One of my favorite novels of all time is the apocalyptic alien-invasion novel Footfall. It was a 1985 best-selling sci-fi book by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The two collaborated on several other popular sci-fi novels, including the wildly inventive first-contact scenario The Mote in God's Eye and Lucifer's Hammer, a post-apocalyptic thriller detailing society's collapse following a devastating comet impact.
Footfall is considered by many critics to be the best hard science fiction novel of the 20th century. The aliens, known as the Fithp, are physically reminiscent of small, trunk-climbing elephants with multiple trunks (probably the biggest reason Hollywood has never made a blockbuster movie based on the premise). The Fithp arrive in orbit and proceed to destroy our space stations and satellites and then go after our military installations.
The aliens are perplexed because on their planet, when a herd suffers enormous losses, they surrender and are incorporated into the winning herd.
But the humans fight back, resulting in the Fithp hurling an asterioid at Earth, destroying most of our civilization. The novel's climax includes the spectacular scene (another reason Hollywood has passed on making a Footfall film) of people building a city-sized spaceship dubbed the "Michael," which is propelled into orbit by detonating nuclear bombs beneath it. The "Michael" ascends into orbit on a column of nuclear fire to engage the Fithp mothership in a brutal, winner-take-all space battle.
An unbelievable fact about Footfall is that many of its elements are based on real science, including the spaceship powered by nuclear weapons (Project Orion). The realism of the science only adds to the belief that such scenarios can actually happen, leading to our doom.
Our willingness to accept the premise of hostile aliens taking over our planet, no matter how fanciful, is coded into our DNA as a response to cultural and political messages we absorb. The worse things are in the culture and in our politics, the more we become susceptible to apocalyptic scenarios and Doomsday scares.
As author and occultist John Michael Greer points out in an expansive article in UnHerd, "An apocalypse places a full stop at the end of everything familiar, and if anyone survives to witness the aftermath, they will inhabit a world wholly unlike the one that was destroyed." Unlike the earthquake in Venezuela, where survivors are already trying to return to "business as usual," an apocalypse by its very definition creates an entirely new reality.
Greer believes that in times of political and cultural stress, people subconsciously long for that "new reality" because the one they currently inhabit is too frightening or totally unsatisfactory. This leads to the creation of apocalyptic myths and scenarios.
"People place their faith in an imminent end of the world when society as it exists refuses to meet their needs, and gives them no hope of better times ahead," Greer writes.
Greer uses the term "hauntology" to describe "the recognition that something which has never existed, does not exist, and will never exist, can still affect human culture and thought in much the same way as something that possesses a less phantasmal mode of being."
The term was first used by the post-modernist and the father of "deconstruction," Jacques Derrida, when communism was derailed in the early 1990s. Derrida's Specters of Marx argued that even though literal communism was dead, the specter of Karl Marx and the unfulfilled promise of a utopian future would never stop haunting the Western world.
I'm looking at you, Zohran Mamdani.
Hauntology has come to describe the persistent, melancholy feeling that the optimistic futures envisioned by previous generations (in art, politics, technology) failed to materialize, leaving us haunted by "what could have been."
Hauntology, then, is the perfect framework. It explains how a society's deep anxiety and longing for a "new reality" are often just us being haunted by the ghosts of unresolved history and failed cultural promises.
Nonetheless, Marx and Engels were quite correct when they claimed, in the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto, that the spectre of Communism was haunting Europe. While the ghost in question was chased out of its familiar European haunts by the events of 1989, it still hovers unbanished in Russia, where the Communist Party is the second-largest political party in the country, and in the United States, where a resurgent socialist faction is battling the mainstream Democrats for control of the party. Given the massive unpopularity of socialist ideas in the US, outside a handful of huge and very liberal cities, that struggle may yet succeed in handing the midterm elections to Donald Trump: a reminder, if one were needed, that when idealists go charging into the political sphere, the outcome of their actions may not be what they hope.
The prepper movement might not have had a direct impact on politics, but its rise in the 1990s was significant politically because it was by way of prepper networks, among other channels, "that the ideas that paved the way for Trump’s victories — notably the rejection of the bipartisan consensus on immigration and economic globalisation — found their way well in advance to a considerable share of the US electorate," Greer points out.
Is there any significance to today's handwringing over climate change, economic collapse, and the "end of democracy"?
It bears reminding how short a time passed between the first great wave of apocalyptic frenzy in the American colonies, the Great Awakening of the 1740s, and the outbreak of the American Revolution — or how an even shorter interval passed between the second such wave, the one that culminated in the so-called “Great Disappointment of 1844”, when tens of thousands of Americans waited vainly on hilltops for Jesus to appear, and the outbreak of the American Civil War. British readers may draw a comparable lesson from the way that Puritan apocalyptic beliefs in the first half of the 17th century helped drive the rising spiral of political and religious passions that sent the New Model Army marching across the British landscape and brought Charles I to the headsman’s block.
From the left, we get hysterical predictions of the "end of democracy" unless Donald Trump disappears/is assassinated. On the right, there is equal hysteria about the "end of the U.S. as we know it" if Democrats ever regain power. Both sides are practicing a kind of "hauntology" that substitutes panic for rational thought.
The left is constantly haunted by the ghosts of unresolved history (communism, universal health insurance, the end of billionaires), while the right is haunted by failed cultural promises (the end of abortion, prayer back in schools, gender controversies ended). Both sides have lost faith in our system of government, in their friends and neighbors, and in their ability to govern themselves.
There is no comparable period in American history from which we can draw substance and answers. We're on our own and at the mercy of the conspiracy mongers and hysterics.
