It is now
11:36 on December 19, 2012. If you are reading this then congratulations!
December 21st has passed and you have lived to see another year.
Perhaps multiple years, even. This is coming little more than a year after
Harold Camping’s prediction for the Christian Rapture, which was supposed to
come on May 21, 2011, and of course, the good old Y2K apocalypse of 2000, which
remains a cherished memory of my childhood.
It seems
somewhat trite and obvious to state that as a culture we are obsessed with
apocalypse theories. Not only in getting ourselves invested in the theories
themselves, but also in the entertainment that they produce. Armageddon, 2012,
the Left Behind series, Deep Impact, The Core, Reign of Fire, Knowing,
Melancholia, War of the Worlds etc. The list of apocalypse entertainments that
have come out in the last fifteen years could go on for the remainder of the entry.
Of course,
on a basic level, death is something that we’re all interested in. It
preoccupies most of our fears, and there is something undeniably cathartic and
exhilarating about having a book or movie play upon those fears. However, if
playing upon our fear of death was all that this was about, then why do
Christine and Duel remain probably the only two killer car movies worthy of
note? And why is it that Death-Bed: The Bed that Eats remains the only
noteworthy killer-bed movie, when a bed is where you’ll most likely draw your
last breath?
There is
the argument that the fear of apocalypse transcends the fear of death because
it represents not only the obliteration of the future, but of the past as well.
According to Erikson’s theory of developmental stages, the stage of late
adulthood is the one in which a person, facing his imminent demise, is forced to
take solace in the achievements of the life he has led and in the contributions
that he has made to the world that will continue turning after he has gone.
Apocalypse robs that from him and makes his life’s works meaningless. In it,
his societal contribution is made toward cinder and his lineage is made barren.
But then there are far more common ways to obliterate the safety net of
Erikson’s final stage. For example, a person could go about their days
awkwardly avoiding social interaction, masturbating to internet porn and
writing snarky, depressing essays to add to an ever-growing “unpublished”
folder.
See, it’s
not merely that we want our fear of death and the obliteration of our lives’
works played upon effectively. We want a death that we can really sink our
teeth into, that we can romanticize, and that will comfort us late at night.
The best horror movies of any sort do not play upon the banal and depressing
reality that your death will happen silently and unnoticed in a bed, probably
as a result of decades of poor diet and lack of exercise. A good horror movie
makes death sudden, explosive, and most importantly, not your fault. True, you
may have made some poor decisions along the way—picking up smoking, running
down into the cellar—but at the end of the day it was the alien or the man in
the mask. You may not have accomplished anything of note—it is no coincidence
that the victims in horror movies are always at the cusp of adulthood—but a
machete to the spine is a pretty good excuse for not ever having ever finished
that novel.
What we
want is not salvation, but rather abdication. We demand the role of tragedy, we
demand the mask of the victim, we demand the right to the age-old comfort of
“well, there was nothing anyone could have done.”
And returning
to our obsession with apocalypse, the reasoning becomes quite apparent. In
Armageddon and Deep Impact it is an asteroid, in Left Behind it is a pissed off
God, in War of the Worlds it is aliens, in Reign of Fire it is a sudden
recurrence in dragon populations, and in 2012 it is mystical cosmic forces that
are beyond our control, or even comprehension.
The idea
that the obliteration of mankind is something that rests outside of our control
is an extremely comforting one. Who wouldn’t rather turn off CNN’s reports on
North Korea’s latest missile tests and Iranian nuclear prospects, to go down to
the Cineplex to watch a sensible old God engulf the earth in flames and lay
waste to the collective achievements of mankind’s history? Who wouldn’t rather
ignore the fact that in a world of increasing technological advancement, total
global nuclear armament is something of an inevitability? But let’s not just
scare monger on nuclear weapons. Maybe the lefty tree huggers are right and
within the next century New York will be under water. Maybe the right-wing
gold-nuts are right and the current global economy is a house of cards waiting
to topple.
The point
is that whatever proves to be the global catastrophe that topples the existence
that we have grown accustomed to, it will not be the work of some vague and
foreign outside force, but rather of our own workings. No, it will not be you that launches the weapons, or tips
the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to catastrophic levels, or shortsightedly
pulls the strings to plunge us into the next recession, but that’s not the
point. The truly unsettling thing about observing the horrific act of another
is that it forces you to see your own humanity inside of them, inside of the
act itself.
The forces
that hurdle us toward catastrophe after catastrophe are not mere aberrations,
but rather integral components of our collective human nature. It will be the
blind innovative spirit of man that will have led us toward the inevitable
outcome of global armament. It will be the impossibility of trust when personal
benefit is to be gained, in a Prisoner’s Dilemma on global scale, that will
lead countries around the world to set business friendly pollution laws out of
fear that if they don’t some other country will. It will be the propensity of
man to see his actions as abstractions existing outside of greater societal
problems that will lead us to financial crash after financial crash.
The fact is
that in all likelihood your lack of life achievements will have been a product
of personal shortcomings, and the global catastrophes whose throats we are now
throwing ourselves down will be the products of the human nature that rests
within you and on which the comfort of your life is built.
But now
I’ve gone and depressed myself. It’s times like these that I turn to my Bible
for comfort
The sun and sky were
darkened by the smoke from the Abyss. And out of the smoke locusts
came down on the earth and were given power like that of scorpions of the
earth… During those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will
long to die, but death will elude them.
I feel better already.
