It’s the end of the world as we know it*
Here’s a worthwhile read by Kurt Anderson on the New York magazine website on the “frisson of smug or hysterical pleasure” that characterizes contemporary “apocalypse preoccupations” — including those that have leached into “less-fantastical” — i.e. secular/Western/post-Enlightenment — “thought and conversation.”
My only beef is that Anderson goes a little too easy on environmental doomsayers, conceding that they may be “sincerely fearful of climate change” while focusing most of the piece on people who conceive apocalypse through the mechanics of religious prophecy.
It would be more fair to note that religious fanatics are “sincerely fearful” of moral corruption, believing it propels us toward global disaster. The ingredients are therefore identical. Start with widespread evil and thick-headedness. Then swap in some scary physical processes for a wrathful deity and voila, ya gots your post-modern secular kablooey.
The question is: who are you going to believe?
October 2nd, 2006 at 5:39 am
Just a different pile.
Sometimes the religious connection is overt.
Remember reading of an environmental group praying to the departed spirits of of dead creatures beside a polluted lake.
October 2nd, 2006 at 5:41 am
I think he’s entirely right about the generational conceit though.
October 4th, 2006 at 7:10 am
Praying to creatures killed by pollution . . . interesting. I may need to swipe that one for a subplot :-)