Last week’s discussion of failed predictions in the peak oil
movement inevitably touched on the latest round of claims that the world as we
know it is going to come to a full stop sometime very soon. That was inevitable
partly because these claims account for a fairly large fraction of the
predictions made by peak oil writers each year, and partly because those same
claims flop so reliably. Still, there’s another factor, which is that this sort
of apocalypse fandom has become increasingly popular of late—as well as
increasingly detached from the world the rest of us inhabit.
Late last year, for example, I was contacted by a person who
claimed to be a media professional and wanted to consult with me about an
apocalypse-themed video he was preparing to make. As I think most of my readers
know, I make my living as a writer, editor, and occasional consultant, and
so—as one professional to another—my wife, who is also my business manager,
sent him back a polite note asking what sort of time commitment he was
interested in and how much he was offering to pay. We got back a tirade
accusing me of being too cheap to save the world, followed not long thereafter
by another email in which he insisted that he couldn’t afford to pay anyone
because his project would inevitably be the least popular video in history;
after all, he claimed, nobody wants to hear about how the world as we know it
is about to crash into ruin.
That was when I sat back on the couch and very nearly
laughed myself into hiccups, because there’s nothing Americans like better than
a good loud prediction of imminent doom. From Jonathan Edwards’ famous 1741
sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” right through to today’s zombie
apocalypse craze, a good number of the biggest pop-culture phenomena in
American history have focused on the end of the world in one way or another. A
first-rate example is the 2012 furore, which turned a nonexistent Mayan
prophecy of doom into one of the most successful media cash cows in recent
times. I can testify from personal experience that toward the end of the last
decade, every publisher I know of with a presence in the New Age market was
soliciting 2012-themed books from all their regular authors because that was
the hottest market going.
The 2012 prophecy may have been a predictive failure, in
other words, but it was a whopping financial success. With that in mind, among
other things, I predicted shortly after December 21, 2012 that a new date for
the end of everything would soon be selected, and would promptly attract the
same enthusiasm as its predecessor. As noted in a
post last May, that was one of my more successful predictions; the
new date is 2030, and it’s already picking up the same eager attention that
made 2012 such a lucrative gimmick.
One of the great innovations of the runup to 2012, which
will probably continue to shape apocalyptic fads for some time to come, is that
you don’t actually have to propose a specific mechanism of doom; all you need
is a date. The architect of the 2012 phenomenon, the late Jose Arguelles, seems
to have been the marketing genius who first realized this. His 1984 book The Mayan
Factor, which launched the furore on its way, insisted that something
really, truly amazing was going to happen on December 21, 2012, without
offering more than vague hints about what that amazing event might be. Those
who piled onto the bandwagon he set in motion more than made up for Arguelles’
reticence, coming up with a flurry of predictions about what was going to
happen on that day.
It didn’t matter that most of these predictions contradicted
one another, and none of them rested on any logic more solid than, hey, we know
something amazing is going to happen on that day, so here’s some speculation,
with or without cherrypicked data, about what the amazing event might be. The pileup of predictions, all by itself,
made the date itself sound more convincing to a great many people. Far from
incidentally, it also offered believers a convenient source of shelter from
skepticism: if a nonbeliever succeeded
in disproving a hundred different claims about what was supposed to happen on
the big day, a hundred and first claim would inevitably pop up as soon as he
turned his back, so that the believers could keep on believing that the world
as we know it was indeed going to end as scheduled.
The same logic is already being deployed with equal verve on
behalf of a 2030 doomsday. So far, without making any particular effort to find
them, I’ve fielded claims that on or by that year, global warming will spin out
of control, driving humanity into extinction; oceanic acidification will kill
off all the phytoplankton, crashing oxygen levels in the atmosphere and driving
humanity into extinction; the supervolcano underneath Yellowstone Park will
erupt, plunging the planet into a volcanic winter and driving humanity into
extinction; an asteroid will come spinning out of space and driving humanity into
extinction, and so on. I haven’t yet
seen anyone proclaim that 2030 will see the Earth swallowed whole by a gigantic
space walrus with photon flippers, but no doubt it’s simply a matter of time.
Now of course it’s possible to raise hard questions about
each of these claims—well, in fact, it’s more than possible, it’s easy, since
none of them rely on more than a few fringe studies on the far end of
scientific opinion, if that, and most of them quietly ignore the fact that
greenhouse-gas spikes, oceanic acidification, and nearly everything else but
the aforementioned space walrus have occurred before in the planet’s history
without producing the results that are being expected from them this time
around. I’ll be taking the time to raise some of those questions, and offer
some answers for them grounded in solid science, in a series of posts I’ll
start later this year. Still, fans and promoters of the 2030 fad have nothing
to fear from such exercises; like the legendary hydra, a good apocalypse fad
can sprout additional heads at will to replace those that are chopped off by
critics.
Thus it’s pretty much baked into the cake at this point that
2030 will be the new 2012, and that we can count on another sixteen years of
increasingly overheated claims clustering around that date before it, too,
slips by and a new date has to be found.
We’ll be discussing the trajectory of the resulting furore from time to
time on this blog, if only because there’s a certain wry amusement to be gained
from watching people make epic fools of themselves. Still, the point I want to raise this week is
a little different. Granted that apocalypse fandom is an enduring feature of
American pop culture, that very few people ever lost money or failed to attract
an audience by insisting that the end is nigh, that a huge and well-oiled
marketing machine lost its cash cow when 2012 passed without incident and thus
has every reason to pile into the next apocalypse fad with redoubled
enthusiasm: even so, why should fantasies of imminent doom attract so much
larger an audience now than ever before, and play so much more central a role
in the contemporary imagination of the future?
There are, as I see it, at least four factors involved.
The first is a habit of collective thought I spent much of
last year discussing—the widespread popular conviction, amounting to religious
faith, that today’s industrial civilization is an unstoppable juggernaut that
will keep rolling onwards forever unless some even more gargantuan catastrophe
mashes it flat to the dust. That conviction, as I’ve noted in previous posts,
is not confined to those who are cheering the march of progress. Plenty of people who claim that they hate
industrial civilization and all its works are as convinced as any cornucopian
that it’s certain to keep moving along its current trajectory, until it finally
vanishes on the horizon of whatever grand or dreadful destiny it’s supposed to
have this week.
As a heretic and a dissenter from that secular faith, I’ve repeatedly watched
otherwise thoughtful people engage in the most spectacular mental backflips to
avoid noticing that perpetual progress and overnight annihilation aren’t the
only possible futures for the modern industrial world. What’s more, a great
many people seem to be getting more fervent in their faith in progress, not
less so, as the onward march of progress just mentioned shows increasing signs
of grinding to a halt. That’s a common feature in social psychology; it’s
precisely when a popular belief system starts failing to explain everyday
experiences that people get most passionate about treating it as unquestionable
fact and shouting down those who challenge it. Believing that our civilization
and our species will be gone by 2030 feeds into this, since that belief makes it
much easier to brush aside the uncomfortable awareness that progress is over
and faith in industrial society’s omnipotence has turned out to be utterly
misplaced.
That’s one reason why apocalyptic fantasies are so popular
these days. A second reason, which I’ve also discussed at some length in this
blog, is the role such fantasies have in justifying inaction, when action
involves significant personal costs. One of the hard facts of our present
predicament is that the steps that have to be taken to get ready for the future
bearing down on us all require letting go of the privileges and perquisites
that most Americans consider theirs by right. A few years ago, I coined the
acronym LESS—Less Energy, Stuff, and Stimulation—to summarize the changes that
we’re all going to have to make as things proceed, and began pointing out that
any response to our predicament that doesn’t start with using LESS simply isn’t
serious.
I’m pleased to say that a certain fraction of my readers
have taken that advice seriously, and tackled the uncomfortable job of
downsizing their dependence on the absurd amounts of energy, stuff, and
artificial stimulation that are involved in an ordinary American lifestyle
these days. I’m equally pleased to say that an even larger number of people who
don’t read The Archdruid Report and don’t know me from Hu
Gadarn’s off ox have gotten to work doing the same thing. Those people are
going to be in a much better position not merely to weather the crises ahead,
but to help their loved ones, friends and neighbors do the same thing, and
potentially also contribute to the preservation of the more useful achievements
of the last few centuries. Still, it’s hard work, and it also requires a
willingness to step outside the conventional wisdom of our society, which
claims to be open to new and innovative ideas but in practice tolerates only
endless rehashings of the same old notions.
Inevitably, a good many people who sense the necessity of
change won’t act on that awareness because they realize the personal costs
involved. Fantasies of imminent doom provide an escape hatch from the resulting
cognitive dissonance. If the world is going to crash into ruin soon anyway, the
reasoning runs, it’s easy to excuse further wallowing in the benefits the
American system currently gives to its more privileged inmates, and any
remaining sense that something is wrong can be redirected onto whatever
cataclysm du jour the true believer in apocalypse happens to fancy. Believing that the end is nigh thus allows
people to have their planet and eat it too—or, more to the point, to convince
themselves that they can keep on chomping away on what’s left of the planet for
just a little while longer.
The third factor, which relates to the second one, unfolds
from the historical tragedy of the Baby Boom generation, which is massively
overrepresented in apocalypse fandom just now.
The Boomers were among the most idealistic generations in US history,
but they were also far and away the most privileged, and the conflict between
those two influences has defined much of their trajectory through time.
Starting when the Sixties youth culture crashed and burned, the Boomers have
repeatedly faced forced choices between their ideals and their privileges. Each time, the majority of Boomers—there have
always been noble exceptions—chose to cling to their privileges, and then spent
the next decade or so insisting at the top of their lungs that their ideals
hadn’t been compromised by that choice.
Thus the early 1970s were enlivened by the loud insistence
of former hippies, as they cut their hair and donned office clothing to take up
the corporate jobs they’d vowed never to accept, that they were going to change
the system from within. (Even at the time, that was generally recognized as a
copout, but it was a convenient one and saw plenty of use.) By the 1980s, many
of these same former hippies were quietly voting for Ronald Reagan and his
allies because the financial benefits of Reagan’s borrow-and-spend policies
were just too tempting to pass up, though they insisted all the while that they
would put part of the windfall into worthy causes. Rinse and repeat, and today
you’ve got people who used to be in the environmental movement pimping for
nuclear power and GMOs, because the conserver lifestyles they were praising to
the skies forty years ago have become unthinkable for them today.
One consequence of these repeated evasions has been an
ongoing drumbeat of books and other media proclaiming as loudly as possible
that that the Baby Boom generation would change the world just by existing,
without having to accept the hard work and sacrifices that changing the world
actually entails. From 1972’s The Greening of America right
on down to the present, this sort of literature has been lucrative and lavishly
praised, but the great change never quite got around to happening and, as the
Boomers head step by step toward history’s exit door, there’s no reason to
think it ever will.
Perhaps the saddest of all these works came from the
once-fiery pen of the late Theodore Roszak, whose 1969 book The Making
of a Counter Culture played a significant role in shaping the Boomer
generation’s self-image. His last book, The Making of an Elder
Culture, expressed a wistful hope that once the Boomers retired, they
would finally get around to fulfilling the expectations he’d loaded on them all
those years ago. Of course they haven’t, and they won’t, because doing so would
put their pensions and comfortable retirements at risk. Mutatis mutandis,
that’s why the Age of Aquarius turned out to be a flash in the pan: “Let’s change the system, but keep the
privileges we get from it” reliably works out in practice to “Let’s not change
the system.”
The expectation of imminent apocalypse is the despairing
counterpoint to the literature just described. Instead of insisting that the
world would shortly become Utopia (and no action on the part of Boomers is
needed to cause this), it insists that the world will shortly become the
opposite of Utopia (and no action on the part of Boomers is capable of
preventing this). This serves the purpose of legitimizing inaction at a time
when action would involve serious personal costs, but there’s more to it than
that; it also feeds into the Boomer habit of insisting on the cosmic importance
of their own experiences. Just as normal
adolescent unruliness got redefined in Boomer eyes as a revolution that was
going to change the world, the ordinary experience of approaching mortality is
being redefined as the end of everything—after all, the universe can’t just go
on existing after the Boomers are gone, can it?
It’s thus surely no accident that 2030 is about the time the middle of
the Baby Boom generation will be approaching the end of its statistically
likely lifespan.
The three factors just listed all have a major role in
fostering the apocalypse fandom that plays so large a part in today’s popular
culture and collective imagination. Still, I’ve come to think that a fourth
factor may actually be the most significant of all.
To grasp that fourth factor, I’d like to encourage my
readers to engage in a brief thought experiment. Most people these days have
noticed that for the last decade or so, each passing year has seen a broad
worsening of conditions on a great many fronts. Here in America, certainly,
jobs are becoming scarcer, and decent jobs with decent pay scarcer still, while
costs for education, health care, and scores of other basic social goods are
climbing steadily out of reach of an ever-larger fraction of the
population. State and local governments
are becoming less and less able to provide even essential services, while the
federal government sinks ever further into partisan gridlock and bureaucratic
paralysis, punctuated by outbursts of ineffectual violence flung petulantly
outward at an ever more hostile world.
The human and financial toll of natural disasters keeps going up while
the capacity to do anything about the consequences keeps going down—and all the
while, resource depletion and environmental disruption impose a rising toll on
every human activity.
That’s the shape of the recent past. The thought experiment
I’d like to recommend to my readers is to imagine that things just keep going
the same way, year after year, decade after decade, without any of the
breakthroughs or breakdowns in which so many of us like to put our faith.
Imagine a future in which all the trends I’ve just sketched
out just keep on getting worse, a tunnel growing slowly darker without any
light at the far end—not even the lamp of an oncoming train. More to the point,
imagine that this is your future: that you, personally, will
have to meet ever-increasing costs with an income that has less purchasing
power each year; that you will spend each year you still have left as an
employee hoping that it won’t be your job’s turn to go away forever, until that
finally happens; that you will have to figure out how to cope as health care
and dozens of other basic goods and services stop being available at a price
you can afford, or at any price at all; that you will spend the rest of your
life in the conditions I’ve just sketched out, and know as you die that the
challenges waiting for your grandchildren will be quite a bit worse than the
ones you faced.
I’ve found that most people these days, asked to imagine
such a future, will flatly refuse to do it, and get furiously angry if pressed
on the topic. I want to encourage my readers to push past that reaction,
though, and take a few minutes to imagine themselves, in detail, spending the
rest of their lives in the conditions I’ve just outlined. Those who do that
will realize something about apocalyptic fantasies that most believers in such
fantasies never mention: even the gaudiest earth-splattering cataclysm is less
frightening than the future I’ve described—and the future I’ve described, or
one very like it, is where current trends driven by current choices are taking
us at their own implacable pace.
My guess is that that’s the most important factor behind the
popularity of apocalyptic thinking these days.
After so many promised breakthroughs have failed to materialize,
cataclysmic mass death is the one option many people can still believe in
that’s less frightening than the future toward which we’re actually headed, and
which our choices and actions are helping to create. I suggest that this, more
than anything else, is why 2030 is going to be the next 2012, why promoters of
the it’s-all-over-in-2030 fad will find huge and eager audiences for their
sales pitches, and why some other date will take 2030’s place in short order
once the promised catastrophes fail to appear on schedule and the future nobody
wants to think about continues to take shape around them.
