While reading Kirsch I often noted how cultural anxiety plays a key role in apocalyptic thinking. Apocalyptic anxiety has opened up a huge market in pop-culture. It’s important to note that this market didn’t just succeed without the presence of some need; people buy into it. I would argue that apocalyptic consumers aren’t just successfully targeted bystanders, but rather they have an anxiety-driven fascination with the legacy that originated with The Book of Revelation. Kermode addresses further how this market of anxiety succeeds because of the very human need for a comprehensible end to the human “story.”
Kermode’s discussion of how people perceive time and how people expect events to unfold is fascinating. He suggests that as humans, we are limited to thinking “humanly” about different circumstances. This human thinking is fairly linear and so it makes our perspective on how things like fiction should be. Kermode then addresses how the Book of Revelation works well as a linear “ending” to the story of the Bible. At the same time, though, Revelation is only a proposed sequence of events that introduces the end times. Because Revelation works to satisfy our need for a linear pattern of time, it also, in a way, eases the very anxiety that it creates. I would say, though, that the anxiety surrounding the idea of the end of the world is not entirely rooted in people’s general fear of mortality. I think anxiety is both created and eased by the fairly young pop-culture market.
The mere fact that satiric movies, books, etc. related to the end of the world exists displays that there is indeed an underlying anxiety about the subject. Comedy is a popular means of coping with discomfort or uncertainty. The pop-culture market uses humor as a means of both questioning what/when the end of the world might be, but placing some kind of distance between the viewer/reader and the thought of impending doom. Humor isn’t the only way society is able to distance itself from anxiety. The overdramatized, highly unrealistic films that think about the end of the world also make the Apocalypse less possible and therefore less frightening.
South Park Studios Season 1, Episode 8 “Damien”: http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s01e08-damien#
Above is a link to an episode of South Park that satirizes the final battle between Satan and Jesus and also references the apocalyptic film The Omen. The episode is funny because it addresses some very real anxieties, but it also pokes fun at how out of hand group anxiety can become. I think it’s so interesting to look at how the market for Apocalyptic pop-culture is so successful even in a time that is, arguably, less religious than the times of people like John. The shift from religious to Godless Apocalypse that Kirsch discusses in his final chapter helps explain this trend. People in today’s society aren’t afraid of an apocalypse brought on by the hand of God, but rather an apocalypse brought on by themselves.
For me, a human induced apocalypse is a far scarier thought because it is so easy to imagine. The shifted perspective on the source of apocalypse supports Kermode’s point that people will always think of time in terms of how far away from the end they are. It makes sense to me that we generally view ourselves as living somewhere in the middle of history. The question “why are we here?” is easier to understand if we can think of it in terms of an ultimate ending that will explain all of our unanswered questions and ease all of our unaddressed anxieties.
The apocalyptic market is comforting as an outlet for thinking about our anxieties, but it also fuels and speaks to our continued fears about the end of the world. The pop-culture market, I’m sure, will continue to thrive because people are fascinated by the idea of the end of our story. So, people will likely continue to write, preach, watch and read about the end of the world and how we fit into the great linear story of the universe because, as Kermode says, we have a lasting and irreconcilable “…problem of making sense of the ways we make sense of the world.”(31).
This idea of an apocalyptic market fits well into our cultural anxiety over the end of the world. Our popculture feeds off of this anxiety and definitely makes the end of the world seem more conceivable in an individual sense, but also serves to magnify the globalization and drama of doomsday. It makes me wonder how in touch with reality we are, as a people, when we are constantly waiting for the final battle of good vs. evil, where evil inherently triumphs into the new millennium. If this were to be a human induced apocalypse, the hype over the end of the world would surely have been at fault for it. If we continuously wait for the apocalypse to make its way onto earth, impatience will only drive humanity to narrow the wait time and self create this feared moment in time. The irony of this is mind boggling. Kirsch talks about the controversy of faith in progress vs. faith in God. It is progress that will allow us to advance to a level beyond our perceived scientific means, and it would be that same progress that would contribute to our manmade end. This indeed promotes the “problem of making sense of the ways we make sense of the world.”
I would certainly agree, as Kirsch asserts towards the end of his book, that by imagining the end of the world we risk entrapping ourselves in a self-fulfilling prophecy. However, I think there was a suggestion that progress, instead of leading to the advances that will allow us to destroy ourselves, could rather lead us to simply create the millennial era ourselves; history will not end, but enter a utopian period. Certainly it seems in many ways that we are on the former track, and both sides of the coin are extreme – I think it likely that we won’t destroy ourselves for some time, and equally likely that we won’t be reaching a utopian world in the foreseeable future. My point is only that progress itself (much like faith) is not inherently good or bad; the application is what gives it a moral value. The use of progress with a positive connotation comes from the linear thinking Kermode and Whitney discuss, and is deeply imbedded in the ideal “American dream.” However, historically speaking, the idea that society in general has been moving in a constant positive direction is easy to dispute. Our current generation is a good example of this – there is a pessimistic outlook that we will not be as well off as our parent’s generation and America can certainly be seen as on the decline relative to both previous generations and other countries in terms of many factors. This may be part of the fuel for apocalyptic anxiety and fascination so prevalent in the young pop-culture market that Whitney identifies.
Reading your post reminded me of something that I noticed while reading Kirsch – most of the number crunchers who tried to predict the end of the world generally placed the date sometime within their lifetime, often in the next few years. I believe that this ties in with your point about the human desire for an ‘ending’ and our ever-present fears about our mortality. Since our entire lives are lived through an incredibly limited perspective, its often disturbing to contemplate that the world will go on, without the slightest pause, after our deaths. I believe that this same fear led to so many ‘true believers’ hoping and praying that the world would end without their actual deaths, thereby avoiding the thorny issue of life after death and the existence of God.
Hi Whitney,
For discussion in class, I’d like for us to focus on the issue of anxiety that you bring up here. I asked Ilirjan to pose it in class as well, given his statement that “apocalypse produces overwhelming feelings of anxiety that some Christians feel they may temporarily quell by believing they have it all figured out.” So the two of you can lead off this part of our discussion.
I really think everyone makes interesting points related to how we THINK about the world around us(whether the progress we’re making is a good thing or a risk, or as the case may be something in between), about time, and about what it all means in relation to our own mortality.
Something that I’m thinking about is the difference between anxiety and fear. It seems to me that our anxieties, which often seem absurd or over-estimated in retrospect, work, as some of you have suggested, to help us avoid our underlying fears; fears that are too deeply routed or too hard to think about “humanly” for us to work out in our own minds.
I think these comments will be a good springboard for class discussion tomorrow, as Professor Quinby suggested. There’s so much to think about!