Earth Abides

In Part 2, Chapter 1, Ish reflects on how civilization was “built up” by planning, striving, exploration, and acquiring mastery (160). Ish is aware that these values created and sustained modern technological society. At play here is the trope of history as civilization’s progress, growing slowly out of “primitive” social organization, religion, culture, technology, and values. The return of ancestral traits—as midcentury America conceived of it—is called atavism, and it is atavism that Ish fears but ultimately learns to accept.

In Part 1, Chapter 5, Ish sees a light bulb’s filament burn out: “‘The lights are going out. The lights of the world!’ he thought and he felt like a child going alone into the dark” (89). The symbolism is evident: The electric light of technology and enlightenment is disappearing, leaving humankind in the darkness, reduced again to a state of immaturity and fear: new dark ages. This is Ish’s worry and the fate he struggles against. However, there are signs from the beginning that the regression is inevitable if not salutary: Even calling the group the “Tribe” refers obviously to pre-modern societies. This particular connotation in the word is also apt in drawing from the many years in which anthropologists exalted Western cultures above all other ways of life.