Repent, for the End is Nigh
by Jason GodeskyIn the 1980s, middle America had no concept of AIDS. It was a disease that afflicted homosexuals and drug users. To parochial Christians who never met a homosexual or a drug user, it seemed like divine vengeance–a terrible disease that ravaged the sinners and spared faithful, G-d-fearing Christians. They called it “the gay plague.” AIDS research was not a significant priority; why should we spend our resources to save sinners and thwart divine justice? Then, they began to learn how innocent children had contracted AIDS from blood transfusions. AIDS began to spread through the heterosexual population, as well. There was no “justice” in it–even in a world ruled by a deity so bloodthirsty and evil as the one America’s Christians worshipped. They may not have counted homosexuals or drug users as humans worthy of their concern, but once “good Christians” began to die, nearly all of them were forced to accept that the spread of AIDS had nothing to do with “justice.”
“Justice” is a human concept–one that is not shared by the rules of nature. Epidemics kill sinners and saints in equal measure. He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. (Matthew 5:45) The universe is no less indiscriminate with its woes as with its wealth.
So, it is very good to be skeptical of claims like those made by Steve Lagavulin in his latest entry, “The Wheat and the Chaff“:
To my eye we’re witnessing a remarkably fine separation or distillation of humanity, a separation not by such gross features as race, location, status or religion but rather a kind of guided selection of people based on their quality of being. This is purely speculation, I admit…but if I were reading our contemporary history as a book I would presume that events seem almost specially crafted to sift from the general mass a select type of people–those who are able to both recognize and take responsibility for adopting a more humble life in true service of the planet and each other. Individuals able to “repent” of the “sins” of modern civilization. Perhaps those who are meek enough to inherit the earth. In fact I’m not actually a Biblical man, but from a more objective point of view I’d have to see this as a winnowing of the “wheat” from the “chaff”.
It’s easy to mythologize collapse as eschatology:
In the beginning, man enjoyed an Edenic state (whether Eden, or tribalism), which was disrupted by the Fall (Quinn very explicitly connects the Fall and the Agricultural Revolution in Ishmael). Now the world is ruled by evil powers (in the Book of Enoch, world governments are created by fallen angels; “the corporation” plays a similar diabolical role in the environmentalist mind), powers that cannot possibly be defeated by force (just like Rome). But take heart! For in the end, the divine (whether G-d, the gods, or Mother Nature) will wreak holy vengeance upon the wicked (whether in the form of plagues and horsemen, or just global warming), and the righteous shall inherit the earth (whether by means of “the Rapture,” or the differential survival rates of primitivists who know how to survive without civilization).
We all think in terms of stories; we all form our own mythology. We attach meaning to things that are basically random and meaningless. The dividing line between sense and nonsense is which comes first, the facts or their interpretation–and are we willing to change our interpretation as the facts change?
For the collapse to be a proper eschaton, it must punish the wicked and reward the righteous. We’ve already discussed why people starve–that it is usually a failure of imagination, rather than a lack of food. Is there any doubt that those who seperate themselves from civilization before it collapses will have a better chance of survival than those who do otherwise?
Previous collapses bear this out. We marvel at many sustainable, indigenous cultures, like the Hopi. The Hopi were the survivors of the Anasazi, the Hohokam, and other civilizations of the American southwest. When they collapsed in horrible warfare and grisly cannibalism, the survivors were those who rejected civilization, seperated themselves from it, and found a new, sustainable way to live–the ancestors of the Hopi.
Natural selection is all about pressures acting on diversity, making some varieties succeed at a different rate than others. Usually, this is a matter of a slightly higher birth rate–1% or less–but sometimes there are very strong selective pressures, pressures which exterminate the ill-adapted with ruthless efficiency.
That is what we face in the decades to come as collapse unfolds.
I can agree with Lagavulin that the pressure here selects for imagination more than anything else. The very existence of this website places the Tribe of Anthropik in the tiny fringe who have even considered the idea that civilization might not be a good thing, much less actively pursued a course of seperation from civilization. That may not be enough to survive, but it’s enough to put us at the head of the race.
That is what we must remember when we consider the collapse as a kind of eschaton. As it was written in the Book of Job, “Shit happens.” Good people suffer, and the wicked prosper. Collapse favors those who “repent” of their ecological “sins,” it is true, but it is not perfect or clean. Imagination is the most important factor, but luck, as always, plays its role. “Rednecks” have close-knit communities and are already accomplished hunters–they are as likely to survive as any, even though they support the Republican Party, logging and strip mining–even though they’re the same aforementioned Christians who were so hard-hearted as to dismiss AIDS victims in the 1980s as sinners in the hands of an angry G-d, until their own began to fall ill, as well.
At the same time, ecovillages and permacultural schemes are bound to fail as often they succeed, even though they are formed by good-intentioned people trying to find a sustainable way to live. My own friends and family are among those for whom seperation from civilization is unthinkable–even knowing me, and hearing me talk about it endlessly. In the end, I can only hope that when the proverbial shit hits the equally proverbial fan, they’ll remember me and everything I’ve said, and there will still be time to join us.
Even the Tribe of Anthropik’s success is by no means guaranteed. We think we have a good handle on the situation (doesn’t everyone?), and I always look for a good counter-argument to further refine that understanding. We think we’ve managed to maximize our chances, but they’re still that–chances.
We might be able to predict the general timeframe with some degree of certainty; we might be able to predict the general shape of it. But shortly into the process, it becomes utterly unpredictable. The details are impossible to predict. No one’s survival is guaranteed; all we can ever do is improve our chances.
Once we’re faced with the inevitability of collapse, we need to find a way of understanding it and living with that fact in a universe we can inhabit without going mad. If that requires fitting the facts into the template of the eschaton, that is a perfectly normal, human way to make sense of the world. If that’s the interpretation we’re going to cling to, though, it is crucial to never forget that it is an imperfect eschaton. Sometimes the good die, and the wicked survive. We can accept its inevitability without losing our humanity. We can remember that the victims are human beings, guilty of nothing more than not happening upon the particular idea we happened to stumble upon. In that sense, it was always luck. However positive the overall effect of collapse may be, we must never lose sight of the gruesome price that must be paid for the past 10,000 years of destruction–and that not all of those who pay it deserve such harsh punishment.
Otherwise, we’re just bigots spouting off a new iteration of “the gay plague.”
If there is a “sin” involved in the origin and spead of AIDS through the human population, it may well be this: The hunting of bonobos, a race of chimpanzees and the closest creatures to Homo sapiens on the family tree of life. It is generally acknowledged by the scientific community that chimpanzees’ DNA is remarkably close to our own; Jane Goodall says (accurately, of course) that the eating of chimpanzees (still carried on in parts of Africa) is “the closest thing to cannibalism.”
It is fair to say that the more closely another species is to us evolutionarily, the more likely it is that a pathogen can cross the species barrier between it and us. The transition between hosts is not so great that a given bacterium or virus cannot make it via adaptation.
What do syphilis, trichinosis, Creuzfeld-Jacob Disease, AIDS, “swine flu”, and others have in common? All are thought to have originated in animals. This goes for SARS and avian plague as well.
Comment by Peter Q.Kilbridge — 3 March 2006 @ 1:09 AM
That reminds me, I promised Ran an article on which primate’s most closely related to us (Preview: Could be chimps, could be bonobos, could be orangs … which one you go with says more about your ideas of human nature than it has to do with the evidence)
I would think that the closest thing to cannibalism would be, y’know, cannibalism.
Why such an abbreviated list? Most epidemics are zoonotics, as we discussed in detail in thesis #21.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 March 2006 @ 1:16 AM
To complete my thought: Modern modes of transportation, by “annihilating distance”, enable diseases to spread through the human population at a far more rapid rate than in pre-industrial eras. If the governments of the world truly wish to contain the waves of infectious diseases that now seem to be spreading through the world with ever-increasing speed, they could make a good start by banning air travel.
Perhaps the ancient human desire to fly like a bird, to be something we are not, now realized through technical means, is also an evolutionary “sin.” Thus we see the wisdom of the Greek myth of Icarus.
“Till swollen with cunning of a self-conceit
His waxen wings did mount above his reach,
And melting heavens conspired his overthrow.”
- Christopher Marlowe
We may now be witnessing the opening act in the overthrow of Homo technicalis, who chose to eat of the Tree of Knowledge rather than the Tree of Life.
Comment by Peter Q.Kilbridge — 3 March 2006 @ 1:29 AM
Bonobos are genetically our closest relatives.
Also, like us, the have recreational sex.
Comment by Floyd Soul — 3 March 2006 @ 5:50 AM
That’s a gross oversimplification. Usually I can shrug something off as “close enough,” but that’s such an oversimplification that it tips the border from “mostly right” to “mostly wrong.” It’s a lot more complicated than all that; why do you think I’m planning a whole article on it?
That is true … and yet, not.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 March 2006 @ 9:13 AM
Can you explain how it is true and also not?
I read that our DNA is 99% the same as chimpanzee DNA. Is that true?
Comment by Floyd Soul — 3 March 2006 @ 11:53 AM
Calm down, wait for the article.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 March 2006 @ 11:57 AM
Ask, and ye shall recieve.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 March 2006 @ 1:42 PM
I look at the development of human history as a process, and one which unfolds in a similar way to any other process of nature. As such I think it’s important to recognize that such processes have long periods where the flow of things is relatively constant and predictible, and then they also have certain periods where a profound “break” (or maybe “leap”) occurs–for instance when wildfire rages through a field or forest, or perhaps when a lightening storm ionizes the atmosphere, or even when certain species suddenly alter their behavior to “correct” an imbalance that’s occurred within their environment. Such “breaks” seem to take a myriad of forms and purposes, and as you pointed out these periods are not very predictible. So essentially I believe what the human race is headed for is just such a correction period. And what I find so interesting is that–as the facts appear now–it seems the preparations we might make which would give us the best chance of creating a kind buffer between ourselves and the generally collapsing society all reflect a markedly “higher” or qualitative level of understanding of our situation. That doesn’t mean that the Rapture is coming and the elect will be comforted and protected while the sinners wallow in suffering, it just means that nature favors those who are best aligned with changing conditions.
I just wanted to point that out in case there was any misconception that I was passing some kind of subjective religious judgement on people…I’m not doing that–although I have to admit I do think there is such a thing as “objective justice”, but that’s totally different from the illusory “subjective” idea of justice most people hold. Like I said, those who are aligned with the demands of the coming times will fair better than those who are not. Such is justice, and there’s no formal determination for that, it’s just the way nature works. And certainly, and as you highlighted, nothing will happen in any clear-cut defined manner–we’re only talking in terms of general trends here….
Also, since you brought up the Hopi–they have some of the most extensive legends regarding the previous Cycles or Ages of humanity and the catastrophes which marked the transitions between them. And I should point out that almost all traditional cultures share such mythos, and that they generally correspond–i.e. the Great Flood is almost universally regarded as the last such catastrophe to befall us, and various Eastern cultures mention a “shifting of the poles” that occurred long before that.
In fact an interesting point about the Hopi Flood story (the best account of which is in a book called “The Book of the Hopi”, by Frank Waters I think) is that it gives an elaborate account of how the “elect” were spoken to and told how to prepare, and that those who were “wicked” from the sickness of the age couldn’t hear that voice and so they didn’t prepare (and in fact scorned the “elect” for doing so). But there were also a certain few also couldn’t hear the voice but still believed the warnings of the “elect” and joined them and worked with them and were saved. But what caught my attention was that then, as they tell of the long period of Flood and the labors the “elect” made to survive it and resettle of the world, then suddenly and with no explanation it’s mentioned that “oh, and by the way, some of the wicked DID survived and they brought their wicked strife with them…”.
So all in all I think it’s as foolish to believe that there is no “hidden hand” or Prime Directive at work in these things as it is believing we actually KNOW what those forces will bring. In other words, if there IS Justice in the world, and if there IS a Wicked and an Elect, then our real hubris is in thinking that we actually have enough criteria in our understanding to know what the difference is. Because we’re speaking of quite definite and stict laws operating on a very high level, a level we can’t presume to understand any more than an acorn could understand whether it is destined to become an Oak tree or simply more mulch for the soil. And that means subjective feelings like “belief” and “faith” don’t enter into the question. I tried to emphasize in my piece that I didn’t in any way consider myself to know what my own fate would bring. But that said, I do believe that we can listen to that subtle “voice” which is trying to speak to us all–telling us we are in fact nearing the end of a Cycle, and urging us as to how to prepare.
Comment by Steven Lagavulin — 3 March 2006 @ 2:44 PM
I actually agree with you; I wasn’t accusing you of that, just pointing out that this line of reasoning can lead into dangerous territory, and heading it off.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 March 2006 @ 3:06 PM
If Bonobos are human’s closest relatives, and they have recreational sex, then I must not be a human.:-)
Comment by Rick Larson — 3 March 2006 @ 10:02 PM