End of the World Rhetoric

The world is a complicated place filled with many voices and opinions and viewpoints.

In my twenties, faced with all this complication, I began to listen to how people talked. This is about the time I formed the opinion that the rhetoric of the left and the right mirrored each other. I also noticed something else:

The rhetoric of doomsdaying or "everything is worse than it has ever been before" is a constant in American/Western society.

It may be a constant of the human condition. If A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens is any indication, it has been floating about Western culture, at least, for a while now. In any case, it is--like Hello, Kitty--a constant underpinning of just about any group I've encountered (only far less friendly).

Out of all the rhetoric I refuse to participate in, my refusal here provokes the most bewilderment and often the most ire. How can I not SEE that the world is getting worse? I must be blind, naive, immoral, corrupt, brainwashed, apathetic, etc. etc. etc.

I encounter this attitude among religious people, progressive leftists, conservatives, environmentalists...

Here's why I still refuse to take the rhetoric on-board as a "given" (even when I'm the one grumbling about the "good old days"):

1. The rhetoric insists on "sinners" even when the rhetoric comes from non-religious institutions.

That is, end-of-the-world rhetoric insists that the end-of-the-world is coming about not only due to outside pressures but due to horrible people--"they" (ah, that ubiquitous they) are dragging the world down.

Not every group uses "sinners" in its rhetoric but the replacement rhetoric is the same: these dragging-the-world-down people are inherently corrupt. They may be misguided (it's not their fault) but they have no redeeming virtues and hence no valid perspective. They should not be argued with since their viewpoint is, by default, non-arguable. Sin is sin. To give way, to allow for the "sin", is to descend on the slippery path to hell.

Many current ideologies use this type of rhetoric. Take into account that "fill-in-the-blank-phobics"--like sinners--are by their very natures bringing society to its knees. Eschew their presence! Flee to the mountains!

2. The rhetoric insists on a narrow vision accompanied by emotional relativism.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" sums up the narrow vision.

And the truth is, it is very difficult for humans to get out of their own brains. In the past decade or so, a myriad of books about the human condition as well as the human brain have highlighted how easily humans trade on assumptions; how quickly we define the world in terms of our own experience.

And yet we have managed, remarkably successfully, to build societies using science and engineering and people who non-violently and generously agree and disagree over art and law and belief.

Objective observers acknowledge that life is complex--and always has been. Objective observers, artists, historians, and even religious believers acknowledge that people of the past experienced full lives that differ from their own. Objective observers look to literature and statistics and science and principles of mercy to allow for a complicated universe that doesn't always work in accordance with their immediate concerns or culture or theories.

Doomsday rhetoric adopts objective observation when it suits its purpose. Otherwise, it eschews it for the sake of the relative: what I perceive IS the way the world functions. What I experience in this decade, culture, tiny moment in time IS how the world has ALWAYS functioned.

Humans really do believe, at the end of the day, that they are "all that." Doomsday rhetoric props up that belief. Self-esteem becomes indistinguishable from being the center of the universe. I would argue that one reason my refusal to adopt this rhetoric causes so much consternation/push-back is that it attacks identity. Not that I mean to! I don't think that doomsdaying is necessary to self-understanding. But for many people the belief "I cling to this because of how bad everything else is" is indistinguishable from "this is who I am."

3. The rhetoric insists on a "good spirit--bad world" dichotomy.  

The idea that the spirit or soul--the mass of feelings and thoughts, inspirations, revelations and dreams that a human undergoes--is pure and good while the physical experience is limiting and destructive and bad is very common.

It is not uncommon to blame this spirit=good v. physical experience=bad on religion. Truth is, the idea does crop up in religion. It also crops up in political and social discourse. I maintain elsewhere that it truly took off as an ideological concept in Western culture in the nineteenth century; this is about the time society got just wealthy enough that philosophers could abstract the human condition into theory.

It has remained a surprisingly difficult concept to combat, even when one is dealing with people and ideologies that claim to embrace the physical experience. The popular--and I mean, popular--perspective is that the world is "too much with us"; we are slaves to a nasty environment that interferes with our pure selves.

It is difficult to persuade current Western thinkers--who have less reason to fear the physical than their plague-stalked ancestors--that this distaste for the tangible world is a rather current idea.

Not entirely, of course--all human beings since forever have been convinced not only of their emotional importance but of their need to get away from real palpable dangers. As a cultural given, however, our ancestors were slightly more humble. In ancient and medieval cultures, for example, "worldliness" referred, quite specifically, to stuff like vanity and paying politicians large sums of money. Everything else was just life: deal with it.

Unfortunately, "worldliness" has begun to creep into social discourse as a criticism of anything that is part of one's day-to-day working reality: biology, work, entertainment, taxes, other people, reading material, debate (people, people, people). The existence of a world filled with the oddities of human nature and human experience has become fuel for end-of-the-world rhetoric.

In other words, everything has become fuel for end-of-the-world rhetoric. 

To say this is dismaying is to undersell my reaction. If all problems are the result of dark, dismal, inherently unfriendly "sinning" behavior that require dire warnings and alerts . . .

What becomes of compromise? And I don't just mean political compromise. What about personal compromise? Making the best of things? Not getting disillusioned? (Because there's a waste of time). Figuring out how to make a place for oneself in the world with the resources available to one? Moving on? Embracing the complicated? Creating self-immunity to stuff like Twitter? Being agents unto ourselves?

Is escape or joining the fearmongers the only choice?

The cynics would say, "Yes--and that's the point. They want you to join them, and they're going to scare you into doing it!"

I prefer to believe that end-of-the-world rhetoric is rooted in fear. I don't like it. But fear--and the desire to control that fear, that sense of being out of control and wanting to get back in control--makes it comprehensible.  Doomsdaying is a way of forcing the world to march to a particular order that will supposedly keep the scary at bay.

So, I understand it.

That doesn't mean I need to join in.

See also: Fighting Outrage: It's Very Difficult
The Dumbness of Doomsdaying: One Person's Story 

COMING NEXT: How doomsdaying leads to utopia thinking . . .