Since time immemorial, particularly towards the turn of a particular decade, century, or millennium, mankind has often entertained and terrified itself with unfounded notions about the end of the world. Indeed, as Denis Dutton, professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, points out in an article in the December 31, 2009 issue of
The New York Times, “Religions from Zoroastrianism to Judaism to Christianity to U.F.O. cults have been built around notions of sin and the world’s end”—only to be consistently rebuffed each time by the reality that the world had endured despite their direst predictions. Even so, he says, end-time fantasies have retained their huge mass appeal, drawing people to apocalyptic fiction and wide-eyed crowds into theaters, “as historically they have drawn crowds into churches, year after year.”
Artwork from The New York TimesThis New Year that's also the last year of the first decade of the 21st century, Dutton admonishes us that we should take such doomsday scenarios for what they really are: not just harmless scares but potentially dangerous diversions from real problems like poverty, terrorism, and broken financial systems. “We wallow in the idea that one day everything might change in, as St. Paul put it, the ‘twinkling of an eye’— that a calamity might prove to be the longed-for transformation,” he says. “But turning practical problems into cosmic cataclysms takes us further away from actual solutions.”
Read Dennis Dutton’s “It’s Always the End of the World as We Know It” in the 2010 Greenie Watch collection of global climate-change articles now!
