01. THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES
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What connects the first ever recorded science fiction story with Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove? And who was the real live person that Strangelove was modeled on? We all know that to understand the future we have to understand the past, so that’s why we’re starting the season deep underground in the site of ancient Roman London.
In this episode Eva and John get two different takes on apocalyptic story telling, figuring out if there’s something inherently human in our fascination with the end times.
Christopher Star is professor of Classics at Middlebury College, and the author of Apocalypse and Golden Age: The End of the World in Greek and RomanThought (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022.
Review of Prof. Star’s Apocalypse and Golden Age
Christopher Star’s Homepage
Chiara Di Leone is a writer and researcher, her writing has most recently appeared in NOEMA, Kaleidoscope and Tank magazine, among others.
Eva Kelley: Hey John
John Holten: Hey, Eva so why am I here? And where am I?
EK: We’re in London! I live here now, SURPRISE!
JH: No I know that, but -?
EK: Yeah, a lot has happened in the past three years, since we released season 1.
JH: Yeah you could say that.
EK: The covid pandemic. I moved here. I had two children. What about you?
JH: I spent a lot of time in Ireland, where I finished a draft of a novel. But back to my original question though, where exactly are we and why are we here?
[JH: Wow this is quite spooky]
EK: We’re here in a site of ancient London Rome, seven meters below street level, standing in the ruins of a temple that was dedicated to the Cult of Mithras. It’s dark and mystical, there’s fog. It’s easy to picture people walking around here in togas. The smell of incense, perhaps. Mithras was the Roman god of light. He was a very masculine deity and women were not allowed inside. He killed a bull and fertilized the world with its blood.
EK: So, imagine this to be like a super bro-y frat, I guess. We hear them recite their chants, we hear them chatter and joke.
[Chanting in the background]
EK: Now, something interesting about Mithras is that he is a very mysterious God. The first rule of the cult was that you weren't allowed to write down any knowledge about him, so it was all passed on verbally, kind of like Fight Club. And of course, those words easily got lost and forgotten with the passing of time, so we actually don't know all that much about him. We are also looking at the discarded tools of the Romans which were found here on site during the excavations carried out in 1954 following the Blitz in 1941. Tell me what you see, John.
JH: Well we’re looking at a whole load of ancient tools and leftovers from the time the Roman Empire when it stretched all the way up here, to what would have been the very edge I guess of their known world. There are little pins, there are some shoe soles from children’s feet. There’s colorful shards of glass vessels and some gold brooches, all really beautiful. These objects are, it’s hard to image, 2000 years ago.
EK: Yeah umm and around the year 409 was when their rule is considered to have finally collapsed, of the Romans in Britannia. Fun fact, they called London, Londinium, yeah. There were many separate collapses of the Roman Empire throughout history. It took a lot of time for it to fully diminish. A slow burn, you could say, not suddenly, but gradually. To us now it might look like their world ended back then, but for the people who were still around in 411, they didn’t go down with that apocalypse. They watched it happen and continued to live on.
JH: Or not to conflate the two, like in between our seasons of the podcast - the apocalypse did seem to come and go, and perhaps it’s still on-going, but here we still are. And what is cool about being able to do another season, and go on another little journey into the future, is we can try and see what’s up ahead.
EK: That’s exactly why we are here in this fallen temple. When we started out with Season 1, our first episode was about the apocalypse. And then, the world as we knew it, actually ended. Everything stopped and changed. Many people died. I think most of us didn’t see the pandemic coming. And standing here right now, among the ruins of ancient Rome, it shows us that worlds have ended many times.
EK: Welcome to Season 2 of the Life Cycle.
JH: This is Episode 1: The Stories We Tell Ourselves
[Intro: The Life Cycle, a podcast about the future of humanity]
EK: So, let’s think about the idea of the apocalypse. And let’s think about how ancient that idea is. How, we’ve been telling these stories forever. But also, let’s think about what the word apocalypse itself means. I had a conversation with Professor Christopher Star, who teaches Classics at Middlebury College and who published a book called Golden Age and Apocalypse: The End of the World in Greek and Roman Thought. I asked him about the origin of the word itself.
Christopher Star: Umm you know, the opening the first word of the book of Revelation, as it's usually called, or the apocalypse, right, by John, probably writing on an island in the Mediterranean, in about 90 CE or AD. The first word is apocalypsis. And it's interesting, right? Because Greek does have a definite article. He could have said, The Apocalypse of John, but he just had an apocalypse, right, of Jesus Christ revealed. So already seems that he knows that there are a lot of different ways to, to think about the end of the world. And he was already writing, within a tradition. And for him Apocalypse is ultimately is a Greek verb, to uncover or to reveal. And specifically a Christian idea to begin with. It's a genre, it's a narrative genre, where a secret history or World History is revealed from an otherworldly being to human. That's one basic definition. At its base, it means Revelation.
EK: Okay so, it’s just a verb. To reveal something. But, to reveal what?
CS: One, we don't know what the future is going to hold. And it's always nice to have a vision. I mean, it says something interesting about humans that there has to be some form of destruction, right, that the current order can't hold. And that's, I think, sort of a fascinating take on this idea that there's something wrong, today. And that goes back to, you know, the earliest, umm Jewish and Christian apocalypses. But even back to the Greeks. You know, Hesiod, when he talks about the Iron Age, the destruction that awaits the Iron Age is basically, you know, a morality tale. Right, that there's, people aren't respecting family bonds, people aren't respecting the gods, and eventually, Zeus is going to have enough with it.
CS: What's sort of fascinating and what I find so interesting about Greeks and Romans, especially during the same period, writing their own visions of the end of the world is they’re in a lot of ways like us. Let's just say, you know living relatively comfortably, you know, sort of enjoying the fruits of a globalized world, enjoying the fruits of privilege and economics and safety. But yet, at the same time, they still have this, I don't know if anxiety is the right word, but they still have this vision that, you know, eventually, this will come to an end.
EK: So, it’s really interesting to think about the apocalypse as a narrative genre. Because it makes it easier to accept the idea of all the different versions of the way the world will, or has, or could, end. It’s like the romance genre: there are many ways to fall in love. And that made me think about how maybe, the idea of apocalypse is kind of a way for us to deal with our own anxiety about death, our hidden fears of our mortality. We’re projecting those anxieties onto this big pomp story about the world as we know it collapsing. So there is that thread of the story itself throughout time, but how has it changed?
CS: It's interesting how there's a very old idea, which was a lot of times really seen as a religious idea has really just taken off. In terms of philosophy, in terms of policy. Right? The idea is avoiding existential risks, and how can we do that, whether it's AI or nuclear, or environmental. And so perhaps since 1945, right, we've got this idea of a secular, right, apocalypse. That humans or the nature of the world is just going to put the brakes on, right, whether there's a great filter, or we destroy ourselves through nuclear war, and then we have to rebuild. And that goes back to Plato, and Plato had this concept of, there's just cyclical destructions that happen to the human race and the human race just sort of continually, human society just continually rebuilds itself. And there's nothing we can do about it.
CS: Aristotle says, you know, I think ideas have developed repeatedly, throughout human history. I guess, what I'm getting at is that the ancient world, ultimately, although they did sort of believe in eternal empires, at least, the Romans, they also had this very strong belief that eventually things have to break down. And that's just the nature of the universe. And that's just the nature of the world. And the interesting difference between them, and today, and though, perhaps it's shifting is, there's nothing we can do about it, right? So the idea of existential risk or plotting for the future, whether it's to go to different planets, or to worry or to worry about, you know, AI and things like that. They were more concerned with sort of just the psychological acceptance of the death of all things, and you know, that that's just like, you die, right? They sort of put it as the world's dying or human civilization dying. Just it's just that on the larger scale, the inevitability of death,
CS: My thinking is right now is that we have sort of this cognitive narrative, that, that when we think about the end of the world we're sort of tapping into sort of very old narratives, right? This idea of, we're living in this sort of this bottleneck period, right? There's usually the narrative, right? If we just get things right, we'll come into this golden age of plenty and, humanity just expanding out into, you know, the millennia to come. And that's, you know, sort of a very ancient way of looking at things, that right now is a very critical time. If we can pass this test, everything will be okay.
EK: So, as Professor Star says, there is this feeling like we are always on the precipice of an apocalypse occurring, or a potential disaster occurring, and in a way, that might be what has kept us around all this time. At the same time, we also have to remember that there have been many apocalypses, there have been countless beginnings and endings. There is comfort in that, because it shows us that life goes on and we find ways to adapt. But where does the idea of an apocalypse start and where does it end? You could say, the Parkland School shooting was an apocalypse for those involved, the civil war in Yemen, the war in Ukraine, a family member passing away from Covid, a mine explosion, a car accident. And also, it’s all about perspectives.
CS: There certainly have been apocalypses throughout history, there have been cultures that have been wiped out. Certainly, Columbus, you know, sort of saw himself 1492 and after, thinking himself as fulfilling revelation, right, you know. Revelation talks about a new world, a New Jerusalem, there'll be a new world. We still have this concept of a new world, right. And that's also, you know, goes back to this apocalyptic thought that there will be a new world. Whether it's, you know, the entire globe, or there's a part of a globe and, you know, thinking about the loss of cultures, the loss of people, the wiping out of native cultures that happened from that discovery of a new world.
EK: Why do we keep torturing ourselves with stories of endings?
CS: And I think a lot of times when we think about the future its a story of progress, or it's a story of decline. There's also right collapse, a very sudden break coming in the future. And I think probably one of the ways to deal with sort of the uncertainty is to just sort of put it out there, you know, that, eventually that that there is an apocalypse coming. Because I think it perhaps helps us to deal with the uncertainty. It can be dealt with right? Stories, telling stories is sort of comforting.
CS: Nothing lasts forever. So I think thats you know, that that's that sort of anxiety that we have today that, on the one hand, we're told, or capitalism tells us, it's just going to go on forever. Yes, the market is cyclical. You're always told, if you invest something today, and you just grind it out, eventually, you're going to have these great returns. You know, it seems to me that a lot of people are realizing more and more that right there are, there's limits to growth. This idea of sort of this counter discourse of, there's limitations, there's going to come a breaking point, right. The world can only handle so much.
JH: That’s also interesting because this summer I met the writer and researcher Chiara Di Leone, by chance, and I knew I had to ask her about our topic ‘the future of humanity’ after just chatting a few minutes with her. And quickly she started to recount this one fascinating line, or tradition even, of modern storytelling about the apocalypse which touches on exactly these points. It it’s kind of surprising because it starts in a way with popular culture, Hollywood, before moving into the military and extractive capitalism: here’s Chiara:
Chiara Di Leone: So essentially, I'm interested in the ways in which we make sense of the future, and we plan for the future as humans, but the ways in which we do it at an institutional level. And it's striking to me that we all talk about scenarios, and you know it is kind of entered the kind of language. And it's normal to talk about futures and multiple different possibilities and multiple different scenarios. You know, you have the expression, worst case scenario, best case scenario.
JH: Yeah.
CDL: Virtually any topic, if something in the future is always spoken about from a viewpoint of multiplicity, like having a view of the future that it's of like multiple options, right. But this wasn't always the case. Before the Cold War there used to be a future that was quite binary, you know, something would either happen or not. Military think tanks you would have a plan based on the expertise of the generals and the people that were on the on the ground. And so you would determine the likelihood of the Russians striking or not.
JH: So what Chiara is talking about, is scenario planning, which is one weird sort of storytelling about the end of the world. Or at least that’s how it started out: It’s a type of strategic planning method businesses and companies have been using to plan for the future, Which a company like Shell Oil in fact got from military intelligence. Which is really interesting considering that so much of our current moment’s anxieties come from these two areas - organizations with long-term human activities such as fossil fuel extraction and, well, the military-industrial complex and war. So before Shell and other oil companies and what have were usuing scenario planning, it began with people in the United States thinking about game theory in regard to nuclear war:
CDL: With the nuclear war, and with, you know, the world getting becoming way more complex, this changed because it was impossible to predict what would happen. And also you have advances in statistics and computation that will allow you to calculate multiple futures and multiple scenarios. Right? And so you go from this view of the future that is that is binary, it's either it's something that's happening, it's something that's linear to a view of the future. That's there's multiple futures. And specifically, the word scenario comes from this analyst, at the RAND Corporation who is called Herman Kahn.
JH: We should jump in here and explain what the RAND Corporation is, at least in my mind it's synonymous with the Cold War. But it still actually exists. Basically, it’s a think tank for the military, and it’s been feeding the US air force plans, as well as paranoia, ever since 1948.
EK: And Herman Kahn?
CDL: Who worked with screenwriters in Hollywood to write these different scenarios. And the word scenario comes from Italian commedia dell'arte, which is this theatre genre where basically the writers would not write the script of what the actors would say exactly and precisely. They will just write the scenario which is, you know, set the scene, there is this character who does this, there are these props, and then it was just about improvising things.
CDL: But yeah, screenwriters in Hollywood really liked this because it allowed them to test multiple films and multiple scripts without having to develop them in details. And this was something that this kind of prototyping of different films and different like, yeah, scenarios was something that was very useful to to Hollywood. And Herman Kahn was was looking for some kind of language to articulate his visions of the future. There were multiple, and they were, they were not, you know, black or white. And so he went to, he was very close was with this specific screenwriter, who was also a RAND analyst called Leo Rosten, who was writing film scripts for American propaganda of film in the, in the 50s. And so they together developed this scenario planning technique.
CDL: And, and it was used quite successfully to think through all the possibilities of the Cold War, including, you know, thermonuclear war and everybody was really angry and really mad, and people were very scared. But, you know, through this methodology, then, you know, they could really think through the worst, and understand that the worst wasn't, wasn't so bad or like, prepare for it or just having this like, openness of the future that goes from the closed future to multiple ones.
JH: Wow. It's so very American and very 20th century, isn't it? Like, you have Hollywood as the place that gives us like, you know, mutually assured destruction or whatever the RAND scenario generating machine comes up with.
CDL: Yeah, you know, everybody watched the what's the film about Herman Kahn? Oh, my God. Dr. Strangelove.
JH: Yeah.
CDL: Yeah.
JH: By Kubrick.
CDL: Yeah.
JH: Right and that was based on…
CDL: Dr. Strangelove is Herman Kahn.
JH: Okay right.
CDL: Yeah, it's based on Herman Kahn, and Herman Kahn even tried to get some rights some some rights, some kind of copyrighting, but he failed. He tried to get some money from Celine Comprekia.
JH: Okay.
CDL: But he couldn't
JH: He was a real like Hollywood hustler.
CDL: Yeah.
[Audio from Dr. Strangelove]
JH: Dr Stangeglove came out in 1964. It’s full title is Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It’s a black comedy that makes fun, somehow, of The Cold War, which is no small achievement considering just how terrifying and present nuclear war was at the time.
EK: Uhh it was directed by Stanley Kubrick, right? And it starred Peter Sellers who played four different roles. It went on to win Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, AND Best adapted Screenplay at the Oscars in 1965.
JH: It makes fun of the very same Hermann Kahn who came up with the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction at the RAND Corporation.
EK: And so, just so I’m clear, Mutual Assured Destruction, is that as scary as it sounds?
JH: Yes it is. It’s a form of ‘rational’ deterrence developed in the Cold War. A full-scale use of nuclear weapons and the resultant retaliation by your enemy would mean everyone was wiped out. A complete annihilation of all human life. So there would be no winners, to say the least. And therefore it wasn’t worth attacking in the first place. And so the same guy that came up with this, consulted with Stanely Kubrick and gave him the idea for what they call in the movie a ‘Doomsday device’. So the Russians make this ultimate deterrence but the only problem is, in the movie that is, that they don’t get around to letting the Americans and the rest of the world know about it, and therefore the deterrence doesn’t actually work.
[Dr. Strangeglove: They are connected to a gigantic complex of computers. A specific and clearly defined set of circumstances, under which the bombs are to be exploded, is programmed into a tape memory bank. Is that the whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret. Why didn’t you tell the world?]
EK: That definitely fits the description of an apocalyptic narrative. Scenario planning? [laughs] It’s such a bad joke. It’s such a bad joke. Why are you making me say this John? Scenario planning, more like, ‘Worst case scenario planning.’ Do you remember in the last season, I asked some of my friends and family members how they thought the world would end?
JH: Yes, of course, I’ve never forget the mental image that your dad, of all people, described of us all drowning in a sea of shit.
EK: Yeah, that definitely stuck. So instead of asking Chris Star how he thought the world would end, I asked him what his favorite apocalypse story was, and his answer was really surprising, to me at least.
CS: Plato invented the story of Atlantis. The story of Atlantis which is, you know, ubiquitous today. Aquaman all that and you know. My son, always, you know, Scooby Doo goes to Atlantis. Plato, you know, really could collect a lot on intellectual property.
JH: Wait so, Atlantis is his favorite apocalypse story?
EK: Yes! And I don’t know about anyone else, but I somehow never viewed Atlantis as an apocalyptic narrative until Chris Star mentioned it. And also, I didn’t know it was Plato who wrote it down. So, in its essence, most of us are familiar with the story of Atlantis, right?
JH: Yeah, an ancient city that was swallowed up by the sea.
EK: Exactly, and now mermaids live there. But the principal story comes from the philosopher Plato, who mentions Atlantis in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias. He wrote these in 360 BC. And Plato’s writings are the only known record of its existence. Atlantis was supposedly located just beyond the strait of Gibraltar, but there is also a map from much later, from 1669, that claims it lies in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. In a National Geographic article Charles Orser, curator of history at the New York State Museum in Albany is quoted as saying: “Pick a spot on the map, and someone has said that Atlantis was there. Every place you can imagine.”
EK: And essentially, the legend goes that Atlantis was a powerful and rich island, a utopian civilization rich with precious metals and lush nature on the island, with rare wildlife. And in Plato’s account it’s used to represent the antagonist power that besieged Ancient Athens about 9000 years before his own time, before Plato’s time. Athens, in Plato’s eyes, the “ideal state,” fights off the attack heroically. Athens wins. The Gods punish Atlantis by drowning the city. Apocalypse. And what’s funny is that in Plato’s work, Atlantis is really a minor character. But the story took on a life of its own and has had such a huge impact on literature and general pop culture. And that also kind of made me wonder if it’s the same case with John, not you John, but John in his cave in Patmos and his Book of Revelation and his use of the verb apokalipses.
CS: With the Renaissance, with the discovery of new worlds, all of a sudden, Atlantis became a place to look for, and it's still a place that some people are looking for today. There's New York Times stories, you know, my search for Atlantis, or people are claiming they found Atlantis, you know, buried in various places. So I think one is the Atlantis story, which is one little piece in Plato's larger narrative of cyclical catastrophes that there have been, whether it's earthquakes and fires, or floods or disease. Plato argues that this is the nature of the universe, the nature of our world. He does say that there is always a group of humans that survive.
CS: What's different, though, of course, is that Plato doesn't see any problem with that. And he does think that the human species will survive. And there never is this idea of complete annihilation, but he sees us locked in and sort of the same rebuilding and the same sort of the same thing over and over again. The same forms of government arise and then the crisis comes and wipes out the majority of humanity. And then the same thing happens over and over again.
JH: The forms of government that arise, that’s of interest to us also on The Life Cycle, right? And how we manage societies. The stories, in short, that we tell ourselves - the use of fiction and myth to understand our present and build toward a better future. And sure, there’s been the dark side ot some of the more nuttier pickups of the story of Atlantis, such as from some eugenicists and other weird people at the beginning of the 21st century, but it’s also gave us Thomas Moore’s fictional island of Utopia. What I’m talking about here is I think that Plato has come up with the first science fiction. Jules Verne visits Atlantis in his book called 20 thousand Leagues Under the Sea. And in fact it’s been represented in, I believe, over 400 films!
EK: By the way, Legoland in Denmark also has an Atlantis. Don’t ask me how I know this. Get this, you scuba dive down to visit an Atlantis made out of lego bricks under the water. This is Plato - the classics - for the masses!
JH: I love that we can say that Plato created a few genres in his telling of an apocalypse: historical fiction, science fiction. It’s also been argued that Atlantis could be a proto green narrative because Atlantis extracts so much from the island to become this perfect thing.
EK: Yes.
JH: It’s like this extractive society.
EK: Yes.
JH: Anyway, he presents all of it also as being true, but in fact it’s made up, we should stress. And he manages to do this by telling the genealogy of the story itself. How Timeas’s grandfather heard about all of it from an Egyptian priest and so on, and traces it back through time, basically making it all the more believable.
EK: It’s kind of like my girlfriend’s cousin’s brother’s neighbor said.
JH: Yes. You always have to get the genealogy of the story and then you make it all the more believable.
JH: Plato was interested in the good life and how best to organize society itself, and Atlantis is a great example of that. It’s a warning. Plato was also interested in epistemology, which is like knowledge, and metaphysics (the philosophy of being), about the building blocks of the world and how to govern. All of this. And he was never scared to use a story or allegory to help get his message across.
[Aquaman: Aquaman, swift and powerful monarch of the ocean!]
Eva: Does Aquaman live in Atlantis?
JH: I’m not sure. I’m not sure. I’m not sure I know who Aquaman is. [laughs] Is that really embarrassing?
EK: No, I mean I don’t really know who he is. I just know that he is a water person. [laughs]
JH: [laughs]I think that Aquaman would be a good suit for Atlantis.
EK: [laughs] He’s a water guy.
End Credits
EK: Thanks for listening, and thanks to our guests Christopher Starr and Chiara Di Leone. also thank you to the London Mithraeum, where we recorded parts of this episode.
JH: This episode was written and produced by Eva Kelley and myself, John Holten
EK: Sound editing and design was by David Magnusson.
JH: Mundi Vondi is our Executive Producer and he also created the artwork for this episode, in collaboration with Midjourney.
EK: Additional research, script supervision, and fact-checking by Savita Joshi.
JH: Follow us on all the social medias and subscribe wherever it is you listen to your podcasts.
EK: And please reach out to us if you’d like. We’d be delighted to hear from you.