(2023-10-05) Schroeder Apocalypse Or Just A Catastrophe

Karl Schroeder: Apocalypse, or Just a Catastrophe? I want to do book reviews, talk about stuff that excites me, and give you a window into my current work, but the main connective tissue of Unapocalyptic posts is tools to think with. (tools for thought)

Today I want to talk about the grammar of apocalypse and how we use and abuse it, because that has consequences too.

Northrop Frye’s magisterial study of Western literature, Anatomy of Criticism, where he argues compellingly that every prose text, even the most dessicated and abstract, has buried within it a protagonist, a struggle, and a triumph—even if the protagonist is just an idea and the struggle is the argument the author is making to prove it.

In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye sets out to do nothing less than create a ‘general theory of storytelling.’

Part of his theory is that, historically, this canon revolves around one central wellspring of metaphor and analogy: the Bible. He calls the Bible The Great Code that underlies all European storytelling in the past 1500 years. And a key part of that code is its systematic use of apocalyptic language

as Alicia Juarrero claims in her book Dynamics in Action. She and Brian Boyd claim that storytelling evolved as a way to think and talk about the behaviour of complex adaptive systems

According to Frye, the Bible establishes two kinds of apocalyptic prose: positive and negative.

the positive apocalypse consistently uses the imagery of a harmonious society, city, garden, and sheepfold

If the positive apocalypse comes with its set of metaphors, so does the negative; Frye calls it …the world of the nightmare and the scapegoat

The metaphors of the negative apocalypse reverse the positive eschatology: we have egoistic individualists instead of a Society, ruins instead of a City, the wasteland instead of the Garden, and lurking monsters instead of the Sheepfold.

The power of this language creates a problem. Such metaphors are overwhelmingly powerful attractors, but don’t actually describe what’s happening in our world. Remember the Brian Boyd quote that opens this post: “…If our minds can process information in narrative terms, they automatically will.” We think in stories, but reality doesn’t have to conform to our narrative compulsions; and, in fact, it doesn’t. (all models are wrong; crisis)

The AI (AGI) apocalypse is a great example. There seems to be no middle ground in discussions about how AI will affect us.

Take Nick Bostrom’s feared “paperclip maximizer,”

if you look at the maximizer as an actant in an apocalyptic narrative, what kind of actant is it? It’s clearly on the demonic side

So, regardless of any other arguments for or against the idea, we should be suspicious of it because of how closely the maximizer conforms to one of the apocalyptic types.

Apocalypse as Subtraction: Recognizing a Real Apocalypse

What should we be paying attention to? Floods, droughts, mass migrations… these are all catastrophes, true, and all are likely in an era of uncontrolled climate change. But what’s the sign of an actual apocalypse? It’s silence.

When the first explorers reached the Americas, they found towns everywhere. The Amazon was full of cities, the explorers reported. Both continents were teeming with up to 100 million people. (see 1491)

When the first settlers arrived, some years later, they found an empty, trackless wilderness. They found few people and thought it was unowned land for the taking; they had no idea that 93% of the population of the Americas had died or would soon die from plagues the explorers had brought.

What’s most significant for this discussion, though, was that the settlers could not see what was not there.

A real apocalypse looks like the progressive, unnoticed subtraction of abundance from the world.