In the second of three Saturday afternoon talks at Mill Hill Chapel asking ‘What Happened to the Future?’, we welcome back write Tim Black to discuss ‘the return of apocalyptic thinking’.
End-thinking seems to abound today. Politicians and activists alike warn daily of the ever-impending climate catastrophe. Others talk excitedly of the next pandemic or of the world-ending threat posed by AI. What’s driving the prevalence of apocalypticism today?
Writing over 40 years ago, Susan Sontag attributed ‘the taste for worst-case scenarios’ to ‘the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable’. Is the contemporary taste for the apocalyptic fuelled by something similar, by a fear of a profoundly uncertain future, or is there something more going on?
After all, beyond mainstream doom-mongering, countless niche strains of apocalyptic thinking are flourishing, too, from the dark fantasies of Islamists to the dreams of a neo-reactionary right, convinced that the era of Western liberal democracy is coming to its decadent end. There seems to be a proliferation of such conspiracy-minded groups, all self-righteously ‘in the know’, denouncing others as evil or duped, and keenly anticipating a final reckoning.
Historian Norman Cohn, writing of millenarian cults at the dawn of modernity, claimed that the essence of apocalyptic thinking lay in ‘the tense expectation of a final, decisive struggle in which a world tyranny will be overthrown by a “chosen people” and through which the world will be renewed, and history brought to its consummation’.
Could we be seeing a revival of this millenarian sensibility today, rich as it is in Manichaeism and conspiricism? And, if so, why? What is it about the apocalyptic that exerts such a powerful pull on the modern imagination?
