SALVATION/DAMNATION

What might keep us awake to the dimensions of the danger—so gruesomely literal, so massively material, that it can hardly be addressed without recourse to the phantasmagoric? How can we sustain resistance to destruction without expecting to triumph? That is, how can we acknowledge the apocalyptic dimensions of the late-modern situation in which we find ourselves entrenched without either clinging to some millennial hope of steady progress or then flipping, disappointed, back to pessimism? For within the U.S. context there is a traditional tendency to get active, to get enraged, and then to give up, surrendering to the lull of the comforts and conveniences extracted from the tribulations of the rest of the planet... We think that we must 'save the earth.' Who can carry this?... [T]o the extent that we get uncritically hooked on apocalypse—not merely the situation but the habit—we contribute to it. We wish for messianic solutions and end up doing nothing, for we get locked into a particularly apocalyptic either/or logic—if we can't save the world, then to hell with it. Either salvation or damnation."

— Catherine Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then