It all looked so normal—so like a beautiful morning in Pompeii, with only a wisp of vapor rising from Vesuvius.
- from Letter to the Future by Michael O’Brien
We see different versions of it in dystopian movies: a society facing sudden collapse due to a cyberattack, or maybe a virus, war, brain-eating zombies—pick any item off the apocalyptic menu and somebody has cooked it up for our consumption.
And sometimes it actually happens, in small-scale. The Covid pandemic felt that way, at least in the beginning, when grocery shelves emptied out, people walked around with crazed, uneasy looks, and a good friend of mine and devoted pacifist informed me, without any sense of self-contradiction, that he was getting a gun.
Spain and Portugal suffered massive, mysterious outages in their electrical grid a few days ago, and how did people react? They played bocca ball, hung out in the sun, danced, and were seemingly cured of their smartphone addictions.
Okay, that was just one day. What would really happen if a nationwide power outage persisted, dragged on, and turned out to be permanent? I’m guessing the bocca ball games would fizzle out pretty fast. And then?
A 2008 report from the US suggested that nine out of every ten Americans would die within a year. Of course it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. Still, if a major crisis strikes, it begs the question, or rather questions: How will I react? What will I do? How might I prepare?
By prepare, I don’t mean in the “prepper” sense of what brand of machine I should buy to vacuum seal my raw meat, or where in New Zealand to build my luxury nuclear fallout shelter. I mean in the sense of the spirit, the mind, and our relationships—because if these are not resilient, our secret hideouts and vacuum-sealed pork chops will not be enough to sustain us in the long run (though they might be nice to have).
Writers are the sorts of people who think most deeply about the social-spiritual dimension of dystopia, and the latest of these is Michael D. O’Brien, in his new novel Letter to the Future (Ignatius Press). The opening is reminiscent of Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which a monk from the future discovers ancient documents in a 20th-century nuclear shelter, except in O’Brien’s novel it’s a group of children from the future, wearing deerskin moccasins, who discover a manuscript written by a long-dead man who witnessed the sudden collapse of our own 21st-century society.
The novel then pivots to the manuscript itself, a story set in our own time written by the protagonist, Cleve Longworth. Longworth is a disillusioned writer who ends up working at a construction company where he meets Rafe, his boss. Partly through Rafe’s mentoring influence, Longworth returns to his Catholic faith, while at the same time, society is showing signs of deterioration:
Wars and rumors of wars…Pandemics and rumors of pandemics. Fear and franticness in the populace at large, decline of civil liberties in the name of health and security, mesmerization by constant propaganda, the cold calculators, on the one hand, the ragers and haters, on the other, the ecclesial confusions, the betrayers, the strutting of the wicked, the machinations of the basest of men and women who rule in high places.
And yet, nobody senses that society is about to collapse, even when the day actually arrives. It all looked so normal—so like a beautiful morning in Pompeii, with only a wisp of vapor rising from Vesuvius.
Longworth, his wife and some friends head out to visit a cabin in the Rocky Mountains. The crisis begins during the journey, though at first they don’t suspect the full scope of it. They are still in the bocca-ball phase, and expect the problem to be temporary. In the meantime they meet other friends and pick up strangers in need, forming what will become the core of a group that ultimately survives a global cataclysm.
Last summer I had a chance to hear O’Brien speak at a literary conference, where he described two kinds of Catholic fiction. The first kind is implicitly so, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings. You can read LOTR and have no idea that it was profoundly shaped by Tolkien’s religious mythos. On the other hand, O’Brien explained, there is a more explicitly Catholic sort of fiction, which is clearly the way he approached Letter to the Future.
Catholics, and many other Christians, are likely to resonate with the novel’s moral assessment of our own age, and the spiritual elements like prophetic dreams, visions, and malign otherworldly encounters.
For the same reason, non-Christians might struggle to relate to the story, coming as they do from a totally different worldview—and this itself is a marker of our ongoing social fragmentation, even disintegration. We see through the lenses of our innumerable factions, tribes, sub-groups, Sub-stacks, each with their own definitions of the good, the great and the deplorable—and don’t you dare contradict them.
Our current social fragmentation leaves us even more vulnerable if we get hit with a fatal stressor, whether a cyberattack knocking out the grid, or another pandemic, or some other societal aneurysm that explodes our coping capacity. What approach to life can we take now, to strengthen us against further fragmentation and potential future shock?
The solution in O’Brien’s novel is both religious and localist. We need people we can count on to survive the initial trials and calamities; and then, if we’re going to emerge from the ashes, we need a trust-knit community of friends, marriages, children; and we need to know how to steward and work the land, or at least have some sort of practical skills or be capable of learning them; and overarching all this, we need God.
“It would be inaccurate to say that the villages liturgical life was an important cultural factor. It was far more than that. It was vital. It was the central axis around which the year revolved. It was our strength and consolation.” – Letter to the Future
These are not new ideas. They are very old.
has referred to them as people, place, and prayer, while in my own novel of the future, Exogenesis, “family, land, and faith” are the unofficial trinity of the rural Benedite folk.Such views, of course, can seem regressive to the modern mind, even offensive. The modern mind tends to be deeply globalist, one whose great faith isn’t in the religious and the local, but in the rational and the universal.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which I happened to be reading in parallel with O’Brien’s book, is about an emissary sent to an alien planet to convince the native aliens to join “the Ekumen”, an alliance of inhabited planets that peaceably trade and cooperate. It’s globalism on an interstellar scale: rest assured, you might have antennas, and we might have six legs, but we can all get along. The physiology of the aliens in Le Guin’s novel is both male and female, which was a radical idea for a book written in 1969, and still provocative today—and another expression of universalism: there are no boundaries.
“How does one hate a country, or love one?” asks one of Le Guin’s characters, musing on boundaries:
...I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession...Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.
In this view, to have a boundary is to risk hating, to see anyone on the other side of that boundary as an outsider, as “the other”.
In 1969, the year Le Guin’s novel was published, the sexual revolution and civic and women’s rights movements were transforming the West. People were turning away from traditional views, not simply to address the failings of the past, but to create a new vision for the future. John Lennon’s 1971 Imagine is a song about a world without god, without borders, without hunger, but a “brotherhood of man” where we all “live as one”. This was Lennon’s vision, Le Guin’s vision in The Left Hand of Darkness, and is still the vision of globalists today, a shining ideal of secular salvation. And this vision is failing.
It is failing not because we don’t need a unifying, wholistic perspective—we do—but because as currently conceived, universalist thinking and globalism in particular often invert something rudimentary in our nature.
We can commit ourselves to the real people around us, and to the tangible places surrounding us, but we cannot commit ourselves genuinely to abstract people and abstract geographies. And the effort to try, when pushed too far, unmoors us from the tangible, the immediate, turning us into free-floating citizens of nowhere.
Humans are also naturally religious creatures. For most of history, we have gravitated to the spiritual for our values, our virtues. But it’s difficult to commit to a virtue unless there is a Virtue-Giver, whether God, the gods, or some other compelling Reality beyond this world. Globalism and universalism, as appealing as they are rationally, are too rational. You can’t love an abstraction; you can only get obsessive or fanatical about it.
Any conception of globalism that attempts to override, or replace, our natural human defaults as religious and local creatures will falter. Tar the wildflowers and grasses with asphalt, but the undergrowth will always eventually break through.
Observations like these could easily be dismissed as the grumbling of a Gen-X’er longing for the good old days. In fact, I think a return to the old days would be a mistake. We are where we are, in part, because the old days were not always so good; and in part because times always change.
And yet, our creaturely defaults are not dispensable. In the Orthodox church I attend, most of the new converts are not middle-aged Gen-X’ers; they are young men. They come from different backgrounds, different ethnicities, some with tattooed necks, some with smart-cut jackets, some laborers, some with PhDs, and they are all hungry for a meaning in life that is anchored in history, tradition, and God. And, if I were to hazard a guess, they are bursting with masculine energy, and struggling to manage an overwhelming sexual instinct, while surrounded by a culture that keeps telling them to indulge the latter while enfeebling the former. And they are saying no. There must be some other way.
Others have observed the same trend within Catholicism, Orthodoxy’s fraternal twin.
Young women have their own challenges, of course, some of which overlap with those of young men, yet it’s the men who seem to have vanished this past decade or so, lost in post-modern fog and dazed by the internet, ubiquitous porn, and device distraction.
The Catholicism which is so central to O’Brien’s vision of the future, like Orthodoxy, has subterranean oak-like roots in history and tradition, and with 1.4 billion adherents worldwide, isn’t going away anytime soon. Neither are any of the 10,000 or so other distinct religions currently being practiced, whose adherents (including Christianity) collectively total 84% of the world’s population.
And while the globalist impulse might be to harmonize all these into one, surely by reducing them to their “essential principles”, it would remain an abstract achievement, engineered by special interests, and unlikely to gain traction in people’s hearts.
Religions have, and still do, sometimes hurt people, just as nations and tribes can sometimes war against others both outside their territory and within it. Localism of religion, people, or land is not altogether safe. Every time we put a boundary around our land, or around the divine, we run the risk of seeing anybody on the other side as the “other”. The globalist wish to harmonize all things into one, to achieve a Pax Romana of human territory and spirit, or a more nuanced sci-fi universalism in the vein of Le Guin, is understandable. People get tired of fighting and want unity.
Is a unified vision of society possible across different peoples, lands, and worldviews, yet in a way that doesn’t dominate the local, and doesn’t impose its ideological gods on everybody? Maybe, but we’ll need a radically new breed of thought.
For now, the localist spirit will tend to prevail, both in good and bad forms—wildflowers and weeds bursting up through the globalist asphalt. And it’s hard to imagine it otherwise in an age of upheaval, when it can feel like the problems facing our world just keep piling up. If the day should come when the lights wink out, and the internet dies, and when the look in everybody’s eyes becomes anxious and uncertain, we won’t be clinging to the promises we saw in the pixels of those dead screens, made by people far away who didn’t know us. We will do what people have done since the beginning of time: gather around our hearth, holding fast to each other and our prayers, and sharing whatever we have—including, if we’re lucky, those bags of vacuum-sealed pork chops.
But even that isn’t putting it quite right. Really, the end is always near. Even when it flourishes, life can be taken away at any moment. Which means if we are going to love this home, these people, this God, we must always do it, not merely as a defensive response during a crisis, and not as a form of in-group tribalism or way of hiding behind our boundaries.
We just love, from the center outward, overflowing the boundaries whenever we can.
That is the hope of the future, I think.
“We hobble along half-blind, ever-repenting, trying to love in all circumstances. Invoking the supernatural grace of Hope, converting fear into trust. Practicing thankfulness for all things, the sweet and the bitter, the soft and the hard. Offering to others our little bits of bread, baked in the kitchen of our weakness.” –Letter to the Future
Book Links
Find Michael O’Brien’s Letter to the Future here. For reviews of other books of the future by O’Brien, see Father Elijah, Elijah in Jerusalem, and Voyage to Alpha Century.
See here for reviews of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.
And see here for reviews of my own novel of the future, Exogenesis, which Mere Orthodoxy called “a gut punch to our technological age” and “reminiscent of some of the 20th century’s best dystopian novels like Fahrenheit 451, That Hideous Strength, or Brave New World.”
Camino Pilgrimage
Come and join me and my wife
, and on the Camino Pilgrimage in Spain from June 14-24. Space is limited, so reserve your spot now. You can read all about it here or download the brochure here. We would love for you to join us in visiting historic sites, sharing meals, building relationships, all while hiking through a naturally and spiritually inspiring landscape.To learn more we invite you to a live “Unconformed Pilgrims” meeting, TODAY (Saturday, May 3rd) at 11 AM EST.
Everyone is invited to attend (friends and family too!), even if you are planning your own trip, or are simply curious to learn more.