The Lure of the Apocalypse
16th January 2020 Comments (12)
Aynsley Kellow
There are indeed (who might say Nay) gloomy & hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, & despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen. To these I say How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!
—Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 8, 1816
My name is Aynsley, and I’m an apocaholic. A recovering one, I hope, but the appeal of the idea that an apocalypse is looming, and that the chosen few will survive in some unchanging utopia, has a deep cultural hold on most of us. In my own case, it was encouraged by some childhood exposure to the Book of Revelation, but then developed further after rejecting religion by the siren call of the neo-Malthusianism of the Club of Rome, and the usual adolescent flirtation with Marxism. Emphasising the softer 1844 manuscripts over Das Kapital, of course—this was the era of the New Left, after all.
Marx is generally considered to have been hostile to environmentalism because of his attack on Thomas Malthus and his Principle of Population, but Marx’s beef was that the social organisation of scarcity under capitalism meant that the axe of subsistence fell disproportionately upon the necks of the poor. I even wrote my first academic publication arguing that a Marxist environmentalism was possible. And I also engaged in some praxis, writing a feature on the Values Party, the world’s first neo-Malthusian political party, for the student newspaper at the University of Otago, Critic. Having thus helped establish the branch in Dunedin, I then stood as a candidate for it in the 1972 general election.
This essay appears in the latest Quadrant.
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But my academic studies began to break these naive tendencies down, and I began to understand the deeper cultural attraction of these three belief systems. The catalyst was the minor I took in Anthropology, which brought me into contact with millenarian movements, studying texts such as Peter Worsley’s The Trumpet Shall Sound. Millenarianism as a belief system incorporates a prophesied apocalypse which sweeps away the present order with all its hurt and imperfections and gives way to an unchanging utopia that lasts for a thousand years, meant to signify eternity.
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/01/the-lure-of-the-apocalypse/
