Death Wish: Why Are We So In Love with the Apocalypse?http://bigjournalism.com/dkalder/2010/01/24/we-are-we-so-in-love-with-the-apocalypse/It’s impossible to avoid the apocalypse these days. Whether we encounter the End in the form of news reports on Global Warming, or fears of Iran getting bomb, or plague panics such as H1N1, we seem to be living in a high point of apocalyptic anxiety, with horrible Doomsdays lurking round every corner.
And yet, the End has never been so much fun. Roland Emmerich released his latest apocalyptic blockbuster 2012 in November, and since then we have enjoyed Zombieland, The Road, The Book of Eli, Legion and even Al Gore’s dreadful poem read aloud on morning TV in the presence of a fawning sycophant. Much more is to come, and this is to say nothing of video games, books, comics, or half the output of the History Channel.
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What lies behind this fascination with the End? Dr. Richard Landes, professor of mediaeval history at Boston University, is a renowned scholar of apocalyptic movements who has been thinking about Doomsday for forty years. He is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and author of the upcoming Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of Millennial Experience. Landes is an exceptionally interesting thinker who applies his knowledge of past apocalypses to our present fears, an analysis which frequently informs the articles he publishes at his website The Augean Stables.
Recently I phoned him from my base in Texas, to chat about mankind’s enduring love affair with the apocalypse. I caught him in Tel Aviv airport at 2 a.m, and it was then, against a backdrop of deepest night, that we spent two hours discussing the end of the world:
With all these apocalyptic films coming out, and fears of Global Warming, plague and nuclear proliferation running rampant, do you think that we are living through an era of heightened apocalyptic anxiety?
You know, that’s almost a precise paraphrase of what journalists were asking me in the 90s, while looking ahead to the year 2000. That was when we had all those movies about planet-destroying comets, and fears of the Y2K bug… There’s always an apocalyptic undercurrent in our culture, but sometimes it comes to the fore.
Why is the pull of apocalyptic belief so strong?
Our love for the apocalypse is connected with our sense of our own importance. To live in apocalyptic expectation means that you are the chosen generation; that in your time the puzzle of existence will be solved. It appeals to our- by which I mean humanity’s- megalomania: we all want to believe we’re special, that God has given us a front row seat for the most important events in history.