Marina Benjamin
A Second Look
When the expectation of crisis at the last century’s end failed to give Oscar Wilde a sufficiently satisfying frisson, he famously complained: “It’s the fin de sicle. I wish it were fin du monde.” Would that he were here to conjure a suitable epigram today. For as this century draws to its close, there’s enough fin du monde in the air for anyone.
The collapse of global capitalism, war in Central Africa, environmental catastrophe, the breakdown of technological infrastructure, the boiling of land and sea: these are some of our favourite apocalyptic things.
For 2 000 years the Book of Revelation has provided a menu for the end of the world. But are we really flirting with the end as the Bible foretold it? Or is the shadow of the end-time providing us with other satisfactions? Could it be we have ceased taking pleasure in denying the world its prophesied end?
Wilde would have appreciated that teaser, since it recognises that given the choice of struggling on with a bunch of intractable global problems or wiping the slate clean, there are times when the radical course of action has greater appeal. Infantile though it may be, if our hunger for resolution cannot be met, we begin to long for destruction. Perhaps that accounts for our endless fascination with the millennium bug.
It is difficult to say when the 1990s became nervous, but anxiety levels soared with the discovery of this death- watch beetle. Lurking within our computer networks, it promises to trigger a chain reaction that will dismantle our global infrastructure. Millenarians have long suspected the Anti-Christ might be holed up in the circuitry of our technologies.
The Y2K bug fits the bill of paranoia better than the universal bar code or secretly implanted microchips. It is capable of generating maximum disarray from a single nerve centre. It will detonate the moment 1999 clicks into 2000, which means that instead of worrying about when disaster will strike, we simply need to decide whether to welcome it or fight.
What galls us about the bug is that it resists remedy and refuses to yield its mystery. We have no way of knowing whether our fears of electronic apocalypse are real, no way of telling where disaster will strike. What stops us all being millenarians is that none of us is capable of distinguishing the saved from the damned.
One feature of our present imaginative paralysis is that we are bereft of visions of new Edens. Unable or unwilling to pin our hopes on the future, we have taken to fretting over the present. Recently we trembled at the nuclear arm-wrestling between India and Pakistan and anxiously monitored the mad weather from Athens to Texas, which seemed to prove that the greenhouse effect was not simply a ruse cooked up by eco-scientists.
In the past weeks, things appear to have gone from bad to worse. In the aftermath of the United States’s air strikes against Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, fears are rife that President Bill Clinton has only succeeded in igniting a postmodern war of attrition likely to drag on for years. And with Boris Yeltsin failing to preside presidentially over Russia’s crisis, global share prices plummeted.
I ought to confess millenarian inclinations of my own. I have been engaged in a millenarian activity: compiling a list of our worldly woes. Look anywhere in the literature of born- again American doom and you learn that it is through such stock-taking exercises that those intent on matching contemporary events to biblical prophecies seek to reassure themselves that Armageddon cannot be far off. But my point is not about whether the unravelling biblical conundrums allow us to calculate our proximity to the end of the world. It is about psychology.
What is it about such list-making that has the power to induce in us vertigo, a sense of existing on the brink of things? Is there a dark force at work in the human psyche which wants to insist that reversals of fortune are inexorable and part of the fabric of existence? When life appears to have been relatively stable, we become less, rather than more, convinced that things will continue as they are. So the longer things refuse to go wrong, the more precarious we feel. For eight and a half years, disaster has held off. And although we construct calamities such as Chernobyl and the hole in the ozone as “mini-endings”, ominous portents of worse to come, we have survived them.
From the vantage point of now, we have to pinch ourselves to remember the 1990s were not always nervous. The decade opened on a note of relief; the avaricious 1980s were behind us and there was a genuine feeling of widened possibility. The new world promised to be a kinder, gentler place.
On this wave of optimism Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man, arguing that the Apocalypse had already happened, neither with bang nor whimper, but with the peaceful disintegration of the Eastern Bloc nations – the Velvet Apocalypse. For Fukuyama, this was the decade in which the other millennium of peace and prosperity would arrive as pan-global liberal capitalist democracy.
Fukuyama may well have been flying high on Western economic imperialism, but the extent to which the early 1990s were animated by genuine hope may be gauged by the horrified reactions to the Armageddonist impulses of David Koresh at the Waco siege. We could no more share his conviction the world was coming to an end than we could accept him as the seventh angel sent to announce the Kingdom of God. He was just a loony monster. That was in 1993. So what’s changed since then?
To some degree, of course, the calendar is to blame. Even if one is enough of a biblical insider to distinguish the Christian millennium, that 1 000-year wedge of paradise between Armageddon and the Last Judgment, from the man-made millennium of numbers, all those zeros do seem ominous. The nearer we get, the louder they signal finality. With less than 500 days to go, we need to do better, unless we are prepared to capitulate to irrationality. I suspect the reason behind our panic at the hint of global problems spinning out of control, beyond political or even religious remedy, is our loss of faith in institutional authority.
Politics has forsaken vision for management – and appears to be making a hash of it, judging by last week’s meeting of unfortunates, which is how one Russian newspaper described the talks between Clinton and Yeltsin. The major religions seem to have abdicated from the world. It’s not for nothing that Peter Mandelson’s millennium Dome Spirit Zone seems destined to remain empty.
Empty spaces can be filled. Our disillusion with national and spiritual leaders can challenge us to imagine new ways of awakening idealism from its slumber. I believe that imagination has been the real casualty of fin de sicle. Though bravery will get us through the next 16 months, we will only thrive beyond them if we allow ourselves to imagine we can.
Marina Benjamin is the author of Living at the End of the World
ENDS