Apocalypses: Grammar for the End of the World
We rarely see the plural of apocalypse. We’re so comfortable with the singular form that hearing and seeing it written as apocalypses makes us do a double take because it looks and sounds strange in its plural form. It also sounds strange to say an apocalypse instead of the apocalypse. Our tendency to attach a definite article (the) instead of an indefinite article (a/an) also implies that we view the apocalypse as a single, specific event.
The adjective form apocalyptic is much more common. Again, this shows that we are more comfortable describing a catastrophic event as being similar to the apocalypse—some specific but unknown event in the future—than saying something is an apocalypse, which implies that it’s one apocalypse of many.
Despite the more common use of its adjective form, I’ve always considered apocalyptic to be one of those trump-card adjectives, a compelling descriptor that should be used sparingly to protect its power. Its denotation alone can cause existential angst as it describes the complete destruction of the world or something that resembles the end of the world.
On top of that denotation, the word carries a hefty connotation for a lot of people. For those of us who grew up spending significant time with the bible, apocalypse—in any word form—is likely attached to worldview-forming core memories. My religious upbringing sculpted my own strange relationship with the word from a relatively young age. I think I was in middle school when we started studying the book of Revelations in youth group. Since it’s the edgiest book in the bible, maybe the adults assumed it fit well with middle and high school angst. (Song of Solomon is the sexiest book in the bible BTW). Or maybe they were going for the scared-straight tactics that have always been popular but largely ineffective for teenagers. Either way, there I was at 13, in my Sunday school classroom, sitting on a lumpy couch under a hand-painted mural of flames that read “If you’re living like there is no God, you better be right.” And Revelations terrified me.
I, and a couple billion other people, first encountered the concept of apocalypse through this lens of Christian exceptionalism. The end of the world was this horrifying thing that would happen soon, and everyone who wasn’t a Christian was going to be really miserable and then really dead. Our Sunday school teachers were always a little giddy about it, like the apocalypse would be the biggest “I told you so!” ever.
The book of Revelations doesn’t scare me anymore. (Nothing specific in the bible scares me anymore—now I’m mostly afraid of how people use it to reframe their own bad behavior.) I actually think non-Christians could find some metaphors about capitalism’s self-ruinous design in Revelations if they ever found themselves reading it. But my point is this: the singular and definitive language we’ve created and normalized with apocalypse proves that our cultural understanding of the word is still rooted in religious exceptionalism. And it’s a subconscious connection because even people who aren’t associated with Christianity follow the unspoken grammar norms with the word.
My point is also this: viewing the apocalypse as a specific and singular event in the future makes it easier for us to ignore the climate crisis that is constantly unfolding around us. Singular and adjective form apocalypse limits our conceptualizing of the climate crisis to similes, comparisons that place two concepts next to each other: This destruction looks like/as the apocalypse. If we pluralize apocalypse, our conceptualization moves into metaphor status, a stronger comparison that superimposes one concept onto another: This destruction is an apocalypse.
All summer long, we described the flooding in Libya, the wildfires in Hawaii, the heat in Egypt, the water temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean as apocalyptic. But these events weren’t just comparable to the apocalypse; these events were all separate and actual apocalypses. For hundreds of thousands of people, the world as they knew it ended with these climate crises. Coral reefs in Florida experienced an apocalypse when water temperatures reached over 100 degrees Fahrenheit this summer. Yesterday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed 21 more species of plants and animals from the endangered list because they are now extinct. That’s 21 major apocalypses right there. Our tendency to think of apocalypse as singular also causes extinction denial, but I’ll save that essay for another day.
I think our inability to pluralize apocalypse is also connected to our relationship with power in general, colonialism specifically. Colonialism has always generated apocalypses for the species—human and nonhuman—that it encounters. For so many communities, colonialism ushered in an apocalypse, literal and figurative. In Louisiana, many indigenous communities were driven from their lands in the 1800s and pushed farther and farther south to live in the wetlands, which were undesirable due to their geographic vulnerability. In the 1900s, when oil and gas was discovered in those wetlands, those same communities—along with many black communities which formed after emancipation—were recolonized through the oil and gas industry. Today, those same communities face the constant threat of apocalypses through land loss, hurricanes, chemical explosions, water and air pollution, infrastructure failures, shocking industrial tax exemptions, and corruption. Some individuals and even entire communities have already made the difficult decision to retreat, to move their lives once again. For people targeted by colonialism for generations—whether in Palestine or Bulbancha—the apocalypse has always been plural. When a person lives in a place that is steadily disappearing or historically stolen by invasions or industry, they experience tiny little apocalypses every day.
The etymology of apocalypse shows the original definition was quite different from its current one. Apocalypse comes from the Latin apocalypsis, meaning revelation and from the Greek apokalyptein, meaning to uncover, disclose, or reveal. Its current definition speaks to the destructive future described in Revelations more so than to God supposedly revealing that future to John the Elder, who wrote the book.
I think the word’s original meaning is still pertinent since every apocalypse uncovers and reveals the true nature of our society. Western culture is so driven by competitive individualism that we can experience secondhand apocalypses every day—sometimes in real time—and still only call them apocalypse-like. Our inability to pluralize the term maybe means we are subconsciously saving it until our own individual worlds are uprooted either by climate disasters or political corruption and upheaval (which are not mutually exclusive). But as this past summer has shown us, and, as I suspect this next winter, and subsequent summer, and so on and so on, will continue to show us, these tiny apocalypses are here to stay. For a while at least.
Admitting that you’re living through a mass extinction event is difficult. It is painful. It is also scientifically unfeasible to believe otherwise, even if it feels so much better to deny it. There is not much any of us can say or do to soften the blow of what the near future will likely bring. Even if we are able to curb our greenhouse gas production, convince mushrooms to eat our plastics, or crack open cold fusion in the next year, we’re still living in a changed and changing climate. I am NOT saying that we are doomed and none of our choices will matter. I AM saying that we’ve already done irreparable damage and those consequences will be around for a while. (Essentially, even if we stopped guzzling fossil fuels right now, we’d still have to make it through the atmosphere’s hangover.)
But if we allow ourselves to stretch and grow our language—sometimes in subtle ways—we might be more likely to tell ourselves the truth about what we’re facing.
