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  • Existential Threats: American Apocalyptic Beliefs in the Technological Era by Lisa Vox
  • Robert Paul Seesengood
Vox, Lisa. Existential Threats: American Apocalyptic Beliefs in the Technological Era. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. xvi + 266 pp. $47.05US (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8122-4919-4.

Lisa Vox teaches history at the University of Massachusetts. Existential Threats is an intellectual history of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American thinking about the end of the world. Essentially, her argument is that, in a post-Darwin world, Americans were equipped with the necessary intellectual tools to imagine a secular, godless cosmogony or a rational way to account for the origins of an (orderly) world that did not require a deity; similarly, popular culture began to imagine a secular eschatology/apocalypse, a world that could end without divine intervention. Structurally, her book has two movements. In the first section, spanning chapters one through three, she surveys changing American views of eschatology/apocalypse demonstrated in popular culture and art. This “quantitative” survey is chronologic. The final three “qualitative” chapters explore the ramifications of shifting apocalyptic thinking in and from shifting intellectual trends. Throughout, Vox’s arguments intermingle, reminding readers that there is no rigid bifurcation between cultural items that produce social and intellectual structures and those that reflect or arise from them.

Chapter one, “Secularizing the Apocalypse,” establishes the foundation for the book. In the Victorian era, late Romantic and early Naturalist anglophone literature began to play with themes of a godless creation. Within a very few decades, these themes were accelerated by the popularization of secular modes of understanding cosmogony, particularly via the popular engagement with the writing of Charles Darwin. Vox notes an accordant rise in “last man” fictions—namely, emerging genres of science fiction and horror, which developed at the same time as stories of secular eschatology that were sparked by the invasion and conquest of the earth by aliens (or time monsters) or where the end of human life was looming due to rampant disease or human warfare and the last humans ponder their extinction.

In chapter two, “Race, Technology, and the Apocalypse,” Vox explores early twentieth-century American views towards the Apocalypse (up to World War II), noting the common spread of scientific optimism and premillennialism in American thinking (and the contest between the two reflected in the rise of the fundamentalist movement). Her arguments here are particularly helpful in reminding readers that Rapture/millennial readings were developed to address moral and ethical concerns in Christian eschatology and were, in their origins, considered by their advocates as both more humane and more “scientific” ways of reading the Book of Revelation.

Chapter three, “Postnuclear Fantasies,” examines the late twentieth century and its attendant space/nuclear age. Vox notes how apocalyptic thinking reflected real angst over atomic destructive potential and pessimism about human order. Protestant eschatologies, likewise, experienced a blossoming, as previously “impossible” scenes in Revelation now were potentially [End Page 231] real. (A missed opportunity perhaps; Vox notes, but does not fully exploit, the way in which images of the Rapture and its attendant civil dismantling—as witnessed in the underground classic movie Thief in the Night—arise directly from atomic war expectations).

Inspired by chapter three’s visions of the eco-ruin in/of nuclear war, chapter four, “Spaceship Earth,” explores visions of ruinous climate change in American popular thought. Again, this development follows shifting values: our postmodern suspicion of unerring “progress” has matured into visions of the Anthropocene and the consistent fear that environmental ruin will see us hoisted on our own petard of “advancement.”

In chapter five, “The Politics of Science and Religion,” Vox examines the way in which late twentieth-century evangelicals have combined their resistance to eco-disaster and secular apocalypse with their opposition to climate science and its political and economic implications. Chapter six, “Post-apocalyptic American Identity,” examines the linkage between the rhetoric(s) of the Cold War and the War on Terror. Finally, chapter seven, “Post 9/11 Despair,” argues that these factors all contribute to our present, national political tension and ideological ennui.

Vox’s book has a remarkably intriguing thesis: in a post-Darwinian, rationalist secular, Modernist/postmodernist/late capitalist world...

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