Fredrik deBoer's "is the second coming coming" some brief thoughts on the overlaps between apocalyptic literature, eschatological crisis, and religious and Marxist apocalyptic

Before it probably self-destructs I wanted to shared this post from DeBoer because he has some brief but significant comments on post-apocalyptic fiction as a genre and fulcrums of cultural change that happen in those kinds of stories that never seem to happen in reality.



https://fredrikdeboer.com/2020/08/26/is-the-second-coming-coming/

August 26, 2020
One thing I’m learning, I guess, is that all the post-apocalyptic and cyberpunk media I’ve devoured is essentially optimistic because there’s usually one moment, one break, one event, and then there’s a before and an after. Whereas in real life, it seems, tension can just build forever; things get worse and they get worse and they get worse and the air is never let out of the balloon, we never reach the saturation point, and there is no point where we get to let go of some of the old expectations and baggage. Instead we just get squeezed tighter and tighter and tighter, and we’re stuck in this mundane world, the world of jobs and office buildings, not survivors scavenging as we explore the endless plain. 

I have been accused of romanticizing the post-apocalypse, and, well, guilty. But I don’t want nuclear war or for the virus to mutate and start infecting and killing more people. Nothing like that. But what I do want is some sign that we have reached a break, that events have forced us to face up to an old then and a new now, and that the tyranny of normal has been defeated at last. I am eager for that great break in the human mind even if the outcome of what comes next is chancy and unsettled and left for all of us to struggle over for the rest of my life. What this virus has taught me is the supreme durability of normal, the dogged survival of the mundane world, the near-impossibility of some new era in which all old expectations of civility and social norms will just extinguish or burn away….

The elipsis is original. 

Being ... something of a reader of apocalyptic Jewish literature (i.e. the usual suspects from Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel in the Tanakh and Revelation aka the Apocalypse of John in the New Testament) I am not surprised a Marxist would have a fondness for apocalyptic genre tales.  There can be a slippage in popular level writing on apocalyptic that conflates it with eschatology and for patently understandable reasons.  Apocalyptic frequently (maybe constantly) dealt with cataclysmic breaks between ages, between an age of injustice and evil and an age of justice and equity.  The saturation of evil in the cosmos needed an explanation and explanations were generally given, if often in terms considered too mythic or too bronze age or too not-scientific for our times.  

What apocalyptic literature aimed to do was to explain what was going on behind the scenes, beyond the direct observation of the eye, that accounted for the injustice and cruelty of the world we live in.  If in Enochic literature that explanation came in the form of an etiology of demons as the sons of angels and human women whose bodies were destroyed in the Flood and who have since sought to subjugate human bodies out of envy and spite, after a febrile time in which angels who abandoned their stations in the heavens to teach men how to make weapons and wage war and to teach women how to develop what would today be known as the cosmetics industry ... a newer post-Marxist variant on the theme is that the demons are unseen forces that possess people in the form of capitalism and capitalist ideologies. 

What ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic aimed to do that Marxist theory has attempted to do is paradoxically parallel, to slice through the veil over the powers at work in the world around us to reveal the demonic influences that govern the present age and propound a message of hope that these demons can ultimately be defeated. Not that Marxists generally would ever accept such an analysis but that would be for ideological reasons, much like the average theonomistic postmillenial Presbyterian would never, ever grant the possibility that there could be any possibility of Christian postmillenialist utopian ideals for building a new society along theonomistic lines could ever play out like some kind of Marxist revolution.  

There may be a full-blown industry in post-Marxist thought that has, since at least the Frankfurt School, attempted to explain why the apocalyptic-driven cataclysmic break from capitalism didn't happen in eschatological terms comparable to what scholars of New Testament literature and Jewish apocalyptic have proposed happened when Jesus' anticipated return did not take place in the apostolic era.  To invoke the title of a book touching on those issues, When Prophecy Failed, approaches to prophetic apocalypse and promise of eschatological change shifted to account for why the expected parousia did not take place in our lifetimes which led to a refinement of the literary work that came from the germinating seed of the initial apocalyptic genre.  

Perhaps in a parallel way, Marxist thought bloomed into Frankfurt School and other schools of thought explaining why the break from capitalism did not occur as anticipated. A parallel on the religious right would be constantly tweaking the timeline for when the Second Coming will happen so many decades after the publication of The Late, Great Planet Earth.  As a very much former dispensationalist futurist on eschatology it's intriguing to observe that and theological/ideological battles within the West go, the narcissism of small differences on apocalyptic and eschatology between religious fundamentalists and Marxists can be so vehement.because while the apocalyptic/eschatological impulse with a metahistorical set of claims anchored in post-Hegelian dialectical approaches to history tethered to a broadly post-millenialist millenarian utopian/dystopian drive does differ on key points, ... the superstructure could look much the same underneath despite the obvious surface differences between atheistic and trinitarian backdrops for the apocalyptic/eschatological interpretations. 

So I don't think it's actually a surprise at all for a Marxist to have an interest in apocalyptic stories that feature eschatological cataclysms that presage new forms of society and human life.  Most of us prefer our apocalyptic visions of how things have gone wrong and will be made right to have something more of-our-time, and in many a post-apocalyptic dystopian tale the dystopia often seems to be that the modern Anglo-American West no longer rules the roost, is no longer Babylon the Great, is no longer the "leader of the free world" or the light to the nations.  

All of which, I admit, is a dry provocation to consider for a weekend.  As deBoer has noted recently, he's gotten some positive reviews from conservative and Christian sectors lately.  Not a surprise at all a dissenting review came from an Evangelical author at Patheos.