Many artists feature the imagery of deluge in their work. Wassily Kandinsky was an abstract art pioneer whose work discusses spiritual experiences. In Composition VI, he was interested in evoking deluge to represent rebirth, while at the same time, ushering a new approach to art that is removed from realism. The motif of inundation is also central to many of Bill Viola’s work. In his 2002 video artwork, “The Deluge”, people can be seen escaping as a white building that they were in becomes destroyed by a torrential flood. In another work, “The Martyrs”, four individuals are shown as they are tortured by the four classical elements — earth, air, fire, and water. The work is presented in a cathedral, where water is imbued with religious symbology. The word deluge comes from the Latin word “diluere”, which means to “wash away”. In the Christian tradition, baptism is a significant religious ceremony that marks an individual’s beginning as a member of the Christian faith. It usually involves submergence into water, with the subsequent re-emergence symbolizing spiritual birth.

The motif of deluge occurs regularly in history. In the Abrahamic religions, the story of Noah’s ark comes to mind. In it, God was angry at human’s misdeeds and decided to send a flood to reset the world to its state at the creation. In the process, Noah and his family were spared and promised by God that such an act will never be committed again. The aforementioned baptism is a reminder of this promise and a representation of the flood. In Chinese culture, the Great Flood of Gun-Yu showed the power of human ingenuity and how societal developments led to the first Chinese state, the Xia dynasty. Deluge myths are so common in human history that historians, geologists, and paleontologists often try to piece together the puzzle presented by these legends to separate fact from fiction. Some researchers try to identify planetary events that may be the common source for such stories.

While the search for such an event had mostly led to dead ends, new research suggests that there was a time when the Earth was completely covered in water. Scientists hypothesize that our home planet used to be an ocean world with no continents about three billion years ago; this was a time when the only organisms inhabiting the planet were bacteria. By comparison, biological humans showed up much later to the party — about 2,999,700,000 years late, by current estimates. A more likely candidate may not have been a planetary deluge, but a period of sea-level rise caused by glacial melting known as the Early Holocene Sea Level Rise (EHSLR), which occurred between 12,000 to 7000 years ago. This coincides with the Neolithic (New Stone Age), during which humans began farming. Farming generally necessitated access to water, which meant that societies congregated near bodies of water. These areas tend to be more affected by changes in precipitation and/or sea-level rise, which may explain our universal fear of flooding.

The term “antediluvian” literally means “belonging to the time before the biblical Flood”. Early attempts at understanding the history of our planet, at least for the West, came from the Bible. With increasing scientific evidence showing the improbability of a literal reading of the Old Testament, it became irrelevant in the scientific domain. Nowadays, the term describes things or ideas that are “ridiculously old-fashioned”. Over time, ideas that were considered the “gospel truth” (maybe this term itself may eventually become old-fashioned) are now debunked misunderstandings of the world. The beauty of history in preserving our follies, and not just the great ideas that have stood the test of time, is a good reminder that we as a species have often got things wrong — sometimes very wrong. Therefore, while we can marvel at the cultural progress that we have made, we should equally be humbled by our mistakes. 

When I was a teenager, I stumbled upon a TV show titled “Mermaids: The Body Found”, which purported that aquatic humanoid creatures exist in the sea. It featured interviews of named experts and camera shots that resemble a nature documentary. As a younger person fascinated by scientific discovery, I was excited that this may be a possibility. However, I later realized that it was a work of docufiction, which is fiction presented in the form of a documentary. The film capitalized on cultural artifacts like mermaids and sought to popularise the aquatic ape hypothesis. The theory suggests that humans got various biological attributes, like hairlessness, bipedalism, and our superior diving reflex, due to a period of aquatic adaptation. The theory is widely debunked by experts and is currently considered pseudoscience. However, it somehow managed to draw record viewership, with its sequel netting 3.6 million viewers, the largest ever for the nature TV channel, Animal Planet. Discovery Inc, which owns Animal Planet, goes on to create more pseudoscientific docufictions that broke new viewership records. For a brand that prides itself in delivering factual content, these programs seem to betray its mission and audience. This experience personally foreshadowed today’s post-truth and fake news era. 

We are living in a time of informational deluge. Nowadays, facts are less important than engagement and the result of that seems to be perpetual cycles of outrage with no resolution in sight. In his book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, writer Neil Postman stated that the world we live in resembles Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” more than George Orwell’s “1984”, in that we are inundated with so much information that “we would be reduced to passivity and egoism”. We are currently trying to keep ourselves afloat in this flood, but one cannot help but wonder what will be left in its wake or whether it will be a permanently flooded world. Either way, we will need to evolve new capacities to adapt to these new circumstances.

At the same time, we are also in a climate crisis that would likely lead to a physically flooded world if we continue to dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. By current projections, even if global warming is capped at 2°C, at least 570 cities and 800 million lives will be affected by increased flooding by 2050. Many coastal cities are at risk of becoming completely inundated by 2050, forcing the displacement of about 150 million people. This upcoming reality will not only permanently change geography, but will also have profound impacts on culture, society, economy, and politics. 

As we get rag-dolled by these double deluges, will we sink or swim?

The Enlightenment and the project of modernity sought to achieve a universal understanding of the world through reason. A part of this project included theorizing the goals of various academic pursuits. In Aristotelian terms, this is known as the final cause, which Aristotle used to derive the purpose of any given object or animal. For instance, the webbed feet of a duck has the purpose of wading through water. Another term for this approach to understanding is teleology. Teleology is applied to various fields in modernity to gain clarity of how civilization should proceed. For instance, within the natural sciences, the fields of physics, chemistry and biology differ by their defined goals of inquiry. Physics is concerned with answering questions about matter, motion and energy. If all of the unsolved mysteries of physics are explained (and assuming that no other questions emerge in the field), one can say that physics has ended. To put it another way, this ultimate resolution can be called the “end of physics”. Such proclamations have been made before, not by crackpots but by well-respected experts. Albert Michelson, the first American physicist to receive the Nobel prize, stated in 1894 that within physics, “most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established” and “the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.” Michelson’s claim, therefore, is that physics no longer requires additional explanatory theories and that progress in the field is limited to more precise measurements. (This claim is often misattributed to the British physicist Lord Kelvin.) 

For hundreds of years, philosophers and other intellectuals have made claims to the “end of history”, which is the concept that there is an end-point in the evolution of political, economic and social systems, which manifests itself as the ultimate form of human organization or government. Beyond this “end of history”, major changes in human systems will cease to occur. In his controversial 1989 essay “The End of History?”, Francis Fukuyama claimed that the combination of liberal democracy and market economy seems to be the final form of human organization. He based this theory on the fall of fascism and communism in World War II and the increased liberalization of the market in the USSR respectively. Almost like clockwork, the Berlin Wall fell a few months after his essay was published and the USSR dissolved two years later in 1991. In the remaining years of the 90s and up until the mid-00s, Fukuyama’s idea seems to hold. Even Slavoj Zizek said in 2014 that “in a certain sense, almost all of us were Fukuyamaists” as “most of the left, was not raising fundamental questions… They were just trying to make the existing system more just. And more efficient.” The belief in Fukuyama’s claim may have created a blindness to the effects of neoliberal policies, which contributed to the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. The economist Joseph Stiglitz, responding to Fukuyama, titled a 2019 essay “The end of neoliberalism and the rebirth of history.” It is important, therefore, to be skeptical about suggestions that humanity has reached the final stage of its development. Gradual shifts that occur under our noses and unchallenged assumptions can lead to significant societal upheaval.

A related strain of inevitability is the cynical view that nothing fundamentally changes. In response to the French Revolution of 1848, the French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” He is arguing that sweeping societal change only serves to cement existing injustice and inequality. The phrase rings true to many today in the US, who feel that their government only serves to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Despite being bailed out by US taxpayer money in 2008, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon got a bonus of almost $16 million in 2009. One could argue that it pales in comparison to the $27.8 million that he received in 2007 but it leaves a bad taste, especially for the millions of people who lost their jobs or their homes. However, in the book Factfulness by the physician and statistician Hans Rosling, the world as a whole has improved immensely over the past century. Some of these improvements include a decline in child labor, nuclear weapons and smallpox. 

For some, the fact that the world is improving causes them to believe that there is a natural course that history takes. This position may be best represented by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who (citing the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker) said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” These words inspire hope, but they may also cause people to feel that there is a natural tendency toward universal human progress that is separate from individual or collective agency. A similar form of optimism was criticized by Voltaire in his satirical novel Candide, whose main character became unable to reconcile the suffering that he observed in the world with the Leibnizian optimism that we are living in the “best of all possible worlds.” 

Our discussion leads us back to the intellectual heavyweight who shaped current thought around the “end of history” — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. For Hegel, “World history… represents the development of the spirit’s consciousness of its own freedom and of the consequent realization of this freedom.” This means that he believed that freedom is an essential quality of humanity and that sociocultural evolution will always proceed in a way that increases freedom for all people. Similar to Karr, Hegel was affected by the events of the French Revolution but had an almost opposite interpretation. For Hegel, Napoleon’s conquest of much of Europe was one of many world-historical events that allowed humanity to get closer to the final stage of history. Today, some popular interpretations of Hegel view his work on the philosophy of history as a form of inevitable progress, whereas others claim that agency is central in his work. What is apparent to me is how certain groups of people adopt a somewhat Hegelian explanatory approach to justify certain supposed “inevitabilities”. For instance, the rise of automation and its replacement of human labor is increasingly assumed as inevitable. Why is that the case? To me, this so-called inevitability can be explained by the Friedman doctrine that a company’s only goal is to increase shareholder value. Costs are reduced by cutting jobs and investing in automated production capability, which increases company productivity and ultimately enriches shareholders. Therefore, it is important to question the underlying assumptions of people who sell us their version of the future. When necessary, we have to muster the courage to imagine and actualize our own vision.