Seems like everyone is predicting the end times these last couple of weeks, either as a rhetorical device or a cut-off point for existing practices. Years and dates have been mentioned – so much for “no man may know the day or the hour!”
I realise that I’ve never really written properly about the apocalypse on here, which is odd given the title of my blog. My interest in eschatology is not a ghoulish fetish (those of you who have met me will know that I’m actually pretty cheerful and upbeat most of the time), but a fascination with narrative structures.
Stories are brilliantly structured: they have a beginning, a middle and an end. And we (as a society) love stories… we love them so much that we expect events that we experience to have these attributes too. But actual human life is seldom as forthcoming, especially regarding endings. Things tend to peter out, tail away or flat-out stop being interesting. In an increasingly diverse and connected world, this becomes more readily apparent. The advent (so very 1990s!) of post-modernity has highlighted just how important these narrative structures have become.
Enter the apocalypse. This is the ultimate “end”, a profound way of saying “this story is now finished”. My little boy says “The End” after every story he tells, even if it is a story I clearly want to know more about! I think he does it because endings are linked inextricably with beginnings. He wants to start telling a new story.
In art we’ve seen an increase in the use of “apocalyptic” imagery as we entered this economic downturn. I’d argue that this is a wider cultural wish to end this story and switch to a new one. And idly watching speculative Hollywood fiction about some natural disasters is easier than actually doing something about the several man-made ones we are now in the middle of. At the end of the Hollywood apocalypse we see the triumph of humanity, justice, and the American way. In reality this is never quite so certain… and the final triumph is more of a few more snatched days, weeks or months before the next onslaught.
To conclude, apocalypses beguile and dazzle because:
they are dramatic. Saying “X is dead” is much more exciting than saying, “I don’t think X is really working”.
Linked to this, they are irrevocably final, they appeal to the idea of completion…
… and thus to the idea of a new, fresh beginning.
they offer the possibility of individual and group heroism. Apocalyptica is littered with heroes: the prophet crying in the wilderness, the action man with the crow-bar caked with zombie, the well organised vault dwellers, Bruce Willis…
Wish fulfilment: from St John of Patmos to the Swedenborgians to the DIYU crowd – it’s incredibly seductive to imagine all the things that you don’t like being swept away so you can be proven right all along…
… especially politically. The far right dream of bunkers and guns, the far left of riots and revolution. If my involvement in OER has taught me one thing politically, it’s that the bridge from right libertarianism to left anarchism is surprisingly solid.
As a follower of the apocalypse, I’m interested in what happens after all this heroism. Because amid the collapse and the destruction, war never changes. And the slow decline of ideas, the trickle of enthusiasm, is neither dramatic nor inspiring. But it is more true than all the stories we can tell.
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