"Apocalyptic narcissism"
The Comforts of the Apocalypse
By Rob Goodman, August 19, 2013
"Nineteen days after the world failed to end, blood stopped flowing to the brain of Harold Camping, prophet of doom. Had he felt his stroke coming as he confidently forecast apocalypse? Maybe not; maybe he had no more foresight into his own demise than the demise of the world. Or maybe he had simply confused the twoâafter all, he was approaching his 90th birthday, and his own mortality couldn't have seemed far off when, on national billboards and his own radio network, he set a date (May 21, 2011) for the end of days.
For some, it is a short mental step from "my end is imminent" to "the end of everything is imminent." Call it apocalyptic narcissism.
"We flatter ourselves when we imagine a world incapable of lasting without us in itâa world that, having ceased to exist, cannot forget us, discard us, or pave over our graves. Even if the earth no longer sits at the center of creation, we can persuade ourselves that our life spans sit at the center of time, that our age and no other is history's fulcrum. "We live in the most interesting times in human history ... the days of fulfillment," writes the Rev. E.W. Jackson, Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia, in words that could have also come from the mouth of Saint Paul or Shabbetai Zevi or Hal Lindsey or any other visionary unable to accept the hard truth of the apocalyptic lottery: We're virtually guaranteed to witness the end of nothing except our lives, and the present, far from fulfilling anything, is mainly distinguished by being the one piece of time with us in it.
"Perhaps you, like me, are a good secularist, and perhaps Camping's prophecies strike you as a perverse joke. (You may also be relieved to hear his stroke proved nonfatal.) But I find it harder to mock false prophets, because of the very real fear (of death, nothingness, irrelevance) to which their prophecies speak, and because I'm not at all convinced that secular culture is above their form of self-flattery. We're living through a dystopia boom; secular apocalypses have, in the words of The New York Times, "pretty much owned" best-seller lists and taken on a dominant role in pop culture. These are fictions of infinite extrapolation, stories in which today's source of anxiety becomes tomorrow's source of collapse.
"Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games projects reality television and social stratification into a televised tournament of death. Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series manages to combine an energy crisis, an omnipresent surveillance state, and caste warfare between "uglies" and surgically enhanced "pretties." Nor is the literature of collapse confined to the young-adult section. The World Without Us, Alan Weisman's 2007 best seller, imagines in loving detail the decay of material civilization on an earth from which humans have vanished. Our extinction goes unexplained, but a sense of environmental catastrophe hangs heavy over the book; billing itself as nonfiction, its premise comes straight from dystopian sci-fi.
"All of this literature is the product of what the philosopher John Gray has described as "a culture transfixed by the spectacle of its own fragility." Call it dystopian narcissism: the conviction that our anxieties are uniquely awful; that the crises of our age will be the ones that finally do civilization in; that we are privileged to witness the beginning of the end.
"Of course, today's dystopian writers didn't invent the ills they decry..."
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