Reviewing End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor in the Sept. 15 New York Times, Damon Linker of the University of Pennsylvania frames the puzzle in his first paragraph: the President’s coalition now includes “tech-industry billionaires who readily concede they are building machines with a non-negligible chance of wiping out the human race.”
Klein and Taylor observe that three groups that otherwise disagree—dispensationalist evangelicals and Israeli settlers hastening a final war, Silicon Valley’s longevity-and-Mars entrepreneurs, and the builders of “fortressed borders”—share a single premise: that a stable future is no longer possible, and the only rational aim is to be “among the chosen few who survive,” in “impenetrable gilded bunkers” or “escaping Earth altogether.” Readers of EIR.news have seen the pattern unfold in real time—an AI safety chief conceding better than one-in-ten odds of extinction and no plan, yet proceeding; NATO pushing forward with military build-up against the world’s leading nuclear weapons power. One builds the machine anyway only if one has already given up on the world it might destroy.
Where the authors fail is the explanation. Fascism, they write, is “capitalism’s most ferocious threat response,” directing anger “downward at the vulnerable rather than upward at the system.” But the fatalism they describe is not confined to the right, and not to America. It is seen in the British Labour cabinet, the European Commission, and a German chancellor who will not move “one millimeter” while 88% of his country disapprove of his government. What Klein and Taylor are looking at is an oligarchy that has stopped believing in the future because it has stopped believing in progress—the physical kind, measured in power plants, railways and children who will live better than their parents. Klein herself has spent a quarter century arguing against that kind of progress.
So her remedy is a gentler version of the disease. Against the end-timers she offers “the web of life that sustains us,” a politics that is “multispecies,” and inspiration from New Age environmentalism. Humanity as one species among others, to be accommodated rather than developed, is not the antithesis of end-times thinking. It is end-times thinking with a kinder face.
Linker is unpersuaded by the fascism label, and proposes to “deprive [the emergency] of the oxygen of perpetual emergency” and think “as sober-minded adults about our many real (but not apocalyptic) problems.” That would be wise if the emergency were rhetorical. The strait through which a third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer trade passes is closed. Those building artificial intelligence have said in public that they do not know how to make it safe.
Neither the book nor its critic contains the word that would resolve the argument. The alternative to the bunker is the railway. The reason to build for a future one will not live to see—the reason Félix Tshisekedi gave in Kinshasa last month, the reason Pope Leo gave in Spain for creating conditions in which no one need flee his home—is that the meaning of a human life does not end with death, and is enlarged by what it leaves for others. This is what end-times thinking denies.
