Happy New Year to one and all, and let’s hope your celebrations were particularly enjoyable this time round, because there are many people lurking on the world wide web that would tell you with 100% conviction that the world is going to end in 347 days’ time. That’s right, 2012 is upon us, a doomsday theory so entrenched in western society that Hollywood made a film about it – for those of you who didn’t catch it, it was a bit like if a frothing-at-the-mouth conspiracy nut chewed up and swallowed the script of Armageddon and whichever part of the bible talks about Noah, then shat the resulting, partially digested mulch out through a CGI generator. But this isn’t a post criticising Roland Emmerich – there are enough of those already – instead, this month’s entry looks at why humanity is so obsessed with believing in grotesque, over-arching and unproven concepts such as doomsday predictions, conspiracy theories, superstition and religion.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with the concept of the 2012 phenomenon, the upshot is that an ancient race of people from Central America, the Mayans, who were “in many ways more advanced than we are today” (pfft), are known to have created an extremely accurate calendar, which has supposedly predicted many world events. The days on this calendar run out on the 21st of December 2012, hence sparking myriad fears that this is some kind of prediction of the end of the world. On this day, coincidentally, the planets in our solar system will apparently align with the centre of the Milky Way for the first time in thousands of years. No one knows exactly why this is important, but it sounds quite impressive, so many people have latched onto this idea. All this is supposedly backed up by findings from other ancient races, as well as that tome of extremely factual facts and truth, The Bible. The theories are deep and complex, seemingly hundreds of (mainly Americans) having devoted large portions of their lives to proving that all our lives are about to end. Sounds like a waste of time, eh?
If you search 2012 on YouTube you can spend literally hours sifting through all the material. Some of it seems to be presented by at least partially sane people… but 90% of it is an assaulting compilation of dazzling lunacy, stark fundamentalism and brash conjecture, (I suppose that’s not particularly surprising though, seeing as 90% of the whole of YouTube is pretty much the same thing). Whether it’s posturing Armageddon; blaming 9/11 on the Jews, George Bush or cheese; posting images of Chinese lanterns and asserting them to be ‘UFOs’; or, manically highlighting parts of the bible that state as fact that we’re all doomed to “brrrrn een heyllll” - it really is quite frightening how many people have no problem blindly following speculative ideas.
It’s easy to dismiss these people as troubled or insane, but I don’t think it can be argued that most people seek to find some meaning in their lives by attributing things that are hard to understand or comprehend to a subjective, ethereal force – whether this be luck, the fates, God or Al-Qaeda. Let’s face it, life is pretty mind-bogglingly difficult to understand at the best of times, so in a way it’s not really much of a surprise that so many of us jump at the chance of subscribing to something that might actually provide something solid and perhaps comforting to believe in. This being said, the real danger comes when people start to actually act on these beliefs and, although this could be as simple and seemingly harmless as avoiding cracks on the pavement, such irrational beliefs have been known to be responsible for occurrences as sinister and serious as cultist mass suicide, and even genocide. The fact is, if we place great value on non-human and uncontrollable forces, this provides us with a convenient scapegoat for when we’d rather not deal with or address certain topics and occurrences. As an example, take the blind ignorance of certain Christian fundamentalists who explain away dinosaur fossils as being put in the ground by God to ‘test our faith’. Imagine if this was the universally accepted view – the immensely interesting and beneficial area of palaeontology would never have existed. Applying this in a wider sense, one can easily see how our progress as a species would be fantastically stunted if we had not begun to question such outdated ways of thinking, and began to seek objective and scientific answers to life’s myriad mysteries.
Thank god (incongruous phraseology alert) that so much progress has been made to bring us into this modern age. Having said this, although we may have stopped imprisoning and exiling the world’s greatest scientists and thinkers, this doesn’t mean that the human race in general doesn’t take an unfortunately blinkered view of people and concepts that attempt to challenge the way we currently do things. It’s gotten to a point in this 21st century where we have replaced the worship of nature and deities with that of the monetary and market system. For example: in the past, people may have sought to appease the sheer futility they felt when a monsoon swept away their crop, or a plague destroyed their livestock by dismissing the occurrence as some kind of ‘sign from god’ and praying just that little bit harder in the hope that they would be spared such cruelty in the future. Today, it seems totally acceptable to dismiss the massive and obvious failings of our current economy and society as “just the way things are” as if we have no choice. In reality, we are an incredibly powerful species, with the ability to cure poverty, famine, suffering and disease not through praying or wishing on a star, but through SCIENCE - the objective understanding and mastery of this world.
And by science I don’t just mean boffins in a lab looking at tiny things through microscopes or long-haired, scruffy Physics professors buried in textbooks pondering the enormity of the universe. I mean applying science and the scientific method of hypothesis, analysis, experiment and conclusion to all aspects of society and, indeed, humanity. Using such a method we can quickly see how, objectively, our current system is inefficient and dangerously damaging to ourselves, and our environment. Indeed, the world might not be ending this year, but I think that most people would have to agree that we’re certainly not doing the longevity of the human race any favours at the moment. And this position certainly isn’t going to improve if we don’t change the way we think about our existence. Instead of focussing on behaving for an invisible man in the sky, or blaming all the things that are bad about society on unseen forces of evil like ‘The Iluminati’ or ‘New World Order’ or, even worse, spending hours fretting over our own demises – perhaps if we all realised that the buck stops with us - that we’re responsible and that only we have the ability to change things - maybe then we can start to build a world that we can all be proud of.
If the earth does get struck by a huge meteor, or the poles shift, or earthquakes and volcanoes rip that land to bits – there’s not much we can do about it. But in the absence of such catastrophes appearing imminent, let’s not destroy ourselves in the meantime.
No comments:
Post a Comment