Filed under: Crónicas / Reflexions
After weeks of practicing a dry, matter-of-fact, thoroughly British type of apocalyptic journalism, which, like all proclamations that the end is nigh still manages to rack some nerves, the BBC has reached a new low (or a new high, depending on the perspective one adopts) in this highly popular genre. On the virtual pages of the BBC News Magazine, Brendan O’Neil raises a question that belongs in the pantheon of the eternal philosophical queries, such as “To be, or not to be?” or “What is the meaning of life?” immortalized in countless self-help and pop-philosophy classics. These queries, however, pale in comparison with Mr. O’Neil’s profound and urgent dilemma expressed in the title of his piece, “Do you need to stock up the bunker?” The author hurries to assure us that he does not have in mind “gun-toting loner[s] in Mid-West America, who live in a shack surrounded by tinned food and emergency water supplies” and who might—one imagines—find his article of some interest if they have access to the Internet, a habit of getting their daily doze of world news from the BBC, and an inclination to be advised by a concerned citizen of their former “mother country”. In other words, the lack of bunker preparedness should be a worry for regular people, like you and me, or, even better, for those “new survivalists”, who are “well-educated, well-heeled” heroes of the article.
Fast forward to the end of the article. Here we are reassured by an expert in the “culture of fear” that we should calm down and critically distance ourselves from what appears to be just a trend in post-industrial mass societies with their unbounded anxiety about anything and everything that might induce a global crisis. A sensible suggestion, perhaps, but it arrives a little belatedly after such relaxed subheadings as “Civilization breakdown”, “Blackout looting”, “Oil shortage”, or “Peak everything”, such deep observations as “Any kind of bunker is going to cost a fair bit of money”, and such optimistic pieces of advice as “Tinned food is probably a must”. But the final word of caution deriving from the fear expert is really just the other side of the coin of the alarmist rhetoric insinuating a return to the state of nature, which is, after all, an entirely British idea that found fertile ground in the mists of Albion, in the intellectual “sobriety” of Hobbes and Locke, and in the empirical proofs the inhabitants of the Isles continue to supply in abundance to this day.
What is the common thread tying these two reactions together? It is nothing else than the inability or the unwillingness to recognize the real crisis, which is as old as world history itself, the catastrophe that has always befallen and continues to befall the “wretched of the earth”. The academic view that recommends a skeptical attitude to the current hysteria fails to see the urgency of the age-old global crisis affecting those who have no money even for one can of tinned food, while the survivalist Robinsonade of the new smartly dressed bunker-builders naturally assumes that I am supposed to be concerned, exclusively, with my individual survival, my water supplies, my precious Picasso collection, my insurance policy against the four horsemen of the apocalypse…(I am not so sure that besides their style in clothing and geographical location these well groomed Robinsons are all that different from their despised mid-Western counterparts.)
To follow the third way—and I am using this syntagma advisedly—is to do what Walter Benjamin advocates in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, namely, to bring about the real crisis that underlies the periodic crises of capitalism, “to catastrophe the catastrophe”, to realize that world history is nothing but one unmitigated disaster. Of course, in and of itself, such a realization is insufficient. It would not be enough to adopt a passively pessimistic stance characteristic of some figures associated with the Frankfurt School. Rather, one would need to start thinking about new strategies of organizing what Mr. O’Neil refers to as “civilization”, not as a bare guarantee that the property I possess is not going to be violently and fortuitously expropriated from me by someone who is physically stronger, but as a mode of being-in-common that cannot afford to be oblivious to the suffering of others. Perhaps, then, the dreaded “collapse of civilization” could be conceptualized as the decline of a particular civilization that might yield either a social arrangement that is even more barbaric than the one accompanying capitalism, or a new chance to rethink the social contract on non-legalistic, non-contractual terms. And, if the latter alternative applies, then the new survivalists will emerge from the woods into a radically transformed, post-apocalyptic world where they will no longer belong, unless they leave their “survivalism” behind. Only this rethinking might prevent the “civilization breakdown”.
