“Disarmageddon” is what The Economist earlier this year called “complacent, reckless leaders” who “have forgotten how valuable it is to restrain nuclear weapons.” The politics of nuclear weapons – deterrence doctrines, mutually assured destruction and so on – have been the obsessive stuff of international politics since the Manhattan Project. There is, as Alissa Wilkinson and I argue in our 2015 book How to Survive the Apocalypse, something unique about the nuclear age, in which it becomes terrifyingly clear that human beings could end up as authors of their own destruction. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has run a clock on the odds, a literal Doomsday Clock, since 1947.

Debates in religious communities have run hot over things like nuclear weapons, regarding not only the use of them (which most are absolutely against) but also the possession of them. The anxiety that we have spent the last 60 years or so in creating the architecture of our own destruction is hard to miss. But nuclear weapons are just the tip of the iceberg of the politics of apocalypse, the most visible and spectacular perhaps, but a piece of a plague of fears and uncertainties about what it means to be human and whether the systems and institutions of our design have not, in some way, changed or challenged basic aspects of our humanity. Underneath tongue-in-cheek headlines like “Is Google Making You Stupid?” or the addictive isolation of Instagram posturing is a kind of technological pessimism that shows our scientific optimism of the post-war period is running out of steam. We have made marvels, great and terrible, and now that our machines are loose upon the world, like Frankenstein, we have a moment of real pause about whether we might have gone too far and whether we can still control the devices of our making – or if they now control us.

Many technologies are, of course, new and so we sometimes suffer socially from the kind of lapses in memory that come from our progressive and presentist worldview; that our problems are not like anything in history and all of history has been a long story of progress to produce us. But like nuclear weapons, technology itself is only a manifestation – albeit often a concentrated one – of the underlying anxieties embedded in the “modern moral order.” The “problem” of our age, pundits are often apt  to wax, is “technology” (kids on their phones) or, of late, “late-stage liberalism” (kids on their phones) or some other feature of modern life whose intensification has undermined or challenged our humanity. In fact, these social and political manifestations are older than we usually recognize. Alissa and I draw out three pathologies of the modern moral order, a sort of unholy trinity around which our politics of apocalypse often gravitates: (1) individualism and authenticity, (2) consequentialism and (3) the loss of freedom.

Individualism, Authenticity and You

Philosopher Charles Taylor calls the decisive shift in the modern moral order an anthropocentric turn, by which he means a kind of optionality that emerges for people about whether and what to believe. Human beings become the center of this universe, not gods or God or a cosmic hierarchy of whatever, but people themselves who have existential choices of real weight to make about who they are, what they will become and what they are for. Not coincidentally, just as this turn was happening in hearts and minds, human beings were also busy building the bulwarks of what would become the anthropocene, what scientists as well as social scientists could describe as a period on the planet when human activity has become the dominant influence. These are hardly unrelated. Just as humans are busy now creating their own moral universes of meaning, so we are also busy making and remaking the material universe, the very stuff of the planet and maybe, eventually, beyond. We have become like gods, though the jury on the quality of our divinity is very much out.

Of course, a number of new problems are raised in this kind of a universe, especially for the very young. Without the backdrop of history and tradition, it is difficult for individuals to situate themselves in a cosmos derived of obvious meaning. It is as though, leaning on generations of science, history and theology we cut the ladder out from under the next generation and asked them what they think being human means. But we are creatures of metaphor, of modeling and of mimicking; it is hard to know how to behave or how to live without these sources. We are told to be authentic to ourselves, to take the road less traveled, to bracket our parents and our upbringing and to find out what is most true to ourselves. Yet most of us seem to have found this isolating and even disempowering rather than empowering.

There is always a backdrop of society, history and tradition, even if we try to ignore or fight against it. Even our petty rebellions are fueled by our intellectual, spiritual and biological parents. There is no escaping them. There is also, in a more profound sense, no escaping certain laws of nature and human life. We can make what we want of our moral universe, but certain behaviors eventually degrade and destroy. “Love is love” may be the chant of our sexual liberation, but nature is totally indifferent to our trivial revolts. The fecundity of childbearing and birth obeys laws we cannot change.

Has technological revolution fueled and intensified the drive to authenticity? I certainly think it has, but it has hardly created the drive or the fragmentation of individualism. It has, at best, been a catalyst of certain underlying assumptions – like authenticity – written into our machines and their programs. It has enabled and extended this drive, but the crisis of authenticity did not arrive with Instagram. Instagram intensified and enlarged and then made money off it.

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