Title: Re: End of the World is Nigh
Post by Agatha on Aug 13th, 2021 at 11:45am
The end of the world, it seems, is here to stay. No doubt, today’s climate scientists, armed with computer models that spit out mountains of projections, are a far cry from the doomsaying prophets of old.
But it is not hard to discern a continuity between the heat, fires and cyclones the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced earlier this week and the flames, floods and famines that have framed one of mankind’s most ancient fantasies.
Long before the many accounts of the last days of humanity were committed to writing, tribal lays had recorded disasters that would presage the demise of life on earth. The Indian version, which figures in the Mahabharata and the Puranas, expected the “Fire of the Cosmic Conflagration” to bring on the universe’s dissolution. And similar to it were the Ragnarok myth of the Scandinavians and the German Gotterdammerung – that fearful time, foretold in the Voluspa, in which mankind would be overrun by “Malice and foulness, Ere the World ends, Ere the Doom fall”.
The Greeks refined those prefigurations into the myth of the eternal return, with its perpetual cycle of destruction and renewal. But it was undoubtedly the Christian vision of the end of days that left the most enduring imprint on the Western mind.
Best captured in the notion of the adventus – that which comes towards us – the end time, in that vision, already exists and its realisation, when it transforms itself into the present, would be merely the ultimate moment of revelation. Always already given and known by God, the apocalypse – or “lifting of the veil” – was viewed as a fate humanity might fear or desire but that was not of its doing.
Deeply marking Europe’s collective imaginary for century after century, that conception of the end time underwent dramatic change in the period that stretched from the Enlightenment through to the late 19th century. As living standards began to rise, expectations of progress and of personal and social improvement, which until then had stayed stubbornly beyond reach, acquired unprecedented immediacy. At the same time, however, new horrors emerged out of the chaos of the Napoleonic wars and from the “dark satanic mills” that drove a huddling underclass into urban infernos.
It was therefore no coincidence that just as the Enlightenment’s central, formative doctrine – that the constant augmentation of knowledge would serve as an inextinguishable engine of progress – gained ground, a radically new version of the apocalypse appeared, with Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s Last Days of Humanity heralding its arrival.
A defrocked priest so despairing of the future that he drowned himself in the Somme canal at Amiens on February 1, 1805, Cousin de Grainville shocked his readers by asserting that the world would end in accordance with the laws of nature, not by a word from God. The end would, in other words, come naturally and without any help from divine intervention or human ingenuity – but no less painfully for that.
Absorbed into the maelstrom of romanticism, by the 1830s Cousin de Grainville’s vision of nature turning upon man had spawned a dystopian “counterdream” to the Enlightenment’s dream of perpetual improvement.
Suddenly, Europe’s leading painters, anticipating Bertolt Brecht’s prediction that someday nothing would remain of the world’s great cities except the wind that blows through them, began depicting London, Paris and Berlin as colossal, burnt-out ruins, hulking in an uninhabitable landscape of charred stumps and blackened carcasses.
Yet that secularised version of the apocalypse, in which the end days, rather than revealing the divine will, revealed the innermost secrets of nature’s laws, itself proved transient. As scientific advance accelerated, and the late 19th-century arms race with it, the newly developed genre of science fiction portrayed in spine-chilling terms Europe’s terrible readiness for mutual destruction and its thirst for what Yeats was to call the “blood-dimmed tide”.
Henry Ergas
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