Are we living in the End Times? Only if we're counting in the wrong direction...
This global pandemic should be the kind of apocalypse that appeals to religious cultists. But historical events are far more random than the future is, writes George Pitcher
The wonder is not that this covid pandemic has generated so many conspiracy theories, but rather that it has generated so few. I don’t mean here baby-eating, QAnon ravings, nor the propositions that viruses are spread by radio masts, for the benefit of Big Pharma, or that it’s all been staged by evil-genius Amazon boss Jeff Bezos so that he can corner the market in home-delivered hand sanitisers and funeral shrouds (pack of four, made in China, just sayin’).
No, I mean the religious cultists. There has been relatively little talk that we are living through the End Times and that covid and its new variants presage the final Armageddon conflict between good and evil, before the salvation of God’s Elect while the rest of us toast our toes for all eternity.
This is surprising, since the search for the anti-Christ should be about as simple as solving a clue in a nursery-level Easter egg hunt. All it would need is for the Republicans’ fallen-angel president to move into apartment 666 of Trump Tower for the voices of a million 5-year-olds to call out ecstatically “Found him!”
The history of millenarianism - as distinct from millennialism, when we get over-excited as the clock ticks past midnight from a year ending 99 in the Common Era to the next block of 1,000 years - is a proud one. For millenarianists, it can be a 1,000 of anything, not just years. A thousand plague victims in a medieval village will do. That’s why bands of clergy in the Black Death trudged across Europe in the 14th century, beating themselves with anything thorny that came to hand, calling for repentance before a wrathful god - and, of course, spreading the puss-filled buboes of plague quite effectively in the process.
Meanwhile, those who like to count to a thousand - the millennialists - have been responsible for the panic that allegedly swept Christian Europe in the run-up to New Year’s Eve in the year 999 (was that where the emergency telephone number came from?); and, in its way, the better recorded terror of the frenzied prophecies of techno-apocalypse that accompanied the millennium bug of 1999 (a virus that never materialised, even in the markets of China).
The eminent zoologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote an excellent book ahead of the year 2000 called Questioning The Millennium, in which he references the work of Henri Focillon, who found “strikingly little evidence for any general fear surrounding the year 1000 itself - nothing in any papal bull, nothing from any pope, ruler, or king.” On the other hand, a monk called Raoul Glaber (whose name meant “smooth baldy”, so Mr Bezos really wasn’t the first), who lived through that millennium-change hootenanny, wrote: “Satan will soon be unleashed because the thousand years have been completed.”
The trouble with the numerical neatness of such prophecies is that “signs” of the final eschatological chaos tend to turn up randomly. The Black Death kicked of in 1348, The Great Plague followed by the similarly Great Fire of London were 1665-66 and the Second World War was declared (by Britain at least) in 1939.
So let’s play a round of Spot the Year. What year is described here? “The economy of Greece is in shambles. Internal rebellions have engulfed Libya, Syria, and Egypt, with outsiders and foreign warriors fanning the flames. Turkey fears it will become involved, as does Israel. Jordan is crowded with refugees. Iran is bellicose and threatening, while Iraq is in turmoil.”
When would you say that describes? 2013? Well, yes. But it is also the situation described in Eric H Cline’s spell-binding book 1177 BC - The Year Civilisation Collapsed. In that year, more than three thousand years ago, after centuries of brilliance, the civilised world of the Bronze Age came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Kingdoms fell like dominoes over just the course of a few decades. No more Minoans, Mycenaeans, Trojans, Hittites or Babylonians.
The year 1177 BC has a mysterious quality to it, because it was a perfect storm of events that looked almost orchestrated, but we should resist the easy temptations of determinism. To his credit, Cline resolutely resists playing “What If?” at the end of his book, acknowledging simply that stuff happens: “Sometimes it takes a large-scale wildfire to help renew the ecosystem of an old-growth forest and allow it to thrive afresh.”
Perhaps that’s what is happening in the global pandemic of 2020/21 - and there may be domino years to come. But here’s one further thought, inspired by the metaphor of that “old-growth forest”: Maybe both millenarianists and millennialists have got it wrong by counting forwards from past events.
Alone among our eschatologists, the “warmists” of the climate-change environmentalism movement look towards an event horizon in human history from which we will be unable to escape - the time when we have industrially so harmed our planet that we have reached a point of no return and the inevitable extinction of our species.
It may be that we should be counting back the years from that apocalypse, rather than counting forward from past events that we have no power over and cannot now alter.
George Pitcher is a writer, Anglican priest and visiting fellow at the LSE.