Three hundred and sixty-five days ago, millions of people felt a growing
sense of -- I was going to write “relief,” but it might have been
“disappointment” -- when the world didn't end on Fake Mayan Prophecy Day. Social
media users around the world greeted the non-event with the kind of viral
mockery everyone loves these days, so long as it’s someone else’s beliefs being
mocked.
Such scares, however, can be serious business; a few weeks before the
predicted end of the world, Britain’s
Telegraph newspaper reported that
“panic buying of candles and essentials has been reported in China and Russia,
along with an explosion in sales of survival shelters in America. In France
believers were preparing to converge on a mountain where they believe aliens
will rescue them.”
China might seem a strange place for the apocalypse idea to crop up, but the
Telegraph said that “In China … a wave of paranoia about the apocalypse can be
traced to the 2009 Hollywood blockbuster ‘
2012.’
The film … was a smash hit in China, as viewers were seduced by a plot that saw
the Chinese military building arks to save humanity.”
That $200 million steaming pile of callous manipulation, I suspect, did a great
deal to boost the 2012 myth from New Age circles into the mainstream.
As I wrote a couple of years ago, we might be able to
forgive filmmakers for creating an overpriced package of ridiculous escapism
like
The Core or
Volcano. Unlike those films, however, and like the fundamentalist
Left Behind series, the film implied
their fictional work presaged actual and imminent tragedies.
The filmmakers also dropped the “Rapture” name for extra points among the
mega-church crowd, both in the script and in the cruel advertising line, “Will
You Be Left Behind?” The difference is that the
Left Behind authors seem to truly believe their dubious theology,
whereas the filmmakers seemed to be exploiting the genuine fears of real people
to make some quick cash.
Even if only one person in ten thousand takes them seriously, scares like the
2012 fakery can cost real people their lives. David Morrison, an astronomer at
NASA, told the Telegraph that “at least once a week I get a message from a
young person, as young as 11, who says they are ill and/or contemplating
suicide because of the coming doomsday. I think it’s evil for people to
propagate rumours on the internet to frighten children.”
Apocalyptic scares have cropped up throughout history, and no one has written a
more readable overview of them than John Michael Greer. His drily funny book
Apocalypse Not: Everything You Know About
2012, Nostradamus and the Rapture is Wrong probably saw sales fall off
after Nothing Happened Day, but should still be read as immunisation against
the next one.
One area Greer could have explored more, perhaps, was “Why Mayans?” Why not
prophecies from Norwegians, or Saudis, or any other group? The answer seems to
be twofold; first, it’s easier to project any beliefs or ideology you like on a
now-extinct group that can’t protest. There are some descendants of the Mayans
left, who have rightly objected to their pop-culture co-opting, but poor
Third-Worlders do not generally have the media influence of California New Age
gurus.
The other reason has to do with the exalted place Native Americans hold in
popular culture. Of course Native Americans were the victims of the greatest
human genocide in history, and even into the mid-20
th century were
portrayed in popular fiction as villainous savages. The response of the Sixties
counterculture, though, was insulting in a different direction, projecting onto
Native tribes whatever ancient wisdom they wanted to hear. This was done mainly
through the use of Italians and other Europeans pretending to be Natives,
making up New Age teachings and passing them off as authentic.
As John Miller wrote in the
National Review, “Between 1960 and 2000, the
number of Americans claiming Indian ancestry on their census forms jumped by a
factor of six. Neither birth-rates nor counting methodologies can account for
this explosive growth. Instead, the phenomenon arises in large part from the
increasingly idealistic place Indians occupy in the popular imagination. Much
of it is based on harmless sentiment mixed into a hash of unverifiable family
legends and wishful thinking among folks who hang dream-catchers from their
rear-view mirrors. But for a distinct subset, it’s all about personal profit.
They’re professional imposters who have built entire careers by putting the
sham into shaman.”
In some cases people just claim to be Native when they are not: author and
provocateur Ward Churchill, actor “Iron Eyes” Cody, and many others. In others
Europeans claim special insight into Native culture: Carlos Castaneda, for
example, wrote his entire Don Juan series with supposed interviews based on a
reclusive Yaqui Indian no one else ever met, while Lynn Andrews did something
similar with her Medicine Woman series.
The Celestine Prophecy, Mutant
Message from Down Under -- for a while it seemed every year brought more
books from dead or remote peoples, offering life-coaching for upscale
Westerners.
Some of these teachings are useful in their own right; Canadian ecologist “Grey
Owl” married into Native American communities and wrote beautifully about protecting
wilderness, even if he was originally an Englishman named Archie Blayney. “The
Education of Little Tree” is a lovely story, even if it turned out to be
fiction written by a white segregationist.
Decades of such romanticising, though, means that followers of the Sixties
counterculture treat Native teachings with a special reverence – even fake
ones, and they usually are. I know a number of people who sneered at Harold
Camping’s numerous Rapture predictions who seemed to take the Mayan claims
seriously – at least, as seriously as anyone takes anything these days,
forwarding memes while filtering any convictions through layers of post-hip
meta-irony.
The 2012 books I leafed through also yanked science-sounding terms into the
discussion whenever possible, describing a “quantum leap” forward in human
“evolutionary levels.” Basically, it’s the same technique used by the religious
cult “scientology,” stealing bits of words from actual scientific research and
using them to imbue their vague hokum with a bogus legitimacy.
Many people I talk to seem unconcerned with doomsday crazes, considering them
throwbacks to an earlier age of superstition, which will die out eventually.
It’s been a standard line of science and science fiction for a hundred years,
recited in everything from H.G. Wells’
Things to Come to the
Star
Trek series, that technology would allow humans to outgrow primitive ideas.
Instead, however, the opposite has happened -- as people spent more of their
hours staring at electronic media, they became more susceptible to
superstition, for several reasons.
First of all, news and fake news travel instantly around the world, and are
increasingly difficult to escape. A year ago today, I was listening to
neighbours talk about the alleged Mayan prophecy … at our local pub in rural
Ireland. Locals would have been sitting at the same pub fifty or a hundred
years ago -- several apocalypse scares ago -- but would not have easily known
about them; until a few decades ago, few places in Ireland had electricity or
modern media. Today, though, people here hear the same celebrity gossip, and
watch the same blockbusters and visit some of the same internet sites as people
everywhere. Instead of a dubious notion having to infect a critical mass of
people in a town before spreading to the next town, a con or conspiracy theory
can appear everywhere in the world – to a teenager in Saskatchewan, an old lady
in Turkmenistan and an Irish farmer – simultaneously.
The modern world has made us more susceptible to superstition in other ways;
when we spend most of our time staring at glowing rectangles rather than living
in the real world, it becomes easy to become isolated, paranoid, or trapped in
a misinformed bubble of like-minded people. Also, when we spend most of our
time moving pixels on a screen for a paycheque, it becomes all the easier to
fantasise about fighting zombies or some other more hands-on existence.
Finally, the very nature of our online lives means that information flits in
and out of our minds quickly, leading us to forget, only a year later, that
there were millions of people who genuinely thought the world would end. It
leaves us singularly unprepared for the next fake Apocalypse, whose rumours are
already circulating somewhere.
You might think that people are right to be alarmed, even if it takes a fake
Mayan thing to alarm them. Between fossil fuels and climate change, an
increasingly fragile economy and a disintegrating culture, humanity faces all
kinds of problems. I’ve been writing about them for years; is it hypocritical
of me, you might ask, to criticise someone else’s doomsday theory?
But here’s the thing: peak oil was never the apocalypse. When the theory of
peak oil was revived around the turn of the millennium, some well-intentioned
and otherwise beneficial thinkers saw in it the doomsday they had been waiting
for. Ten years ago, however, when I wrote my first magazine cover story on peak
oil, I said that we “won’t wake up Amish one day,” and when conventional oil
peaked a few years ago, we didn’t. Rather, the promising peak oil movement
dissipated somewhat after that, perhaps because the countdown had ended and the
world had not collapsed. Framing peak oil as the apocalypse harmed the
movement’s credibility, and undermined the very useful contributions of
volunteers in local communities around the world.
Climate change is also not the apocalypse, in that sense. Almost all scientists agree that
humans are causing climate change at a geologically alarming pace, but on a
human scale the change is slow and scattershot enough to leave many
non-scientists unconvinced. Even when events do happen – this or that city
being devastated, a record-breaking summer, droughts and floods like no one has
ever seen – no one can prove that climate change caused it, and with our short
modern memories we quickly move on. Claiming that “we have only ten years left”
to stop climate change, as some activists have done for decades, only
discredits climate science in the eyes of the public when, ten years later, the
changes have been small or quickly forgotten.
None of these crises in our culture, our economy, or in the living world
constitute the Apocalypse of John of Patmos, or any of the rest of the
Antilegomena. They are not the Big One people have been waiting for, and people
need to stop waiting. None of them will wipe out everyone you don’t like, and
leave them sorry they doubted you. None of them will eliminate all those other
humans standing in front of you in the grocery queue, leaving you with all
their stuff.
I do expect a great many crises in the years to come – more weather
disasters, economic crashes, wars and rumours of wars. I expect that actions
that were once considered unspeakable might become commonplace, just as actions
fifty or a hundred years ago are unthinkable to us, and vice versa. Preparing
for such long-term events, though, means working with others, making your
little corner of the world more resilient in the face of change, and adhering
to a consistent set of principles even when the culture shifts tectonically
under your feet. It means changing your life in a thousand small and tangible
ways.
At some point, of course, the world will end – for you. That sobering
realisation – in Greek,
Apocalypsi,
or Revelation – is what most apocalyptic scriptures are really about; the
commonly cited passages about the end of the world take on a very different
meaning when you posit that they are not talking about a universal end, but a
personal one. That’s what most religions are about: When done rightly, they
help you spend your remaining years meaningfully, to think of others before
yourself, to set an example the world can see, and to bring you closer to God.
Doomsday thinking, as in the Mayan 2012 belief, does the opposite. It
encourages people to retreat into a bubble of believers. It discourages people
from making small improvements, when everything is about to be swept away. It makes
people passive in the face of predestination. It tells people that God will
come to them, and they don’t need to do anything.
