Learning to Live With Armageddon

Yeah, yeah, 2012, the Singularity, economic collapse, what else you got?

when it comes to world cataclysm I say, ‘put up or shut up’

I am not a particularly old man, but even so I’ve already lived through more than one doomsday scenario. I can remember, for example, ducking under my kindergarten desk in drills intended to preserve me during nuclear attack and I witnessed the rise of sunscreen thanks to the thinning of the ozone layer and water has always been scarce and various toxic wastes and carcinogens have poisoned my environment and somehow I avoided ebola and tuberculosis and cholera and let’s not forget the 17 years I spent as a fundamentalist Christian, absolutely convinced that a wrathful God was poised to unleash Armageddon and reader, I promise you, I worried about all these things intensely and discussed them earnestly in coffee shops and classrooms and read the books and watched the PBS specials and frankly, I’m done: when it comes to world cataclysm I say, ‘put up or shut up’. So near as I can tell, the world has always been going to hell in a hand basket, and yet it never gets there, quite.

And we are not the first generation to cope with such a proliferation of threats, either. 14th century Europe quailed under the onslaught of what they took to be worldwide plague, the world’s various holy books betray an unhealthy fascination with divine mass murder and various native peoples in all times and places have interpreted omens in the most dire possible manner. It’s almost as if humans have a genetic propensity to believe the worst possible future scenario and this even makes evolutionary sense; after all, paranoia is a useful survival skill.

The fashionable world ending scenario nowadays is of course global warming, unless you prefer agricultural collapse due to honeybee decline or biological collapse due to extinction of keystone species. And yet, here I am: though the planet appears to be in its death throes, again, I continue to exist in reasonable comfort, as do most of my acquaintances, and I have every expectation of living out a typical human life span. As a sage of my acquaintance sometimes asks, “Why is the view out my front window less meaningful than the view on TV?”

I’m not suggesting that everything is rosy, that humans around the world aren’t dealing with serious difficulties, and I’m certainly not suggesting that your particular crusade, whatever it is, isn’t right and holy and urgent or that I won’t contribute to your fundraiser, whatever it happens to be this week. But I am suggesting that humans in general, and you and me in particular, are predisposed to fear apocalypse, to assume that our world is about to collapse. And when selecting our paranoid obsessions, it may be a good idea to keep this in mind.

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Tagged as: Armageddon, belief systems, philosophy, weird beliefs