The Incredible Dullness of Being (Them)

So dull, and so empty, that you’re ready to invite ‘the apocalypse’ and think of everything as a crisis, just to liven things up.

We are living in a time of crisis and potential apocalypse, with the overlapping of the financial crisis, ecological crisis and the crisis of movements of resistance. The apocalyptic imagination feeds on this to produce dreams or nightmares of a world "cleansed" of humanity, from 2012 to the History Channel's Life After People. These fundamentally reactionary fantasies can only imagine redemption of our fallen world on the condition that humanity ceases to exist, or is reduced to the "right" number of the "saved". What concerns me here is thinking more closely the relation between radical and revolutionary thought and an "apocalyptic tone" in our current context. The usual model of such a tone was proposed by Kant, when he argued that it was the result of the illegitimate extension of reason beyond its limits towards a transcendent "exalted vision" (schwärmerische Vision).[3] Failing to recognise the limits of reality the apocalyptic dreamer was a fanatic (Schwärmer) trying to impose an abstract vision on reality.

The resemblance this has to contemporary environmentalism is striking. It also shines a light on the obvious cracks in modern middle-minded thinking: while religion and faith must be appeared to be frowned upon, the vision is one of an unstable religious movement flirting with cult-like extremes, and dangling from anything it can find from feeble movies to disaster-porn on the History Channel.

On the opposite side of the ring is Norman Cohn's 1957 book In Pursuit of the Millennium, which wisely linked similar millenarian sentiments of the middle ages with illiberalism, Communism, totalitarians, and social anarchists. His conclusion is that these messianic movements aren‘t just something that will always be with us, but take donations and run for office. Writing about him, Greil Marcus notes that he identified them as:

a restlessly dynamic and utterly ruthless group which, obsessed by the apocalyptic phantasy and filled with the conviction of its own infallibility, set itself above the rest of humanity and recognized no claims save that of its own supposed mission . . . A boundless, millenial promise made with boundless, prophet-like conviction to a number of rootless and desperate men in the midst of a society where traditional norms and relationships are disintegrating -- here, it would seem, lay the source of that peculiar subterranean fanaticism.

It seems that Cohn is right – they seem to always be with us, and they will try to lead us into the totalitarian cycle that crash-tested civilization over, and over.