KYLE SMITH: Eve of Destruction.
Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell about the End of the World is an exhaustive look at the enduring appeal of works about how civilization might end, from the Book of Revelation to 12 Monkeys, The Matrix, I Am Legend, and whatever extinction-level event Hollywood next brings to screens. (“Extinction-level event,” by the way, is a phrase popularized by the 1998 blockbuster Deep Impact, starring Robert Duvall and Téa Leoni, about what happens as Earth prepares to receive an asteroid the size of Texas.)
A writer and podcaster whose previous books include 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (2011) and The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (2019), Lynskey seems to have pored over hundreds of books, many of them obscure, and watched nearly as many movies and TV shows to shape this definitive account. “There is always enough misery and mayhem in the world to support a claim that it is the end of days,” he writes. The seismologist Charles Francis Richter noted that when the Gospel records that “there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places” (Luke 21:11), Jesus wasn’t exactly going out on a limb: “Assuredly, no safer forecast was ever made.”
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The most celebrated of this supposedly brilliant crew was the spectacularly erroneous neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich (“Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” he promised in 1970), who boldly accepted a bet in 1980 by the techno-optimist economist Julian Simon about the future price of any five precious metals chosen by Ehrlich, which under his catastrophic-scarcity theory would necessarily become more expensive. Prices instead fell across the board. Lynskey sniffs, “Simon was lucky because commodity prices were unusually high in 1980 and Ehrlich had a weak grasp of economics.”
The most sophisticated of the sophisticated see climate change and overpopulation working in tandem to hasten our mass demise. For Lynskey, the 1973 Charlton Heston flick Soylent Green, which pictured a 2022 New York City (population 40,000,000) as a “smoggy, sweltering, desperate shanty town” is “a remarkably far-sighted movie about climate change.” Yet any long-time resident of New York City will tell you that the place is considerably cleaner and more pleasant than it was in 1973.
To Lynskey, no climate-change prophecy is ever wrong, merely premature; he occasionally sounds like a Millerite re-calculating the future arrival date of Armageddon. Why, after mocking so many doomsayers, does he include only two glancing mentions of the leading alarmist of our age, Al Gore, whose film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) won an Oscar for its sci-fi speculation, warning that the planet would be doomed in ten years unless a “drastic” reversal of course were taken? Lynskey seems entirely to have forgotten that Gore, a Nobel Prize winner, was taken far more seriously than nearly all of the dozens of (other) nuts and cranks whose wrong predictions get detailed, multi-page summaries. Reaching the end, one feels a bit worn out by the endless zombie-march of unearthed factoids. A greater effort to make sense of it all would have been welcome. But then again, it’s always a good time to panic.
It really is: On climate change scare tactics.
1971: New ice age coming by 2020 or 2023!
1972: New ice age by 2070! Oil depleted in 20 years!
1974: Space satellites show new ice age coming fast! And another ice age just around the bend! Ozone depletion a ‘great peril’ to life!
1976: Scientific consensus planet cooling; famines imminent!
1977: Department of Energy says oil will peak in ’90s!
1978: No end in sight to 30-year cooling trend!
1980: Acid rain kills life in lakes! Peak oil in 2000!
1988: Regional droughts (that never happened) in 1990s! Temperatures in DC will hit record highs! Maldive islands will be underwater by 2018!
1989: Rising sea levels will obliterate nations if nothing done by 2000! New York City’s west side highway will be underwater by 2019!
1996: Peak oil in 2020!
2000: Children won’t know what snow is!
All this doomsday talk gives me a serious case of nostalgia. The apocalypses haven’t been nearly as much fun ever since Orson Welles wasn’t available to pick up a quick paycheck narrating them: