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L'economist mette in copertina THE END OF THE WORLD nel suo doppio numero di 
fine d'anno: anche il capitalismo anglo è diventato catastrofista?


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A BRIEF HISTORY
Dec 16th 2004  

Why do end-of-time beliefs endure?

A VERICHIP is a tiny, implantable microchip with a unique
identification number that connects a patient to his medical records.
When America's Food and Drug Administration recently approved it for
medical use in humans, the news provoked familiar worries in the press
about privacy-threatening technologies. But on the notice boards of
raptureready.com[1], the talk was about a drawback that the FDA and the
media seemed to have overlooked. Was the VeriChip the "mark of the
beast"?

 Raptureready.com runs an online service for the millions of born-again
Christians in America who believe that an event called the Rapture is
coming soon. During the Rapture, Christ will return and whisk believers
away to join the righteous dead in heaven. From there, they will have
the best seats in the house as the unsaved perish in a series of
spectacular fires, wars, plagues and earthquakes. (Raptureready.com
advises the soon-to-depart to stick a note on the fridge to brief those
left behind--husbands, wives and in-laws--about the horrors in store
for them.) 

Furnished with apocalyptic tracts from the Bible, believers scour news
dispatches for clues that the Rapture is approaching. Some think
implantable chips are a sign. The Book of Revelation features a "mark"
that the Antichrist makes everybody wear "in their right hand, or in
their foreheads". Rapturists have more than a hobbyist's idle interest
in identifying this mark. Anyone who accepts it spends eternity
roasting in the sulphurs of hell. (And, incidentally, the European
Union may be "the matrix out of which the Antichrist's kingdom could
grow.") 

 Christians have kept faith with the idea that the world is just about
to end since the beginnings of their religion. Jesus Himself hinted
more than once that His second coming would happen during the lifetime
of His followers. In its original form, the Lord's Prayer, taught by
Jesus to his disciples, may have implored God to "keep us from the
ordeal".

 Men have been making the same appeal ever since. In 156AD, a fellow
called Montanus, pronouncing himself to be the incarnation of the Holy
Spirit, declared that the New Jerusalem was about to come crashing down
from the heavens and land in Phrygia--which, conveniently, was where he
lived. Before long, Asia Minor, Rome, Africa and Gaul were jammed with
wandering ecstatics, bitterly repenting their sins and fasting and
whipping themselves in hungry anticipation of the world's end. A bit
more than a thousand years later, the authorities in Germany were
stamping out an outbreak of apocalyptic mayhem among a self-abusing
sect called the secret flagellants of Thuringia. The disciples of
William Miller, a 19th-century evangelical American, clung ecstatically
to the same belief as the Montanists and the Thuringians. A thick
strand of Christian history connects them all, and countless other
movements.

DON'T GET LEFT BEHIND
 Apocalyptic belief renews itself in ingenious ways. Belief in the
Rapture, which enlivens the familiar end-of-time narrative with a
compellingly dramatic twist, appears to be a modern phenomenon: John
Nelson Darby, a 19th-century British evangelical preacher, was perhaps
the first to popularise the idea. (Darby's inspiration was a passage in
St Paul's letter to the Thessalonians, which talks about the Christian
dead and true believers being "caught up together" in the clouds.) It
is not easy to say how many Americans believe in Darby's concept of
Rapture. But a dozen novels that dramatise the event and its gripping
aftermath--the "Left Behind" series--have sold more than 40m copies.

New apocalyptic creeds have even sprung from those sticky moments when
the world has failed to end on schedule. (Social scientists call this
"disconfirmation".) When the resurrected Christ failed to show up for
Miller's disciples on the night of October 22nd 1844, press scribblers
mocked the "Great Disappointment" mercilessly. But even as they jeered,
a farmer called Hiram Edson snuck away from the vigil to pray in a
barn, where he duly received word of what had happened. There had been
a great event after all--but in heaven, not on Earth. This happening
was that Jesus had begun an "investigative judgment of the dead" in
preparation for his return. Thus was born the Church of Seventh-day
Adventists. They were not the only ones to rise above apparent setbacks
to the prophesies by which they set such store: the Jehovah's Witnesses
of the persistently apocalyptic Watchtower sect survived no fewer than
nine disconfirmations every few years between 1874 and 1975. 

WHICH WAY TO ARMAGEDDON?
Why do end-of-time beliefs endure? Social scientists love to set about
this question with earnest study of the people who subscribe to such
ideas. As part of his investigation into the "apocalyptic genre" in
modern America, Paul Boyer of the University of Wisconsin asks why so
many of his fellow Americans are "susceptible" to televangelists and
other "popularisers". From time to time, sophisticated Americans
indulge the thrillingly terrifying thought that nutty, apocalyptic,
born-again Texans are guiding not just conservative social policies at
home, but America's agenda in the Middle East as well, as they round up
reluctant compatriots for the last battle at Armageddon. (It's a bit
south of the Lake of Galilee in the plain of Jezreel.)

 Behind these attitudes sits the assumption that apocalyptic thought
belongs--or had better belong--to the extremities of human experience.
On closer inspection, though, that is by no means true.

 Properly, the apocalypse is both an end and a new beginning. In
Christian tradition, the world is created perfect. There is then a
fall, followed by a long, rather enjoyable (for some) period of moral
degeneration. This culminates in a decisive final battle between good
(the returned Christ) and evil (the Antichrist). Good wins and
establishes the New Jerusalem and with it the 1,000-year reign of King
Jesus on Earth. 

This is the glorious millennium that millenarians await so eagerly.
Millenarians tend to place history at a moment just before the decisive
final showdown. The apocalyptic mind looks through the surface reality
of the world and sees history's epic, true nature: "apocalypse" comes
from the Greek word meaning to uncover, or disclose.

 Norman Cohn, a British historian, places the origin of apocalyptic
thought with Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), a Persian prophet who probably
lived between 1500 and 1200BC. The Vedic Indians, ancient Egyptians and
some earlier civilisations had seen history as a cycle, which was for
ever returning to its beginning. Zoroaster embellished this tepid plot.
He added goodies (Ahura Mazda, the maker and guardian of the ordered
world), baddies (the spirit of destruction, Angra Mainyu) and a happy
ending (a glorious consummation of order over disorder, known as the
"making wonderful", in which "all things would be made perfect, once
and for all"). In due course Zoroaster's theatrical talents came to
Christians via the Jews.

 This basic drama shapes all apocalyptic thought, from the tenets of
tribal cargo cults to the beliefs of UFO sects. In 1973, Claude
Vorilhon, a correspondent for a French racing-car magazine, claimed to
have been whisked away in a flying saucer, in which he had spent six
days with a green chap who spoke fluent French. The alien told Mr
Vorilhon that the Frenchman's real name was Rael, that humans had
misread the Bible and that, properly translated, the Hebrew word ELOHIM
(singular: ELOHA) did not mean God, as Jews had long supposed, but
"those who came from the sky". 

The alien then revealed that his species had created everything on
Earth in a space laboratory, and that the aliens wanted to return to
give humans their advanced technology, which would transform the world
utterly. First, however, Rael needed financial contributions to build
the aliens an embassy in Jerusalem, because otherwise they would not
feel welcome (a bit lame, this explanation). Although the Israeli
government has not yet given its consent, the Raelians--those persuaded
by Rael's account--continue to welcome donations in anticipation of a
change of heart.

 The Raelians' claim to be atheists who belong to the secular world
must come as no surprise to Mr Cohn, who has long detected patterns of
religious apocalyptic thought in what is supposedly rational, secular
belief. He has traced "egalitarian and communistic fantasies" to the
ancient-world idea of an ideal state of nature, in which all men are
genuinely equal and none is persecuted. As Mr Cohn has put it, "The old
religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends to
obscure what otherwise would be obvious. For it is the simple truth
that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary
millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still."

Nicholas Campion, a British historian and astrologer, has expanded on
Mr Cohn's ideas. In his book, "The Great Year", Mr Campion draws
parallels between the "scientific" historical materialism of Marx and
the religious apocalyptic experience. Thus primitive communism is the
Garden of Eden, the emergence of private property and the class system
is the fall, the final gasps of capitalism are the last days, the
proletariat are the chosen people and the socialist revolution is the
second coming and the New Jerusalem.

 Hegel saw history as an evolution of ideas that would culminate in the
ideal liberal-democratic state. Since liberal democracy satisfies the
basic need for recognition that animates political struggle, thought
Hegel, its advent heralds a sort of end of history--another
suspiciously apocalyptic claim. More recently, Francis Fukuyama has
echoed Hegel's theme. Mr Fukuyama began his book, "The End of History",
with a claim that the world had arrived at "the gates of the Promised
Land of liberal democracy". Mr Fukuyama's pulpit oratory suited the
spirit of the 1990s, with its transformative "new economy" and
free-world triumphs. In the disorientating disconfirmation of September
11th and the coincident stockmarket collapse, however, his religion has
lost favour.

 The apocalyptic narrative may have helped to start the motor of
capitalism. A drama in which the end returns interminably to the
beginning leaves little room for the sense of progress which, according
to the 19th-century social theories of Max Weber, provides the
religious licence for material self-improvement. Without the last days,
in other words, the world might never have had 65-inch flat-screen
televisions. For that matter, the whole American project has more than
a touch of the apocalypse about it. The Pilgrim Fathers thought they
had reached the New Israel. The "manifest destiny" of America to spread
its providential liberty and self-government throughout the North
American continent (not to mention the Middle East) smacks of the
millennium and the New Jerusalem. 

Science treasures its own apocalypses. The modern environmental
movement appears to have borrowed only half of the apocalyptic
narrative. There is a Garden of Eden (unspoilt nature), a fall
(economic development), the usual moral degeneracy (it's all man's
fault) and the pressing sense that the world is enjoying its final days
(time is running out: please donate now!). So far, however, the green
lobby does not appear to have realised it is missing the standard happy
ending. Perhaps, until it does, environmentalism is destined to remain
in the political margins. Everyone needs redemption.

WATCH THIS SPACESUIT
 Noting an exponential acceleration in the pace of technological
change, futurologists like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil think the
world inhabits the "knee of the curve"--a sort of last-days set of
circumstances in which, in the near future, the pace of technological
change runs quickly away towards an infinite "singularity" as
intelligent machines learn to build themselves. From this point, thinks
Mr Moravec, transformative "mind fire" will spread in a flash across
the cosmos. Britain's astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, relegates Mr
Kurzweil and those like him to the "visionary fringe". But Mr Rees's
own darkly apocalyptic book, "Our Final Hour", outdoes the most
colourful of America's televangelists in earthquakes, plagues and other
sorts of fire and brimstone.

 So there you have it. The apocalypse is the locomotive of capitalism,
the inspiration for revolutionary socialism, the bedrock of America's
manifest destiny and the undeclared religion of all those
pseudo-rationalists who, like THE ECONOMIST, champion the progress of
liberal democracy. Perhaps, deep down, there is something inside
everyone which yearns for the New Jerusalem, a place where, as a
beautiful bit of Revelation puts it:

Yes, perhaps. But, to be sure, not everyone agrees that salvation, when
it comes, will appear clothed in a shiny silver spacesuit.

-----
[1] http://www.raptureready.com
 

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