The Last Myth: What the Rise of Apocalyptic Thinking Tells Us About America (Contemporary Issues) - Softcover

Gross, Matthew Barrett; Gilles, Mel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1616145730 ISBN 13: 9781616145736

Verlag: Prometheus Books, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

During the first dozen years of the twenty-first century, apocalyptic anticipation in America has leapt from the cultish to the mainstream. Today, nearly 60 percent of Americans believe that the events foretold in the book of Revelation will come true. But many secular readers also seem hungry for catastrophe and have propelled books about peak oil, global warming, and the end of civilization into bestsellers. How did we come to live in a culture obsessed by the belief that the end is near?

The Last Myth explains why apocalyptic beliefs are surging within the American mainstream today. Demonstrating that our expectation of the end of the world is a surprisingly recent development in human thought, the book reveals the profound influence of apocalyptic thinking on America’s past, present, and future.

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Mathew Barrett Gross rewrote the rules of presidential politics as the director of Internet Communications for Howard Dean’s groundbreaking 2003–2004 presidential campaign. Highly regarded as a new media strategist, he has consulted for numerous political campaigns, advocacy organizations, and global NGOs, and has been profiled in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and Fast Company. A former rock drummer and river guide, he lives in Moab, Utah.

Mel Gilles is the cofounder and director of Sol Kula Yoga and Healing in Moab, Utah. She served as a nonprofit director and consultant for over a decade. Her writing has appeared in newspapers, magazines, and blogs nationwide; her essay "The Politics of Victimization" went viral, appearing on MichaelMoore.com and BuzzFlash and reaching more than two million readers around the world.

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THE LAST MYTH

WHAT THE RISE OF APOCALYPTIC THINKING TELLS US ABOUT AMERICA By MATHEW BARRETT GROSS MEL GILLES

Prometheus Books

Copyright © 2012 Mathew Barrett Gross and Mel Gilles
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61614-573-6

Contents

Introduction: The End of the World?............................91. The Apocalyptic Decade......................................172. The Past Is a Foreign Country...............................413. The Evolution of the Apocalypse.............................674. The Rapture of America......................................1015. The Apocalypse Will Take a Little While.....................1236. In Defense of a Worldview...................................1657. Beyond the Last Myth........................................185Acknowledgments................................................211Notes..........................................................215Index..........................................................239

Chapter One

The Apocalyptic Decade

Few of us can clearly make out the form of history until it is well behind us. The current events that preoccupy us, which we imbue with so much meaning in our daily lives, are often found years later to be of little consequence. The past has another pattern, as T. S. Elliot wrote—and while we look elsewhere or speak of other things, history manifests itself in the wings of the stage. The subplots become the main narrative, and what we perceived as the central crisis of our lives is often later revealed to be a minor and slightly flawed scene, the terrible acting of which is quickly forgotten.

Only in retrospect do the more lasting images and themes of an era reveal themselves. We think of flappers and fur coats and a youthful decadence when we think of the Roaring Twenties. Goose-stepping newsreel fascists in Europe carry the banners emblazoned with our memory of the thirties, segueing into the ticker-tape victory parades of the forties. A cloistered conformity has defined the fifties; hippies, the sixties; self-indulgence, the seventies; and greed, the eighties. Yet while history is happening—while the present is slipping into that inevitable and simplifying parody that soon enough becomes the past—few of us can correctly identify what will later be seen as the dominant cultural icon of our era. A housewife in Peoria in 1967 had little comprehension that her decade would be remembered not for any of the things that consumed her daily life but for the kids who had just driven past her house in a VW® Bus, leaving a scent of grass and patchouli in their wake as they turned down the next block.

That we are blinded to history by our own proximity to current events helps us understand why we still have not settled on a common name for the decade now receding behind us. "The Aughts" never caught on, in part because "aught" as a reference to "zero" remains largely alien to the American vernacular. "The Zeros" is too dreary—too steeped in self-abnegation and too reminiscent of what became of our 401(k)s as the decade came to a close—for even the most maudlin among us to choose it. Some have suggested "The Terror Decade" for obvious reasons, but such a designation fails to encompass the full spectrum of events that influenced the receding decade's mood.How others will look back on this time is beyond our knowing or influence, of course, but future historians would do well to ascribe to our time a name that encapsulates not just the events of the past decade but the way in which we as Americans have come to view the world and our place within it. Such a name might be the Apocalyptic Decade or, perhaps, the Apocalyptic Era—for it is not over yet.

It was during the last decade, after all, that the belief in the end of the world leapt from the cultish into the mainstream of American society. Ours is an era bookended by the widespread belief in the impending collapse of society: at one end we had Y2K, the largest and most expensive mass preparation for a secular apocalypse in the history of the world; at the other end we have the growing expectation and belief that December 21, 2012—the supposed end date of the ancient Mayan Long Count calendar—will herald either a radically transformative or utterly cataclysmic global event. Between these two bookends are pages upon pages of apocalyptic anxiety, a decade-plus-long collection that tells the tale of an America that has grown very afraid of the future.

Ours is a country whose optimism and can-do spirit won two world wars and put a man on the moon during the twentieth century; a nation that has given humankind, in the space of less than a hundred years, the dream of flight, the wonder of electricity, and the power of the Internet. And yet today, Americans of all beliefs and backgrounds are turning increasingly to apocalyptic scenarios to explain and understand a world and nation that look radically different from just a decade ago. This turn toward the apocalyptic is understandable. After all, the headlines of our age read like a horrific disaster novel, with the first chapter titled 9/11; the second chapter, Hurricane Katrina; the third chapter, the Great Recession; and on and on. Nearly every news story—from those dealing with terrorism to climate change to a global economy coming apart at the seams—appears to point to an impending end of the way of life that we have known.

The news looks bad, to be sure. Yet Americans have faced bad news and great challenges before, while largely managing to keep apocalyptic despair off the airwaves and out of presidential press conferences. How have we come to interpret nearly every event through the prism of the apocalypse?

THE END OF HISTORY

To answer that question, it helps to first remind ourselves that we haven't always thought as apocalyptically about world events as we do today. American history is filled with extended periods when the nation looked at the challenges it faced not with despair but with optimism; times when we felt with certainty that the country was not only on the right track but was traveling with great speed toward what would surely be a glorious destination. Such periods are not relegated solely to the distant past. Indeed, though we often forget it, we experienced an extended period of such optimism a little more than twenty years ago, when the Cold War came to an end.

As the Soviet Union collapsed and our four-decades-long fear of nuclear annihilation receded, a heavy burden was removed from our shoulders, and a new sense of levity arose around us. On the pop charts, British rock band Jesus Jones sang about the joy of sitting before the television set as history appeared to come to an end. This was, as another song went, the end of the world as we'd known it—and we felt fine. The long struggle between Western democracy and communism hadn't ended in a nuclear conflagration but instead with the opening of a McDonald's in Moscow. The music at Bill Clinton's inaugural gala in 1993 perfectly (if somewhat embarrassingly) captured the mood of the adolescent decade: yesterday was gone, indeed.

The sense of historical emancipation felt during the early 1990s is best exemplified by American philosopher and political economist Francis Fukuyama's influential essay "The End of History?" Fukuyama borrowed his title from Karl Marx (who had, in turn, borrowed it from Hegel) to argue that the end of the Cold War signaled the triumphant end to human progress....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Prometheus Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1616145730
• ISBN 13: 9781616145736
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 254
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande