Hello America

"This is a vision, relevant to our discussion of apocalypse, of a century or so from now when climate change has made most of the American continent uninhabitable, with large parts of it covered by rainforest or desert. The ideas it puts forward are presented in the context of an adventure story, of a group of Europeans who explore this almost abandoned continent and come across various groups and tribes who live in the ruins or jungles. JG Ballard himself lived through what might be called an apocalypse – that is, the collapse of life in Shanghai under Japan [in the Second World War] and his subsequent internment in a camp. Ballard was a tremendous admirer of surrealist painters – he wanted to be a painter himself but didn’t have the talent, he used to say – and the novel is a tremendous gallery of images, beginning with a ship pulling into an empty New York, where everything turned gold by the sun. That image has a larger significance. In his work, Ballard turned his own experience, which appears throughout his writing, and visionary images of breakdown and collapse – in the literary genre of apocalyptic fan fiction of the kind that Kermode discusses – into something beautiful. In other words, he turns the trauma, even the horror, of his experience into gold. No, not at all. It’s an anti-apocalyptic ending. He is representing in poetic and literary images the truth that life doesn’t end, human fulfilment doesn’t end, and that the notion of an apocalyptic shift which ends everything as we know it and begins the world anew is unreal. What I like about Ballard’s work is how he turns this apocalyptic vision into something life affirming. Whatever catastrophes happen in history, human life re-emerges and other types of civilisation arise. That is also my belief. To me, the apocalyptic mentality is tremendously dangerous because it looks forward to an utter transformation in which everything which has been before disappears and something wholly different comes into being. Of course, that never happens. However many people are killed or die in utopian experiments of different kinds, the dream of the utopia never comes about. But what eventually emerges is something different – not the utopia but a reversion to something more like normal life, but only after terrible and pointless suffering. Utopianism is a particular type of dream. What is embodied in utopianism is what Freud might have called “infantile omnipotence”. In other words, the idea that human wishes, perceptions, desires and visions can be embodied in the world. That if we can imagine a world without dictators or private property or war, then such a world can be brought about by an exercise of will. But to do that, the obstacles – which are often a large number of human beings – have got to be removed. That is the danger. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter If you ask why such and such a revolution produced something different from what it intended, you find in all revolutions – from the Bolsheviks to 1989 – that their original myth was replaced by a myth of betrayal and conspiracy, with Trotsky or Stalin as the betrayer for example. In the case of Iraq, if you ask conventional liberal interventionists they would say if more thought had been given to reconstruction – if they hadn’t just gone straight in, or if this, that and the other had been done – then it would have worked out. But that the revolution in its very nature could not have yielded results that were expected or hoped for is never admitted, because that would compromise the omnipotence of thought that inspired the original project. That infantile fantasy of the omnipotence of thought is the root of utopian thinking, in both its millenarian and its meliorist forms, and the source of its danger."