Questioning the “survival” narrative

After studying Cold-War, Canadian post-apocalyptic science fiction, I have decided that I don’t want to survive the post-apocalypse.

Or at least, I don’t want to do what it takes to survive. Not according to the tenets of the classic non-solarpunk sci-fi narrative, that is.

Hear me out: I’m all about making a better future according to the values of solarpunk. I choose to focus on and pay attention to the actions that are taking society towards a radically just and sustainable world, that sow the seeds of a brighter future by the dim light of the present. It helps me cope with the fact that it’s pretty dark out there right now. It helps me keep the shadows away from my soul; they might have slipped into the crevices of my brain, but solarpunk helps me to keep my heart clear. Mostly.

Some would say we’re living through an apocalypse. Some would argue that our society (as with many cultures around the globe) already experienced an apocalypse and is living in the aftermath, though many people are unaware of it. Because this apocalypse was of the revelation sort, many of us don’t have the ability to recognize the violence that has been done to us. The violence that we have done to ourselves. The violence that we now embody.

Have you read (non-solarpunk) post-apocalyptic novels? Have you watched the movies? What tends to happen to the characters? What do they do to survive? How do they make their way in this changed world, which is often more brutal?

Now think about those stories again, and this time think about the supporting characters: the young, the assigned-female, the gender-non-conforming, the racialized humans. In the dominant science fiction narrative of the post-apocalypse, what happens to those characters? What do they do to survive? How do they make their way in this changed world, which is often more brutal?

Stereotypes taken to their extreme in the post-apocalyptic movie form.

I’m already seeing some of the tropes coalescing irl, and I don’t like it. I’m thinking specifically of two that have made the jump from (science) fiction to real life - the assigned-female humans who take on the violence and domination of the patriarchy, proving that they are “one of the boys” and can hold their own in a fight (whether verbal or physical), and the assigned-female humans who escape into traditionalism, trading in freedoms for the assurance of economic, social, and/or physical safety from the violence of other humans (usually assumed to be the assigned-male ones).

These aren’t great options. They also are based in an understanding of the way that humans work that is faulty, that is perverse, that assumes violence is the answer even before posing the question, that thinks that obviously people will turn to fighting, chaos, and ruination as soon as the enforcement of civil law is taken away.

Have you heard the references to nature, red in tooth and claw? To how life is nasty, brutish, and short? Life is pain, anyone who tries to tell you different is selling something? Who killed the world? These make up the background chorus of post-apocalyptic narratives in my mind; pop culture has thoroughly commodified my imagination and thus is an informing factor of my thoughts and actions. I suspect this is the case for many.

It’s appealing, to rest the axioms of irl human behaviour on the literal worst way that we can treat each other and our selves. It’s so easy, to choose the violent way out. To give in to our base emotions, to let negative affects overwhelm us and carry us along in their flood, consequences be damned. When our adrenaline is up, the energy necessary to carry out terrible things is at most humans’ fingertips, and it’s not a difficult thing to unleash.

(I say this as an average-height, disabled ciswoman who is super out of shape. I’m not going to be beating anyone up physically any time soon because I am angry. But could I bully? Could I viciously tear down my conversational partner if I believe them to be an opponent? Could I make them feel awful? Yeah, probably. Sometimes, it’s hard not to cut someone down verbally, whether in real life or on social media or an anonymous messaging board. You know of what I speak, reader.)

Post-apocalyptic fiction that is gritty, that is dark, that is “realistic” - these stories assume that, in both fiction AND real life, humans are inherently lazy. Well, all humans except for our noble protagonists who, for some reason, have the fortitude and willpower to overcome this urge to easy violence in order to … do whatever it is that merits the win condition for the story medium they find themselves in, I suppose. Conversely, if we’re following an anti-hero, we may gleefully delight in their giving in to their urges to dominate others, as it reaffirms to us that even the most relatable of people can be cut down, brought low enough that their humanity no longer provides a constraining, conscientious barrier to violence.

Is the post-apocalyptic setting that operates according to these rules a fun one to romp around in fiction? Heck yes!
Do I want to live there full-time? Hell, no.

I don’t want to continue to survive in a world where the dominant consensual hallucination has agreed that humans operate according to these narratives of lack, meanness, violence, scarcity. I don’t want mine to be a bare life. I don’t want to be forced to operate according to kill-or-be-killed, survival of the fittest, power-struggle logic that operates strictly in punitive hierarchies. So many of our post-apocalyptic settings demand this sort of action from characters, scripting violence and domination into their interactions.

I am a firm believer in the fact that fiction influences us in a myriad of ways - some overt, some so subtle we cannot even recognize them until they are pointed out to us. The dominant imagination of the post-apocalypse has been beholden to these non-solarpunk stories for so long that fiction is starting to bleed over into reality. And survival is not enough* - it was never enough to begin with, and it’s really not enough now. Instead of imagining humans surviving, let us imagine all beings thriving. Solarpunk stories, in my opinion, do that very well. Is it unrealistic to thrive in the wake of disaster, or to make the best of a bad situation? Is it naïve to hope that there is more to life than a continuous power struggle, only temporarily driven under the surface of consciousness by the strictures of society, but ready to reassert itself the minute something happens to upend that society? I sure hope not.

I want that negative version of the post-apocalypse to stay in the world of fiction, safely, where it cannot twist the way that we think of others, the way that we think of our selves. Instead, I hope we invest more in real life examples of communities coming together in the aftermath of disaster, like the examples in Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell. Like I experienced in Japan after 3/11. All humans do not naturally react to the misfortune of others with indifference, with violence, with destructiveness, but many react with compassion, empathy, and solidarity. I would say, based on this, that the non-solarpunk post-apocalyptic setting is the exception, not the rule.

As I was writing, I was thinking of an anecdote about anthropologist Margaret Mead, who purportedly claimed during a lecture that the earliest sign of “civilization” was not tools, nor weapons, nor pots, but a healed femur. Ira Byock describes how

“Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.
A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts, Mead said.”

This is a really nice anecdote, a wonderful sentiment, and something that points toward a truth, to me; however, that anecdote is very contested, and cannot be attributed to Mead at all. I was surprised to find this out, but even more intrigued by the critique put forward by anthropologist and physician Gideon Lasko. Lasko, writing for Sapiens in 2012, called out the inherent anthropocentrism of the anecdote, asking if medicine, healing, and helping others can really be thought to only be exclusive to Homo sapiens. He goes on to talk about how, not only are healed bones found in many species across the animal kingdom, but evidence shows that many species like chimpanzees, elephants, and wolves practice some form of self-medication and care for wounded members of their group.

This illustration points out rather succinctly that the non-solarpunk default of “survival” is a human construction, not the inherent truth of being “civilized” - which is a super problematic concept in and of itself - or indeed “human”. The dichotomy that the negative version of the post-apocalypse draws between civilized/uncivilized, human/animal, man/woman, etc is a hierarchy that is too often perpetuated in non-solarpunk science fiction stories, especially in those narratives we would consider classics of the genre. I’m looking at you, “Farnham’s Freehold.”**

It is useful to be able to take what we have been taught to be / passively absorbed from cultural worldview as a fundamental truth of nature (that survival is a struggle that continues up through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs past the first level) and carefully detach it from the other assumptions that make up our worldviews and look at it from all angles, recognizing what is true, and what is a result of invention. These ideas didn’t just come from nowhere.

So I return to my original statement. I don’t want to survive in a post-apocalyptic setting that operates according to the negative, binaristic logic that dictates that all interaction between humans is necessarily violent. I don’t want to struggle for power. I don’t want to be a victim. I can see my role, and it looks grim. I would rather just nope out of the situation entirely. There’s a reason I don’t read/watch most sci-fi post-apocalypse media.

Solarpunk gives me an alternative, something that assumes people will act with care for others, with respect for their selves and nature, with good intentions despite the fact that we’re already in hell.*** I don’t think, if the world were solarpunk, I would need to want to survive, because the philosophical groundwork would already have been laid to enable me to thrive.

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*I’m not referencing Star Trek, I’m referencing Station Eleven, which references Star Trek.
**Some narratives (especially in feminist, post-colonial, and more contemporary narratives) invoke this hierarchy precisely to critique its irruption in the present day, and point out how false a narrative it is. I am not talking about these cases.
***Apparently the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but if you’re already there, can you just take the road made of good intentions back out of it? I don’t see why not, since metaphors are also malleable.