What will our apocalypses leave behind?
And what artifacts of destruction really mean
Last week, The New York Times published a photo essay documenting what’s become of images of Bashar al-Assad and his family since Syrian rebels brought down the dictatorship in December. Propaganda posters torn up, faces burned or scratched out, statues toppled and lying on the ground, and, my favorite, an official portrait used as a floor mat. The images are still ubiquitous, but now, so are people’s interventions to them. A strategy to implant reminders of the Assad family’s domination into every facet of public life has been turned upside-down and inside-out, sometimes literally, by the people they once oppressed.
These icons of dictatorship and its end will make their way into the archaeological record, and probably quickly, as many of them will be thrown out or left in once official buildings that people, for whatever reason, don’t want to repurpose or reclaim. Many will decay, especially the ones made from paper or cloth. But some will survive—the broken statues, fragments of the graffitied-over murals, the smashed plastic wall clock. Future archaeologists who may or may not already know about the Syrian Civil War will find them, along with, I’d imagine, plenty of un-defaced images of the Assad dynasty in layers underneath. And then, in the layers above, entirely different faces, or maybe no faces at all. Those archaeologists will likely call what they’re seeing a collapse.
What else will our apocalypses leave behind? The drowned cities and their eventually futile sea walls. The burned neighborhoods too toxic, expensive, or painful to rebuild. The pandemic mass graves we know about, and the ones we don’t. The political propaganda of successive regimes, some more long-lasting than others. Signs about masking and social distancing, proving a place was inhabited in 2020 but perhaps, from those future archaeologists’ perspective, not long beyond that.
It will be easy to see the pain and tragedy those artifacts and ruins carry. It’s easy for us to see now, before they become artifacts and ruins. It will be harder to see the opportunities, new beginnings, and liberation those losses may also represent. Collapse scares us even from a remove of millennia—maybe especially from that remove. From that far away, we can’t recapture the details, like the subjugation and fear that may have coursed through an orderly society, or the relief and freedom its destruction can unleash. What part of that story should we call apocalypse? And would the people who lived through it agree?
Book events!
On Friday, May 16 at 6 p.m., I’ll be at Cellar Door Bookstore in Riverside, CA, co-hosted by the University of California, Riverside’s Center for Ideas and Society. I’ll be in conversation with UCR sociologist Victoria Reyes, discussing how we can use the past to create the kind of future we want, collapses and all. You can preorder APOCALYPSE from Cellar Door here.
On Saturday, May 17 at 7 p.m., I’ll be at Automata in Los Angeles, in conversation with Don Wildman, host of the TV shows Mysteries at the Museum and Cities of the Underworld, and the podcast American History Hit. The event is free, but it’s a small space, so please RSVP here. We’ll have a limited number of copies of APOCALYPSE on sale there, but if you’ve already preordered your copy like the wonderful friend you are, bring it with you so I can sign it!
If you’re interested in having me talk about APOCALYPSE at your bookstore, university, library, museum, living room, or book club, please get in touch!
