Book Notice: How to Survive the Apocalypse

Robert Joustra and Alissa Wilkinson

How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016.
Available at Amazon.com

There are a lot of dark stories being told in popular culture right now. Where we used to tell tales where everyone ‘lived happily ever after’, in more recent days novels, movies, and TV shows have taken a decidedly apocalyptic and dystopian turn. Think of the contrast between Leave it to Beaver and The Hunger Games, Little House on the Prairie versus Game of Thrones, and you get the idea. Robert Joustra and Alissa Wilkinson start from this observation and ask why the change, what does the change tell us about ourselves, and how should we live in that kind of world? How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World is part cultural exegesis, part philosophical treatise, part political manifesto.

In simplest terms the book is a film and television analysis for the early 21^st century. The second of two introductory chapters gives a short history of apocalyptic stories – from the religious apocalypses of the Ancient Near East, through the medieval and early modern period to today’s ‘secular apocalypse’, the dystopian stories that will be the focus of the book. Joustra and Wilkinson conclude that all apocalypses are religious, even the secular ones. These are stories about meaning and purpose. They give us a picture of what we as a society think about our current state and what might lie in the not-too-distant future. Using cultural artefacts as windows into widely held beliefs and values, we are led through an analysis of the TV series Battlestar Galactica, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, House of Cards, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and Scandal, the Spike Jonze movie Her, the Hunger Games series of books and films, and Max Brook’s novel World War Z. Along the way we also get passing references to shows like Parks and Recreation, The West Wing, and the board game ‘Settlers of Catan’. If that sounds like your sort of cultural diet you’ll enjoy the cultural and theological reflection Joustra and Wilkinson offer.

Driving the analysis of these dystopian stories is Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s analysis of our secular age. The book functions as a kind of illustrative companion to Taylor’s The Malaise of Modernity (published in the UK and USA as The Ethics of Authenticity). The first of the two introductory chapters gives ‘a short history of the secular age’, a crib notes version of Taylor’s understanding of modern secularism and its three pathologies of individualism, instrumentalism, and the ‘double-loss’ of freedom. In particular, Joustra and Wilkinson argue that these pathologies are being played out in our dystopian apocalyptic stories. We are being shown what happens when these are pushed to the extreme, and what meaning might be available in the face of them. So even if dystopian popular culture isn’t your thing, the philosophically minded will appreciate the way Joustra and Wilkinson translate Taylor’s secularism thesis into observable cultural forms.

Ultimately though the purpose of the book is not just description and analysis. It is a call to action: ‘We want to see what is good and what is broken in our culture, so we can then have more meaningful discussion about how to maximise one and heal the other’ (p.4). To that end the final chapter calls readers to not throw up our hands in dismay, abandon any project for the common good, and simply retreat into gated-communities of safety while the rest of the world goes to hell. Like Daniel in Babylon we can be ‘faithful compromisers’, joining together ‘to realize the best of the motivating ideals of our age’ (p.182). As Jeremiah instructed the exiles in Babylon, Joustra and Wilkinson urge us to ‘seek the welfare of the city’, recognising the pathologies of our secular age while also shouldering our responsibility to do what we can to make things better than they could be otherwise.

Not everyone will agree with their conclusion but Joustra and Wilkinson are at least asking the right question. The modern secular age is a different world to the one the church faced in previous generations. As such the approaches to political and cultural engagement that worked in past will not necessarily hold for the future. How to Survive the Apocalypse takes us on an enjoyable romp through some of the darker side of popular culture, with an often challenging philosophical depth and density, all toward a serious intention—how shall we live in the world in which we find ourselves? It is well worth the effort.