Apocalypse (En Sabah Nur): The god who mistook evolution for a cull

The first scene of X-Men: Apocalypse (Bryan Singer, 2016) takes place in Egypt in 3600 BC. A crowd fills a pyramid to watch its god change bodies. The old mutant En Sabah Nur lies down beside a younger man and, in a ceremony of light, takes over that body to gain its power to heal. Meanwhile, a group of conspirators shouts “Death to the false god!” and brings the structure down. His four followers die and he is buried alive under the stone. He wakes up in Cairo in 1983, with Oscar Isaac’s face, absorbs what the television sets are saying about superpowers and nuclear weapons, and draws his conclusion: the weak have taken the Earth. He is Apocalypse, Marvel’s great mutant villain. Writer Louise Simonson and artist Jackson Guice created him, he debuted in X-Factor in 1986, he presents himself as the first mutant, born some five thousand years ago, and he lives by a single creed: survival of the fittest.

// The theoryWhat Darwin did not say

Evolutionary criminology was born from a book: Homicide (1988), by the psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson. Their thesis is that homicide is not randomly distributed but follows patterns that fit the logic of natural selection. Most violent deaths are caused by young men against other young men, in disputes over status, respect or partners, which the two authors had called the young male syndrome in 1985. David Buss extended the idea in The Murderer Next Door (2005). But the theory is descriptive: it explains why certain impulses survived, not that we should obey them. The phrase Apocalypse keeps repeating is not even Darwin’s. “Survival of the fittest” was coined by the philosopher Herbert Spencer in 1864, and Darwin adopted it in 1869, in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, as a synonym for natural selection. The political use of that phrase, the idea that ruthless competition between people, classes or nations is natural and therefore good, later got a name: social Darwinism, popularized by the historian Richard Hofstadter in 1944.

// The subjectThe judge of the species

In the comics, Apocalypse first appears in X-Factor #5 and #6 (1986), as the shadow steering the Alliance of Evil to capture Michael Nowlan, a mutant able to amplify the powers of others. Editor Bob Harras would later recall that the character arrived with a clear agenda, survival of the fittest, and with a new threat for mutants: someone who would judge them on their genetic worth, and who would destroy the weak whether they were mutants or not. The second moment comes in X-Factor #24 to #26 (1988), within the Fall of the Mutants saga. Apocalypse offers the team a place at his side in his evolutionary war against humans, and when they refuse, he introduces his Four Horsemen. One of them, Death, is their old teammate Angel, whom they believed dead after he lost his wings and whom Apocalypse has remade in his own image, with sharp metal wings. Then he unleashes the Horsemen on New York.

The third moment is his utopia fulfilled. In Age of Apocalypse (1995), an alternate timeline in which Charles Xavier dies young, Apocalypse conquers North America and organizes the “cullings,” extermination campaigns that kill millions of humans. The film condenses that program into three gestures. He takes Magneto to Auschwitz, the camp where his parents were killed, presents himself as the one who was there every time the forest of civilization needed a fire to renew itself, and teaches him to tear the camp out of the ground. Then he seizes Xavier and Cerebro to force the great powers to launch all their nuclear missiles into space, so that no one can interfere. Finally, he speaks to the planet through Xavier’s mind to tell the most powerful that the Earth will be theirs. (Spoiler warning.) Xavier manages to change the end of the message: those with the greatest power, he says, must protect those without. Storm and Magneto turn against Apocalypse, and Jean Grey burns him to ashes.

// The crackA villain too convenient for the theory

Apocalypse does evolutionary criminology a dubious favor. On the one hand, he shows clearly what the theory is not: Daly and Wilson never said violence was good because it was ancient, and much of their work shows how much it depends on circumstances, because violence rises where competing for status pays off and falls when the environment changes. On the other hand, the character is a reminder of why the theory arouses so much distrust. Social Darwinism served as an alibi for forced sterilization laws, for scientific racism and for the racial hygiene policies of the twentieth century, and any biological explanation of violence carries that shadow. As early as 1902, the naturalist Peter Kropotkin replied in Mutual Aid that cooperation is also a factor of evolution. The film, without meaning to, proves him right: Apocalypse is not defeated by the strongest, but by a group acting together and by two of his Horsemen who decide to switch sides.

Nor does it help to dismiss him as a madman. His logic is that of many real perpetrators of mass violence, who rarely see themselves as murderers and almost always as surgeons: they clean, purify and prune what is left over. In the film, talking to Storm, he hesitates between two verbs, purge and save, as if they were the same. Explaining Apocalypse is not excusing him. That natural selection shaped our impulses does not make anyone its executioner, and whoever appoints himself arbiter of the species is not obeying nature: he is making a decision, and that decision is his own.