The latest New Yorker has an article on modern doomsaying, (registration required) featuring prominently BrainGlutton’s idol, James Howard “the airline industry as we know it will disappear in the next four years” Kunstler. (One of the predictions he is quoted as making in this article.)
This got me thinking: these days, with so many serious global (especially economic) problems in the news, it’s not surprising to me that “end of civilization” prophecies (even ones that DON’T end in “as we know it”) are more popular. With, again, the huge number of confidence-shaking stories prominent recently, why haven’t these prophets gained even more traction than they have? Why do they remain a relatively fringe movement? What would need to happen for them to become more mainstream? Why don’t YOU believe?
(Those first few questions are still relevant for those of you out there who DO believe in at least one such prophecy; if so, switch the “don’t” with “do” in the last one.)
Because until the end of civilization as we know it actually happens, people still have to pay rent, buy groceries, and go to work in the morning to do so. And I’m old enough to have lived through or have read about enough booms and busts to know that neither lasts forever.
You’d have to define “more popular,” because I have the feeling you’re underestimating how much of an audience there is for Mayan Long count bullshit and Peak Oil and the king of them all, Rapture-ism.
I read the same article this evening, so I was thinking about this earlier. Primarily I think people go for this stuff for psychological reasons. People need to believe their lives are consequential in the sweep of history and one of the ways they find that meaning is believing they are in the End Times. (Bonus points if they predict for years that bad things will happen and eventually they’re right one time.) It might also be hard for people to believe that things were ever worse than they are right now, or at whatever their version of the low point is. To remember Pearl Harbor during September 11th, you had to be in your 60s at least, so for everybody in the U.S. under 60, it might’ve seemed like worst time ever. The current economic climate keeps getting compared to the Great Depression, and there are even fewer living people who were around back then. So how could things have possibly been worse than they are now?
I don’t believe in these things because they’re usually nonsense and I understand this kind of thinking has been around for a very long time, so there’s not much chance the doomsayers are correct this time. It’s that simple.
On the production side, there’s a fundamental drive to be Special. Identifying and promoting a doomsday scenario is one way to be Special.
On the recipient side I think there is a fundamental atavistic drive to believe in a Great Cause (and a Great Cause Leader), and TEOTWAWKI doomsday scenarios appeal to that drive. I do not agree that all remain fringe beliefs.
Religion and its various End of the World scenarios fulfill the Great Cause void, but so do ordinary Causes du Jour. I can think of The End of Oil (80s), Y2K (90s) and most recently AGW (aughts) as TEOTWAWKIs whose primary appeal is not a scientific analysis of data–most folks can’t even recite any core data–but rather the ability of the scenario to fulfill a need to believe in a Great Cause.
I find minimal distinction between the behaviours of Believers in Religion and Believers in AGW, for instance.
Well, of course The World As We Know It is going to come to an end. The world’s always changing. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be a bad thing.
Take Peak Oil, for instance. It’s definitely going to come sooner or later: Simple mathematics guarantees that. And a world without cheap oil will certainly look very different from the world we have now. If, when that happens, we haven’t adequately prepared for it, it might get ugly, but if we have adequately prepared for it by then, we won’t even notice that oil’s gone, any more than folks nowadays lament how hard it is to find a good buggy-whip store.
It’s also a strangely comforting thought that the world doesn’t just go on without you like nothing happened if your end coincides with the end of days. It’s difficult to fully conceive of a world without yourself, because your world is a result of your perceptions and thus will end, in a way, when you do, and since most people can’t look as easily over their own horizons as they’d like to think, inferring that you must end only if the world does, too, is just logical in a strange and twisted way.
Also, if there’s a less than total destruction doomsday scenario, I think there’s just a lot of people that secretly yearn for the end of society, because for all the good it’s brought, there is some loss of freedom, as well, and it’s sometimes difficult to see the good when you’re working on your tax returns or have to endure the yells of the fifth angry customer for the morning before you’ve fully metabolized your coffee.
As to why I don’t believe in doomsdayism, well, there just isn’t a single profession with a track record worse than doomsayers, so it’d make more sense to read your horoscope daily, which is at least sometimes right by chance.
Because people have been claiming that the world is going to hell in a handbasket since long before handbaskets were even invented. The history of social commentary is overstuffed with apocalyptic warnings and only the tiniest percentage of them have ever unfolded as predicted. Taking these factors under consideration I’d say our chances of the world continuing to spin on its axis remain better than average.
It is difficult for potential employers to find my references because, after all this time, I’ve left a trail of failed companies. Was that because they couldn’t exist for long after I left? No, but that’s how I like to think of it.
(back to the OP) Y’know how Americans became, after eight years of the Bush administration, immune to the latest scandal? End of Days prophecies did that to us LONG ago. Peak oil? Heard it before. The Rapture? Old news.
And eventually, even all human civilization will end. Probably not for a very long time.
I think people are highly vulnerable to sensationalism. It’s amazing that things like planetary conjunctions get people all in a tizzy and have them fearing the worst. 2012, as far as I know, is supposed to have something to do with Earth’s movement in relation to the galactic plane. I don’t see how it will produce any measurable gravitational effects, much less how it could change civilization (and it certainly won’t get rid of it.) They want to think about exciting, apocalyptic changes, but I doubt most people would even choose that over the relatively mundane lives they have already.
You tell people that Global Warming may lead to disaster some indeterminate time in the near future, they panic and worry to the point of obsession.
You tell people that the End of Days is coming in July, 2010, and the rivers will all run with blood and earthqauakes will devastate civilisation, they relax. It sooths them.
People like certainty. Something fundamental in our nature hates uncertainty. Not knowing will kill you.
End of the world parties and celebrations have gone on for centuries. It is a gift of religion. Year 1000 was the end. Then 2000. Then Hale Bopp. Mayan Calendar etc .etc. etc. There is always something. It is a doomsday Musak system. A boring litany that keeps repeating. Of course they only have to be right once.
I think it also because we have grown up in an age of mass media. As a thirty five year old I have been assured that the world would end in any number of ways over my lifetime. I was told that nuclear war was likely. I was told that during the Carter and early Reagan years that fossil fuels would last another twenty years. I even remember the era of the Japanese buying massive amount of US real estate, leading to the supposed decline of the US and the dominance of the Japanese super economy.
A reasonably intelligent person is much more skeptical than they may have been in the past.