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The Secular Addiction to the Endtimes (& Scapegoating)

The Secular Addiction to the Endtimes (& Scapegoating)

Last updated on: May 6, 2016 at 8:03 pm by Artur Rosman

The Secular Addiction to the Endtimes (& Scapegoating) 2016-05-06T20:03:31-07:00 Artur Rosman

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In our case, it is surely obvious that the sudden intensification of our capacity to pick up the eschatological undertones and overtones of the New Testamnt must have something to do with the emerging crisis of European civilization. Since the turn of the [20th] century human minds have been increasingly aware of a decline and fall, like the premonition of some imminent earthquake in world history. The First World War gave this sense its earliest tragic confirmation, undermining as it did so the then dominant theological Liberalism with its optimistic assessement of a purely cultural Christianity. –Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life

Our 7 year-old seems to have mixed up the Gospel reading with the readings from the book of Revelation. A couple of Sundays ago after Mass he explained to his sister, “Then Jesus went up on a fiery cross . . . and died.”

You’d think such apocalyptic mixups would be the sole provenance of believers if you only read books such as Cohn’s classic The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. You might be tempted to say millenarian and apocalyptic thinking is a trap only believers fall into, but, you’d be wrong.

[SIDEBAR: Did you know that Muslims await for Jesus, not Mohammed, to inaugurate the endtimes? That’s just something I learned from a lecture by the author of Islam’s Jesus. One more thing, because of this very eschatological reason there are plenty of Muslims who await the imminent return of Jesus like some off the grid conservative Southern Baptists.]

How wrong would you be? Take a look at any number of atheist blogs (the ones here on Patheos are fuelled by a the run-of-the-mill sensationalism that appeals only to the choir). Or take a look at the increasingly unfunny Stephen Fry as he totally butchers the Enlightenment by a) claiming it exclusively for the non-religious b) naming Kant and Voltaire (believers) as his main Enlightenment heroes c) then does his best to drum up anti-religious paranoia:

Thank Goodness the Enlightenment was much more pluralistic, even Catholic, than this. Granted, it would be difficult to drum up support for one’s weak community without a scapegoat. So I understand Stephen. It is an effective mobilizing tool, even if it appeals to a small group of like-minded people. Religious communities interpret the apocalyptic parts of their Scriptures in this way all the time. That symmetry only goes to underscore, as with the case of “religious” violence, the fact that no group owns this way of thinking and the actions that flow from it–it’s just human.

There, I’ve shown you a little bit of how the internet sausage is made. This is how ditto-heads on all the sides get hits: by scapegoating (here I partially return to the topic of yesterday’s post: Rene Girard). I hope you won’t mind if I pull back now and give you something more nourishing to bite into. I have in mind the public exchange of letters between the recently deceased novelist (and agnostic) Umberto Eco and Milan’s Cardinal Martini of blessed memory. In Belief or Nonbelief? Eco discusses the omnipresence of apocalyptic thinking and secularism’s appropriation of it:

No more the seven trumpets, the hailstorm, the sea turned to blood, stars falling from the sky, horses rising in a cloud of smoke from the deepest abyss… In their place: the uncontrolled and uncontrollable proliferation of nuclear waste; acid rain; the disappearing Amazon; the hole in the ozone; the migrating disinherited masses knocking, often with violence, at the door of prosperity; the hunger of entire continents; new, incurable pestilence; the selfish destruction of the soil; global warming; melting glaciers; the construction of our own clones through genetic engineering; and, according to mystical principles of ecology, the necessary suicide of humanity itself, which must perish in order to rescue those species it has already almost obliterated–Mother Earth, denatured and suffocating.

From this Eco surprisingly comes to this conclusion about apocalyptic thinking:

I’d be willing to bet that the notion of the end of time is more common today in the secular world than in the Christian. The Christian world makes it the object of meditation, but acts as if it may be projected into a dimension not measure by calendars. The secular world pretends to ignore the end of time, but is fundamentally obessed by it. This is not a paradox by a repetition of what transpired in the first thousand years of history.

It’s not that the threats listed above aren’t real, but what matters is humanity’s response to them. As both Martini and Eco point out there is the possibility of responding in hope without being paralyzed for the Christian. However, Eco believes that secularists tend to get stuck in a vicious cycle of denial, because they think they have no recourse to a transcendence that might lessen their burden as they grapple with such immense problems:

One could say even that we live our fear in the spirit of eart, drink, for tomorrow we die, celebrating the end of ideology and solidarity in a whirlwind of irresponsible consumerism. In this way, each one of us flirts with the specter of the apocalypse, exorcising it; the more one unconsciouslyfears it the more one exorcises, projecting it onto the screen in the for of bloody spectacle, hoping in this way to render it unreal. But the power of specter lies precisely in its unreality.

As you can see, the addiction to apocalyptic thinking is not solely religious, but it takes on a unique form of projecting outwards, very much in line with the mechanism of scapegoating, for secular thinking.

On the other hand, the Christian has the possibility of such a turning against the world in despair, or putting their faith in a transcendence that helps to affirm even the tragedies of history meaningful. But I had a further revelation about atheist thinking while reading the collection of conversations with Richard Kearney entitled, Reimagining the Sacred. The conversation with atheist Simone Critchley, author of The Faith of the Faithless (unexpectedly on sale), especially opened up my eyes because he says, “even those who cannot believe still require religious truth and a framework of ritual in which they can believe.” Now that’s going to take a little bit of unpacking in a future post.

I do suspect that maybe his position is closer to what Kearney calls anatheism–a space of conversation where atheists and theists can meet without scapegoating each other, without becoming addicted to violent interpretations of apocalypticism (the default human position, not uniquely religious), but instead putting their faith in a hopeful form of apocalypticism oriented toward self-transcendence and goodwill.

Granted, the differences cannot be papered over either, as they were not in Belief or Nonbelief?, but neither should they hinder conversations like this between believers from vastly different traditions:

You will also want to read through: Anatheism: The Hospitality Before Theism and Atheism

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