaped by the waning of a type of social dominance or the waning social dominance of a historical type. As this type finds itself in a world emptied not only of meaning, but of its own place, far from going gently into the night, it turns toward apocalypse. If white men cannot own democracy, there will be no democracy. If white men cannot rule the planet, there will be no planet."
In the midst of temptation to catastrophise, in a world of all-pervasive violence, we need to hold onto our capacity for shock. It's what will continue to set us apart from the fascists: fascism fuels itself with the liberated joy of not giving a fuck. It thrives on the kind of nihilism we practice on the Left when we make sweeping statements like "no ethical consumption under capitalism" and "peaceful protests achieve nothing," and when we play into the idea that the bombing of Iran is somehow primarily a tragedy because it's a precursor to the apocalypse, rather than being morally abhorrent in itself.
We need to hold two truths simultaneously: apocalypse is increasingly likely, and even if it wasn't, nuclear weapons are wrong.
It is equally true that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism and that veganism is less invested in some of capitalist consumption's most violent excesses. It is equally true that peaceful protests are nowhere near enough and that it's still better to attend them than to do nothing. It is equally true that you can't solve homelessness on your own and that the homeless person you just walked past will appreciate your £10 note more than you can know. It is equally true that the bombing of children is a constant and predictable feature of capitalist imperialism, and that it's a miserable tragedy every fucking time.
"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us," wrote Walter Benjamin, "that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule." He did not say this as a defense of nihilism. In the same essay, he wrote: "In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it."
Once we've accepted that the state of emergency is not the exception, but the rule, it won't disorient us as much any more. We will no longer need to spend countless hours asserting and re-asserting the imminence of the end times. Instead, the task becomes to ensure we remain open to heartbreak: that we let ourselves cry and scream about the death of Hind Rajab, yet again, the five year-old's pleas for help still ringing in our ears despite (or perhaps because of) the knowledge that she was only one of tens of thousands of kids killed by the Israeli occupation in the course of a few years.
It is this feeling that matters. We won't always be able to hold onto it - but we must do what we can to return to it.
Especially when it feels like the end of the world.
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