Apocalyptic beliefs have always been part of the Christian tradition. They express the yearning for heaven on earth, when evil is destroyed and the good are saved.
In their classical religious form, such beliefs rely on signs and omens, like earthquakes and sunspots, which can be interpreted, by reference to biblical passages, as portending a great cataclysm and cleansing. Thus, apocalyptic moments are products of a sense of crisis: they can be triggered by wars and natural disasters.
Classical apocalyptic thinking is certainly alive and well, especially in America, where it feeds on Protestant fundamentalism, and is mass marketed with all the resources of modern media. Circles close to the Bush administration, it is rumoured, take current distempers like terrorism as confirmation of biblical prophecies.
In secularised, pseudo-scientific form, apocalyptic thinking has also been at the core of revolutionary politics. In his latest book, Black Mass, the philosopher John Gray discusses how political doctrines like Marxism colonised the apocalyptic vision in prophesying the destruction of capitalism as the prelude to the socialist utopia. But political messianism was an offshoot of nineteenth-century optimism. With the collapse of optimism, contemporary apocalyptic belief lays more stress on catastrophe and less on utopia.
For example, in his book Flat Earth News, the investigative journalist Nick Davies reminds us of the millennium bug panic. Newspapers everywhere carried stories predicting that computer systems would crash on January 1, 2000, causing much of the world to shut down. The subtext was familiar: those who live by technology will die by it.
Misreporting of science is now so routine that we hardly notice it. Much more serious is when science itself becomes infected by the apocalyptic spirit. Faith-based science seems a contradiction in terms, because the scientific worldview emerged as a challenge to religious superstition. But important scientific beliefs can now be said to be held religiously, rather than scientifically...
Scientists are notoriously loath to jettison conclusions reached by approved scientific methods, however faulty. But their intolerance of dissent is hugely magnified when they see themselves as captains in the salvationist army, dedicated to purging the world of evil habits.
Today it is the West that foists an apocalyptic imagination on the rest of the world. Perhaps we should be looking to China and India for answers about how to address environmental damage, instead of using climate change as a pretext to deprive them of what we already have. How do the Chinese feel about their new found materialism? Do they have an intellectual structure with which to make sense of it?
The best antidote to the doom merchants is scepticism. We must be willing to take uncertainty seriously. Climate change is a fact. But apocalyptic thinking distorts the scientific debate and makes it harder to explain the causes and consequences of this fact, which in turn makes it harder to know how to deal with it.
The danger is that we become so infected with the apocalyptic virus that we end up creating a real catastrophe – the meltdown of our economies and lifestyles – in order to avoid an imaginary one. In short, while a religious attitude of mind deserves the highest respect, we should resist the re-conquest by religion of matters that should be the concern of science.
The apocalyptic mind
Randa Takieddine
With my brother Doug, more than 50 years ago.
She sat, fat, on the side of the tennis court in Bangkok. It had been hard to file. He had intended to write the diary of a Bangkok brothel, a long history of often hair brained ideas, to interview the Prime Minister of India, to write the world. This time, in semi-retirement, he had wanted to write a moving piece about the comings and goings at the bottom end of town, outside the Russian quarter, away from the gangsters. They had danced half the night away during a weekend in Phuket, in astonishing apartments with views stretching down the coast, vast entertainment areas, an open bar on the roof, ample cocaine for the flagging energies and flagging bones. But that, the life of wealthy ex-pats at the prime of their indulgent success, was not what he wanted to record.
And so it was, in these peopled dreams, that he came to be filing once more for newspaper deadlines, and his fat sister was getting in the way. There wasn't much he could say, in these grimy streets where money cut a swathe. He was regarded as just another eccentric foreigner. He ate from the local stalls and the locals looked at him as if he was mad. His stomach soon proved them right. There wasn't any clear way into this society, and if he was reduced to a pimp or a letch, so be it. How could they be so cruel as to distance themselves, these beautiful men. Moving slowly on the stage, the numbers around their neck; the ultimate slave motif, the ultimate for sale sign.
There had been so many extremities of life, back in Sydney, he had seen, he once thought, the greatest decadence that man was capable of. Vast seething rooms of flesh. The cloaking, cloying smell of amyl nitrate. The smell of semen and unwashed flesh, the room of a thousand orgasms. He had played disc jockey one night. They had wanted something different. The Stallion. Saw dust on the floor. The bar took up an entire block in the city's imagination. It was before the licensing laws and the thought police destroyed the city's night life, when entertainment really was entertainment and the bold step into New York style sex bars was the most exciting new thing happening.
He had seen things no one person should see. The communist puritans who now ruled the city and had overseen the death of fun would have been appalled. You came, you saw, you most definitely conquered. It was so dark there was no telling who was groping you. And then in the cold light they all began dying of AIDS, and the popularity of the sex bars plummeted. The police were everywhere. The new laws made it illegal to serve someone intoxicated by alcohol, which as many a determined drinker pointed out somewhat defeated the purpose of a night out. These days bouncers in the front of empty bars turn away anyone looking a bit under the weather. And the silent brooding suburbs plot their revenge.
These sweeping moments, when all kinds of acts were perpetrated, lived on only in memory; and decreasingly few of those. The Warehouse. The Store. The Dark Knight. Searching for love in all the wrong places, that's what it came down to. Tucked in the back of the Cross in the old days was The Venus Room, owned by notorious underworld figure Abe Saffron, related to a good friend of mine. Everyone who was into going out ended up there some time. And then of course The Purple Onion, another must see. Speed was 20 cents a capsule over the counter at the chemist, if you knew the right chemist. What were they doing selling to one so young?
And all this kaleidoscope, how did it telescope through to the grey days of yore? How could things have gone so far backward, become so grim? The traffic congestion builds and builds. This is Australia, you only have to try and you can achieve anything, the successful tell each other. But the truth is very different. Every spare cent has been hoovered off the populace; the big food chains, Woolworths, Coles, have destroyed local economies. Effort is not rewarded. Beyond the luxuriant, indeed astonishing wealth lining the harbour foreshore, stretched grim miles of suburban struggle. No one could cope; in the silent despair. The gum trees offered a sense of infinity from the Australian bush in otherwise featureless suburbs.
And he longed and he longed, for a different time, for a sense of purpose, for a breakthrough into a higher consciousness. Once there were butterflies and mushrooms on his jeans. Now he donned a tie and went to work like everybody else; the terrible dilemma of the baby boomers, or the 68ers as they are now being dismissively called, those who's lives and attitudes were forged at a time when Janis Joplin was belting down Southern Comfort and belting out her songs, Oh Lord, won't you give me, a Mercedes Benz. We scribbled Sylvia Plath poems on the walls of squats, signing them off as Sylvia Platitude. And we thought every step was a step to a different world, we were the revolution, living the dream. We desiccated our souls, plastered drunk, and watched the splintering sunrises, naively believing that every new insight was a tunnel to a grander, more exultant place, to freedom and a higher plane, the destiny of the human race.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/in-search-of-a-way-to-involve-all/2008/05/23/1211183108450.html
AMID the barrage of reviews, reports, inquiries, papers and strategies — not to mention that mega-thinkathon the 2020 Summit — in Kevin Rudd's first six months as Prime Minister, another was this week added to the mix: the Social Inclusion Board.
The concept of "social inclusion" has become almost as much a mantra of the Government as "working families". And it is equally ill defined.
Since Julia Gillard took to the podium in the heat of the election last year as Labor's spokeswoman for social inclusion, the term has been inserted into copious amounts of text penned by Labor speechwriters.
Their words seem to be resonating. Despite keeping a room packed with hundreds of Australia's leading welfare people waiting for 30 minutes at the Australian Council of Social Service conference last month, Gillard, now Deputy Prime Minister, received a rock star's reception.
A more socially inclusive society. It all sounds so warm and fuzzy. But what does it actually mean? Bleeding-heart spin from the old left or a radical rethink of how we shape social and economic policy?
This week, a group of thinkers ("This isn't a bleeding hearts club," stresses Eddie McGuire, one of the included) sought to nut out precisely who are the socially excluded. The 14 members of the new Social Inclusion Board met in Broadmeadows, a suburb that quickly springs to mind when thinking about pockets of disadvantage. They came up with three priorities: jobless families — the apparent antithesis of "working families" — children at high risk of disadvantage, and "locational disadvantage" a la Broadmeadows.
http://www.geelongadvertiser.com.au/article/2008/05/27/14365_opinion.html
THE polls might have his popularity above 70 per cent, closing in on Bob Hawke's stellar performance of the early 1980s, but Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's honeymoon with the electorate seems to be cooling.
A range of issues are coming into focus which present a variety of potential problems for his government and, had it the wherewithal to stop its in-fighting, opportunities for the coalition opposition.
Not the least of these must be the impatience within the trade union movement at the Federal Government's sluggishness in winding back the previous Liberal government's industrial laws.
If there was a single factor that characterised Labor's campaign and victory at last year's election, it was workplace laws. But with local unionists marshalling for a rally later this week to complain about construction workers' rights, it seems clear workplace laws remain an issue with the party faithful.
Of course, unions scrapped with Labor during the election campaign and may simply be pushing their barrow but their workplace complaints are hardly the only problems facing Mr Rudd.
Pensioners have voiced their displeasure at the recent federal Budget's failure to tackle their needs and they've attracted considerable profile doing so. Concerns are rising within environmental groups about the Federal Government's commitment to reducing greenhouse emissions; Aboriginal groups are already calling for a new `sorry' to address ongoing intervention difficulties; the private health sector is alarmed at Medicare levy threshold changes; while rising petrol and food prices, along with interest rates, present chronic problems for the Government.
Weekend reports that futures trading in oil remains buoyant as far ahead as 2016 point to ongoing problems in that regard _ not that this should be particularly surprising _ as well as the industry and consumer costs so closely aligned to transport costs.
Newport Beach.
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