Apocalypse Not Now

Written by a disbeliever in the Day of Judgment and the End of the World
http://www.brown.edu/Students/Issues_Magazine/1096/1096apoc.html

"This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper." -T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men" "As the end of the world approaches, errors increase, terrors multiply, iniquity increases, infidelity increases; the light, in short . . is very often extinguished; this darkness of enmity brethren increases, daily increases, and Jesus has not yet come." -Augustine, Fifth Century With the specter of the year 2000 approaching, we seem to be behaving like characters in a Beckett play. Struggling against the increasing absurdity of our lives, we wait in hope for the arrival of our own Godot, of something or someone, anything that will give our existence some kind of meaning, of rational explanation. Although this phenomenon is not new, the recent proliferation of apocalyptic culture in the media has brought the “millennium spirit” to haunt us again. Just open a newspaper to experience the current state of despair: dramatic predictions for world demography, the rise of political totalitarianism, genocidal ethnic purification, religious fundamentalism, uncontrollable urbanization, the destruction of ecology, constant nuclear threats, the spread of AIDS, terrorism, and the list goes on. Now, the latest crisis is the National Federal Reserve’s hyped attempt to restructure its computer database to avoid confusing the year 1900 with the year 2000, both represented by the ’00 symbol. In general, we seem to be reviving the deeply-rooted Judeo-Christian apprehension of the famous apocalypse foreshadowed in the Old Testament. Described as a phase of evil, disorder and chaos ruled by the Antichrist, the apocalypse was believed to be a transitory but necessary step to the kingdom of God. Our fear of the coming millennium is, however, somewhat different from the apocalypse paranoia of previous years. Although the events announced by the Bible for this period were primarily gloomy, the final outcome was believed to be one of rebirth and redemption-as suggested by the term “apocalypse” itself, which comes from the Greek apokalypsis, or “revelation.” The ambiguity of the term “end,” meaning both the termination and the goal of humanity, thus leads to a double interpretation of the apocalypse as not only as a vision of disaster, but also as the final stage of development of the Hegelian “World Spirit.” But if Hegel’s conception of history as a form of continuity or progress is already problematic within the framework of German idealist philosophy, it is even harder to endorse his optimism in our current world order, or actually, “world disorder.” Besides, the binary oppositions such as thesis/antithesis that were at the core of this philosophical discourse have been shattered by poststructuralism. Today, Baudelaire’s description of modernism as “the transitory, the fleeting and the contingent” seems more appropriate to describe our present. The truth, is we really don’t have that many values left-besides, perhaps, the notion of decadence acquired since the fin de siècle. In fact, our current generation’s value system is so empty and confused that we can’t even find a decent name for ourselves, and are resigned to carry the sad flag of “Generation X.” Is there indeed any hope for we who come of age at the turn of the next millennium, or is this really the end of the world? Around the year 1000, a series of traumatic events allegedly took place, and medievalist experts are still debating them today. Some-like historian Georges Duby, who reduced the year 1000 to a “mirage historique”-consider that apocalyptic fears were in fact conceived only around the fifteenth century to stress the glory of the Renaissance and to oppose it to the “barbarism” of the Middle Ages. Others, however, have insisted that the profound crises of the year 1000 reflected a deeper social anxiety concerning the future. In the fifth century, Augustine explained, “As the end of the world approaches, errors increase, terrors multiply, inequity increases, infidelity increases; the light, in short É is very often extinguished; this darkness of enmity brethren increases, daily increases, and Jesus has not yet come.” Indeed, the end of the last millennium was marked not only by political instability-the Carolingian dynasty ended in 987-but also by widespread religious insecurity. The constant doctrinal revisions of the Roman Catholic Church, the apocalyptic visions of the Sibylline Oracles, and the Biblical promise of an Antichrist and a Last udgment led to the development of a new science: eschatology, the theology of death and final destiny. The manifestations of popular apocalyptic fears during the Middle Ages were actually surprisingly “modern,” in the sense that they have many parallels in today’s society. In medieval Europe, for example, large-scale religious revivals were oriented around the ingestion of ergots, a hallucinogenic poison known to induce visions of heaven or hell. In its chemical structure ergots was a precursor of LSD, and just as LSD became a cult object in the sixties, ergots was idealized at the time as the sacer ignis, the “holy fire.” Both ergots and acid were meant to bring about a painfully slow, yet never entirely reached, Prometheus-like death, an eternal state of beatitude as proclaimed by both Revelations (“men will seek death and shall not find it”) and by the Woodstock credo of “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Another phenomenon of the last millenium was a group called the “Peace of God” which consisted of knights and armed peasants who, disregarding their class differences, gathered in open fields to organize a religious and political restoration of order. In a sense, these movements were very similar to today’s fundamentalist sects, which also proclaim the imminent end of the world and present mass gatherings around a central figure as the only way to prevent it. The year 1000 also saw a propagation of penitence acts such as fasting, self-destroying projects comparable to the mass suicides of some contemporary sects, or to their sado-masochistic internal dynamics. Moreover, the rhetoric of certain American fundamentalist leaders- watch Sunday morning television!- appears as a striking contemporary version of Christian millenarian discourse. A somewhat less serious modern version of the medieval “Peace of God” can be found on the Internet, especially on web pages and chat groups. Organizations such as the Millennium Alliance allow concerned individuals to converse and try to find practical solutions to the problem of the apocalypse. Another, called “Millennium Matters,” describes itself as “a cyber community of individuals who seek a greater understanding and perspective regarding the changes taking place in ourselves and on Mother Earth.” Today, we are realizing that our way of dealing with these insecurities has hardly changed in its essence; we are still desperate for some sort of “group communion,” some expression of unity in a world ravaged by the excesses of individualism. However, when one compares the turn of the previous millennium to this coming one, there seems to be a fundamental element missing in our lives today. Indeed, if the approach of the apocalypse around the year 1000 was certainly a frightful and dreaded prospect, there was always the hope of rebirth in the kingdom of God. Currently, though, we are at the climax of an iconoclastic religious crisis in which, after so many years of punishing even the slightest attempt of visually representing God, we have come to the publication of his (or her) biography, now figuring on the New York Times best-seller list. Today, the phoenix-like image of revival somehow doesn’t seem to work as well, and the messianic hope of a post-apocalypse “golden age” just doesn’t do the trick anymore. Sentenced to carry around our complex set of paradoxes that have now taken the place of religious faith, we can only wonder, “what is left for our future?” In his recently-published Millennium, historian Felipe Fern‡ndez-Armesto claims to have had a “vision of some galactic museum of the distant future in which diet Coke will share with coats of chain mail a single small vitrine marked ‘Planet Earth, 1000-2000, Christian Era.’” So how exactly did chain mail coats turn into diet Coke? What was at the origin of this cheap alchemy which turned representations of chivalrous honor into body-obsessed calorie counting? Francis Fukuyama tries to explain our decade’s feeling of emptiness by proclaiming that the cessation of ideological conflicts-mainly East/West-has brought about the end of history. But then again, are we meant to be satisfied by Fukuyama’s claim that the only valid system left is liberal democracy of the market-economy type, what he calls “the best possible solution to the human problem?” Isn’t it in fact isolation and the struggle for recognition, all products of individualism, that are at the heart of this “human problem,” this condition humaine as Malraux baptized it? It is ironic to realize that at the end of the millennium, after so many agreements and disagreements in philosophy, we appear to be back at the starting point of Socratic wisdom in acknowledging that “the only thing we know is that we don’t know anything.” We’re back to that old quest theme, and paradoxically, the promise of an end becomes somewhat comforting as it provides a specific aim for society to work towards. Furthermore, it allows us to justify the apocalypse syndrome, now rooted in our culture. The instant popularity of futurology shouldn’t, then, come as a surprise. It is only the modern version of eschatology, or the confirmation of Jean Baudrillard’s statement that “history and the end of history are up for sale.” How appropriate for the age of capitalism! Competing in the arena of future speculation are astrology, numerology, tarot, scientific analysis, economic theory, philosophy, New Age, and even Internet speculation. Everything works as long as it’s an explanation. The “Apocalypse Now” website, for example provides a fascinating account of every “catastrophe” ranging from earthquakes and volcanoes to teenage drug use. Its opening message reads, “Click on the Eye. Yes, go ahead; click on the Eye. You will be Illuminated,” followed by the juxtaposition of numbers representing the world population and the national debt. Jacques Derrida once referred to postmodernism as an “apocalypse without a vision.” Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, describes man-as the protagonist of history-as a figure in the sand soon to be erased by the ocean tide. Even worse, in “Hystericizing the Millennium,” Baudrillard claims that there is no such thing as a joyous or tragic resolution of history because “there is no end to anything and everything will continue to take place in a slow, fastidious, recurring and all-encompassing hysterical manner-like hair and nails continue to grow after death.” And yet, we don’t let pessimism take over. Armed with an indestructible faith in history and its telos, we compromise with what we have left. OK, so maybe God isn’t going to come save us and show us the light, but Pamela Lee Anderson did a pretty good job at it in Barb Wire. Perhaps the American dream is getting further away everyday, but at least the US is still able to stop an alien attack in Independence Day. Like the Aztecs, who believed that they had to practice the ritual of human sacrifice for the sun to keep moving and the universe to continue existing, we make sure that we provide our cosmos with enough blood and violence, filtered through the machinery of the TV screen. We have forged a pop culture that represents our own new cultural mythology. Most importantly, we have trained it to spoon-feed us images of utopia and ideals that we cling to, that we need as an intellectual stimulation to imagine the future, to provide us with a possibility of future. What is unique at the end of this millennium is our new incredulous approach to history, our skepticism before the future and the way we embrace the irony of our fundamentally tragic destiny. We have learned to lower our standards and to laugh at ourselves: instead of dwelling upon the mistakes of Adam or Eve, we are slowly accepting our flaws and opening new alternatives. Recycling our past (in fashion, in music, in trendsÉ) becomes a form of mastering it that seeks to compensate for our lack of control over our future. Is it nostalgia that we crave, or “nostalgia for the future?” Perhaps it is nostalgia for the never-fulfilled utopia that gets further away everyday, as if we were watching it from the mirror of our car, an image perturbed by the inscription: “objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.” So then, the year 2000 will probably not be a return to the Biblical golden age, and it will not likely be up to the level of Nostradamus-like predictions of the end of the world. Most certainly, the future will only be a continuation of our eternal debates and questioning, our internal contradictions and our systematic reaction against everything we held as a truth or a value in the past. Our parents accuse us of apathy; we prefer to call it cynicism or realism. And besides, the future is open: no more guilt, remorse, panic, or “preventive psychosis,” as Baudrillard calls it. Liberated from the anxieties of the Last Judgment, maybe one day we will decide to take control over our lives again, to “choose life,” as Renton in Trainspotting would say. Anyway, maybe... Actually, “definitely maybe...” Autumn 1996