Abstract
Has the scientific vision of an impending doomsday stripped us of hope?
Eschatological visions of the ultimate destiny of the world come in a dazzling array–religious and secular, apocalyptic and gradual. Throughout Christian history, apocalyptic expectations of an imminent end of the world have waxed and waned. The millennial years, 1000 and 2000, were widely favored dates for the beginning of the apocalypse. Catastrophic events, such as the Black Death in 1348 or the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, regularly trigger panic and the expectation that doomsday is dawning.
Today, a vast number of modern Americans, many in high places in government, still believe in the biblical apocalypse. A few statistics: A recent Time/CNN poll indicates that 36 percent of all Americans believe the Bible is God's word and should be taken literally, and 59 percent believe events predicted in the book of Revelation will come to pass.
The schedule of events surrounding the Second Coming varies according to apocalypse buffs. Most probably, the Antichrist will seize power, and life on Earth will be a living hell for those who remain. The good news for born-again Christians is that Jesus will come again briefly and gather His children to be with Him. This Rapture will be accompanied by thunder, lightning, earthquakes, meteors, and other special effects. The graves of the saved will be opened, and the saints of the Lord will be transformed and levitate through ceilings and out the sunroofs of BMWs to meet the Lord in the clouds. Family members will be snatched up from the dinner table, pilots plucked from their planes, lovers interrupted midcourse. Nonbelievers will be left behind.
On Earth, the horrible wrath of God will be poured out upon the Antichrist and his forces. For those left behind, it will be a time so terrible that the Bible says men will “seek death but be unable to find it.” This tribulation will last for seven years, more or less, and will involve a terrible war–Armageddon.
If this all sounds like a bad Bruce Willis movie, before we scoff too loudly, we might consider some of the secular eschatological visions that, unarguably, have been responsible for more death and destruction in the twentieth century than the minor mischief caused by religious visions of the end.
Of the three great mythic-political systems that promised an end to ordinary history and the dawning of utopia, the communist dream of a classless society and the fascist vision of a thousand-year Reich resulted in the deaths of millions before they collapsed. The jury is still out on the American version of the myth of progress. But things are not looking good.
Americans, it seems, are profoundly schizophrenic, split between expecting Jesus to return and simultaneously placing their hopes in a coming triumph of liberal democracy and the market. TV evangelists and Wal-Mart, fundamentalism and modernity cohabit.
For a majority of Americans, the religious foundation for a glorious future has been replaced by the secular myth of progress. The new Prime Mover we expect to lead us into the global empire of milk and honey is not God but a conglomerate composed of technology, markets and corporations, governments, and military. The promised alabaster city undimmed by human tears has gradually morphed into the Mall of America.
The best part of the triumphant future promised by the evangelists of progress is that it is already here. The end of history has arrived. In his now-famous book The End of History, Francis Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy is the final form of government and the end point of mankind's ideological evolution. In the last century it has conquered all its rivals–monarchy, fascism, and communism.
“If we looked beyond liberal democracy and markets, there was nothing else toward which we could expect to evolve because they are the only political system that satisfies individuals' desire for recognition and dignity. Hence the end of history,” he wrote.
Of course, there are rearguard movements such as Al Qaeda that are profoundly threatened by liberal democratic values. But time is on the side of modernity because it has created the only viable civilization in which people actually want to live.
What should we make of this secular eschatology? Are we the new messiahs ushering in the final stage of evolution, the harbingers of the secular utopia toward which all human life has been struggling through the dark eons of history? Are we the last humans, the expected ones, the culmination of the dialectic of history?
During the last year, the Bulletin convened leading international experts to discuss a range of contemporary doomsday scenarios. We present a sampling of their views throughout this report:
About four years ago, I moved out of the city. I started to drive a lot in the countryside and found that there's usually a lot of fog–and I thought this is an interesting metaphor for our relationship to the future. When you're driving in the fog and you've got your high beams on at night, it's just a white wall in front of you, it's impenetrable. The lights are like the best experts that we can manage, but all that happens is that the light shines on this fog, and it creates this kind of white noise in front of you. I really think that to a large extent our experts generate a lot of noise and don't really provide us with a lot of foresight. And not only can't we see very far, we're also driving too fast.
This is an argument for what I call a prospective mind. Fundamentally, we need to develop the capacity to deal with multiple contingencies. We're not assuming that this is going to happen or that's going to happen, but that we can deal with a variety of potential surprises, even ones that we haven't thought of before. This is all about maximizing system resilience; perhaps being less obsessive about efficiency because ultimately we have to pay a little price in efficiency to build up our capacity to be resilient to surprises in the future.
But it's not just about our relationship to the future in terms of trying to see into the white wall; we're also going too fast. That's an issue that's much harder for us to tackle because the forces that are driving the acceleration of change on the planet are very, very powerful: technological change, still-growing population, rapid economic development, huge increases in carbon output into the atmosphere. These are drivers that are forcing us faster and faster into that white wall, even though we can't see properly.
So somehow we need to think about not just building in resilience, but also reducing the rate of acceleration of our society's forward movement into these problems.
There are, it seems, some flies in Fukuyama's ointment. The nostrum he suggests–technology-democracy-markets–is creating wealth for the few and discomfort for the many. The medicine has potentially lethal side effects. Progress and doomsday may be inseparable Siamese twins.
It is not difficult to suggest a threat index that signals the approach of a secular doomsday without rapture. Nuclear proliferation, for one. Since 1945, the nuclear club has grown from one to nine, with potentially 20 to 30 more nations and an unknown number of terrorist groups bidding for membership. Numberless fingers on nuclear buttons in a volatile political climate marked by the practice of jihad and suicide bombing makes a holocaust seem highly likely. Doomsday with a bang. Destruction without redemption for the good, the bad, the innocent, and the guilty.
Unregulated consumption of petroleum and other resources necessary to fuel an expanding global market economy and provide for the needs of a swelling population portends increased pollution of the environment and unchecked global warming. A projected world population of 9 billion by 2042, all of whom feel entitled to the American style of consumption, threatens environmental catastrophe, a world ending not with a bang but a whimper.
In a brilliant and disturbing article that appeared in the journal Postmodern Culture in 1996, “The Slow Apocalypse: A Gradualistic Theory of the World's Demise,” Andrew McMurray argues that the four horsemen of the modern apocalypse–arms proliferation, environmental degradation, the crisis of meaning, and the malignant global economy–are already riding roughshod over the Earth. The Bomb has already fallen. The stealth apocalypse is well under way, and the advanced nations lack the collective will to acknowledge and do anything about our precarious situation. McMurray concludes that humankind's hyper-complex civilization may be nothing more than an evolutionary blind alley. “Who,” he asks, “says the human presence on this Earth was ever sustainable?”
Has the secular vision of an impending doomsday finally stripped us of hope and left us with nothing but clear-eyed despair? Are science, technology, and the global economy driven by an insane creativity we are powerless to harness? Clearly, we have failed to wrestle with the demonic possibilities of science and technology that J. Robert Oppenheimer foresaw when he warned, following the explosion of the first atomic bomb, “Physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”
Are there religious and theological concepts that can speak meaningfully to the present peril without invoking the phantasmagorical apocalyptic vision of the Christian right?
From the beginning of the Christian era, apocalyptic eschatology has existed alongside realized eschatology, a view that the kingdom of God is not a future event but a new spiritual reality that is present in the heart of ordinary history. This view is central to the Gospel of John and to the Gospel of Thomas, in which the disciples ask Jesus when the kingdom will come. Jesus replies: “It will not come by watching for it…. Rather, the father's kingdom is spread out upon the Earth, and people do not see it.”
These days the advocates of realized eschatology tend to call themselves progressive Christians, and they easily make common cause with like-minded Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists. Their emphasis is on the social gospel–the struggle for justice, for an end to poverty, and the elimination of nuclear weapons. Unlike the hard-core apostles of doomsday, they believe humans have the power to mold and transform the future. We are free to do a new thing because the God of creation has placed the fate of Earth in our hands.
One of the more hopeful recent developments is a new ecological awareness among evangelical Christians who are beginning to react to the crisis of our age by becoming green–advocates for creating a sustainable way of life. If “the earth is the Lord's and the fullness there of …,” they reason, Christians have an obligation to prevent the desecration of the creation.
Any theory, religious or secular, that views doomsday as a fate we cannot avoid is a counsel of despair that serves to justify a resignation of responsibility. Neither the supposed intervention of the deus ex machina to bring history to an end, nor the supposed iron laws of economics and power politics that suggest nuclear war and ecological destruction are inevitable, should be used as an excuse to do nothing. The end of the story of human history has not yet been written.
The four horsemen of the modern apocalypse are riding roughshod over Earth. The Bomb has already fallen. The stealth apocalypse is well under way, and the advanced nations lack the collective will to do anything about our precarious situation.
Some years ago, the New Yorker ran a cartoon that pictured a long-haired, bearded prophet wearing a sandwich board on which was written: “The world is not coming to an end! You will have to learn to cope.” Not a bad maxim for troubled times.