A Short History of the End of the World
Doomsday cults, armageddon enthusiasts and bedwetting catastrophizers of all stripes...
Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World...
“Have the riots started yet?”
A dear reader – tongue firmly in cheek – wanted to know about the carnage and anarchy on the streets here in Argentina, at least as (mis)reported in the popular presses.
Needless to say, and much to the chagrin of catastrophizing snowflakes everywhere, life here in the Paris of the South goes on. Folks reading in cafés... enjoying the parks... strolling the plazas...
As you can plainly see, it’s an inferno of truly Dantean proportions…
But what about our own Notes From the End of the World? Does the title itself (cheekily conceived) not portend an ominous apocalypse? A fiery armageddon? A hellish end of days?
After all, the End of the World is not only a convenient geographic location from which to pen these riotous notes... it also implies a long-prophesied day of reckoning. But this, too, can be interpreted in many ways.
Looking back over history, we are delighted to discover that there’s nothing new about the end of the world. In fact, doomsday cults are as old as the days are long.
The Beginnings of the Ends
From the Essene order of Jewish ascetics, who saw their rising up against the Romans in 66-70 AD as a prelude to the coming of the Messiah... to Hilary of Poitiers, the French bishop who predicted the end of the world in 365 AD... to the trembling triumvirate of Hippolytus of Rome, Sextus Julius Africanus and Irenaeus, who foretold the second coming of Christ (based on the dimensions of Noah's Ark) in 500 AD, history is full of end time predictions. (Sextus later reset his cataclysm clock from 500 to 800 AD, presumably due to a cubit rounding error made while measuring the Ark’s upper deck.)
Over the centuries, brigades of bed-wetting panic artists came forth to wail and gnash their teeth over this or that date of decimation. Popes and priests, astrologers and kabbalists, false prophets, TV evangelists, Malthusians, pyramidologists and hucksters of every stripe stepped up, each with their own crackpot explanation and, usually, a collection plate in hand.
Even allegedly sane individuals fell prey to what Freud called the death wish... mathematician John Napier, artist Sandro Botticelli, navigator Christopher Columbus and gadfly reformer Martin Luther all predicted fire and brimstone of varying descriptions.
And yet... here we are, still among what the British author Virginia Woolf called the “army of the upright.” And ready to chart a new journey in our history...
A Precipice, of Sorts
Of course, mankind’s tendency to fear the worst is understandable. In a very real sense, we are always standing at the “End of the World”... carried by the tide of time to the farthest reaches of human achievement and knowledge (such as it is). We exist at the bleeding edge of all that has come before us, on the precipice of all human experience, standing on the shoulders of giants.
We peruse the pages of history, until and including this morning’s newspaper, then we look out ahead... into an unlived abyss, fraught with all manner of possibilities, tantalizing and terrifying alike.
Any wonder we occasionally get a case of the wobbles!
Happily, those dusty tomes, when carefully studied, reveal great cycles... the rise and fall of empires, of cultures and currencies, and of grand political movements, the likes of which may be just beginning again.
The way is not always easy, or even apparent... but as the great Roman statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero (whose birthday we celebrate this week) once wrote:
“The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory.”
Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
P.S. Although an academic skeptic himself, Cicero (106-43 BC) had plenty to say about the competing philosophies of his day, including epicureanism, cynicism and stoicism. Our friends (read: dear wife) over at Classical Wisdom investigate Cicero’s paradoxes of stoicism – Paradoxa Stoicorum – in this handy article, recommended for further reading.
Keep in mind that, when Marxist leftists or authoritarians (elitists) wail that conservatives or true liberals are a danger to society or “democracy,” they are correct . . . at least to the evil social order or mob democracy that they are developing.
One percent scoffing, one percent denying and 98% hoping someone has a solution! Bravo!