End of worlds, an ongoing apocalypse
Paul Lynch won this year's Booker Prize for his dystopian novel, Prophet Song. Set in the near-future, it is a novel of our times: a liberal democracy — in this case, Ireland — under authoritarian rule with law enforcement and the judiciary weaponised by far-reaching powers. But it is a particularly illuminating point made by Lynch in a TOI interview that merits more burrowing.
In the author's words, his book explores the idea 'that the end of the world is actually not some sudden event but it's actually a local event'. He elaborates, 'It comes to your town, it comes to your city and it knocks your door. But for somebody else it's just it's an event on the news.
It's a distant rumour.' This is a powerfully revealing idea that simultaneously amplifies tragedies occurring far away while reducing the magnitude of those happening in one's own backyard.
Global warming is cited — and sighted — as an approaching apocalyptic event. The truth is, end of the world is not a single event following an Armageddon flight path. It will happen, is happening, and has happened for different people and other life forms simultaneously.
No dodo is there at Dubai COP28. The same holds for human conflicts. The current 'polycrisis' — seen to be emanating from only proper nouns like Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, Israel, Taiwan, China — is 'far away' for 30 other countries like Ethiopia, Algeria, Colombia and Myanmar currently engaged in wars (civil war, terrorist insurgency, drug war, ethnic violence).
There have been five mass extinctions on Earth in the past.
