JG Ballard
CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THE END OF TIME by Umberto Eco, Stephen Jay Gould, Jean- Claude Carrire and Jean Delumeau (Allen Lane)
Is Britain’s Millennium Dome too small? Does it represent a failure of nerve of the kind described by the contributors to this discussion on the nature of time and the challenge of the new millennium? Visiting the dome while I was reading these fascinating but troubled reflections, it struck me that this ugly, paranoid structure perfectly embodies the uncertainty that has attached itself like a gnawing barnacle to the year 2000.
As the time draws nearer to its opening there seems every likelihood that the culmination of 2 000 years of Christian history will degenerate into little more than a marketing opportunity. Doomsday fantasies have haunted the popular imagination this century, from nuclear armageddon to alien invasions but, apart from a few apocalyptic sects, the one thing no one expects to happen is that our world will end on December 31.
So there is still time for an unpleasant surprise. Jean Delumeau, professor of history at the Collge de France, says that the notion of the end of time is a recurrent theme in literature and has fuelled innumerable millenarian movements, but is almost entirely confined to the Jewish and Christian faiths.
Buddhism and Hinduism are sustained by the notion of cyclical time, and believe that after immense eras everything will return to its moment of departure. The Judaeo-Christian theme of things is linear and far more punitive. God created the world and, says Delumeau, subjected humankind to time, which the deity could switch off when he felt we had failed him. If there was a beginning, so there must be an end, followed by a last judgment and an eternity of bliss or punishment.
Pain, sadly, has always been far easier to visualise than pleasure, a design fault in the central nervous system that reflects our brutalised past, but from which we may now be emerging, thanks to a longevity our forebears would have found impossible to grasp and an entertainment culture with a huge panoply of recreational drugs.
As the biologist Stephen Jay Gould remarks, people in the past had a real and profound fear of apocalyptic catastrophe, but all that frightens us in our secular age is the prospect of a global computer failure. “In the end,” he writes, “there’ll be just one big party, with people nall over mthe planet kissing each other.” Yet religions have a habit of springing up when we least expect them. As my psychoanalyst son-in-law reminds me, a religion greater than Christianity or Islam might be forming around us at this very moment.
Gould believes that “apocalypticism is the province of the wretched, the downtrodden, the dispossessed,” and that we have little idea of what the human race is capable of on the basis of its genetic make-up.
Novelist Jean-Claude Carrire is more pessimistic, as one might expect from the scriptwriter of Luis Buuel and Nagisa Oshima films. He believes that no period in history has allowed atheism to speak out so powerfully, creating a culture of desperate materialism. But while the supermarket shelves are full, the French language is impoverishing itself, shedding tenses such as the future anterior, the past historic and the perfect subjunctive, tools for articulating time.
For Umberto Eco, the idea of the end of the world is an illusion linked to our sense of our own mortality. “If the man who is my father dies, won’t the world in which I live die also?” The end of the world is not the end of time – there will always be new heavens and new earths.
How many of these will be glimpsed within the Millennium Dome? The year 2000 is an occasion for stocktaking, Eco claims, and reminds us to carry out an overdue self- assessment. Seeing the dome at close quarters, I was struck by its failure of imagination, by its sheer ugliness. Missing from the publicity picture is the maze of cables that jars the retina, a festering mass of black wires.
The dome is too small, I feel. It should be at least a mile in diameter. It fails to astonish, unlike the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, a tenth its size and cost. Staked down like a corpse in this polluted corner of east London, it expresses our failure to respond to the future.
Perhaps we aren’t ready for the next millennium, which should be postponed to 2050, when the last of those responsible for the 20th century will have died out. I suspect that too much unfinished business remains from our century for us to look boldly into the future, that we enter the next millennium with a huge moral debt to the hundreds of millions who perished in our global civil war.
Meanwhile we can cling to the pseudo-events that are dearest to us, such as the eclipse or the martyrdom of Diana. I invest my own hopes in my grandchildren, all under the age of four and the first generation who will have no memories of our century, and who will rediscover the forgotten excitements of living in the future.