We have long been fascinated with the way the world will end, whether it happens with a bang or, as T.S. Eliot thought more likely, a whimper. The Victorians could not get enough of lurid, boiling clouds that parted to reveal an angry finger pointing at the luckless damned down on Earth. A painter who knew how to handle turbulent red skies and the shrieking faces of unbelievers bound for their fiery reward was a painter who could fill his pockets from then till doomsday.
Such a painter was the Victorian polymath John Martin, whose apocalyptic paintings are currently the subject of a popular exhibit at London's Tate Britain gallery. However, they're not as popular as they were 150 years ago, when Martin's great triptych The Last Judgment embarked on an international tour, thrilling and horrifying audiences around the world for years. A frenzy greeted the three paintings' arrival in each city: While lights flashed and dramatic music played, audiences gathered to marvel at Martin's cities tumbling into the abyss, sinners turning into sinner bacon, and Jesus presiding over it all with a smile just this side of smug. It was the theatre of Armageddon more than a century before Bruce Willis saved the world from certain doom in a film of that name.
Contemporary critics loathed Martin's overcooked, finely observed scenes of suffering (the damned might as well have had "aaaiiieee" coming out of their mouths) much in the same way that critics tend to loathe the apocalyptic blockbusters that erupt (or flood, or land like a plague of locusts) on our screens every summer. Yet those Hollywood visions of the apocalypse, like Martin's, are highly popular, with one difference: Martin lived in an age of Christian inevitability, and there was no Bruce Willis around to take Jesus and Satan aside and get them to work out their differences. Martin's paintings contain no happy endings.
Our fixation with apocalyptic myths hasn't abated in the least, judging by the overwhelming attention paid to the end-times cult that predicted the world would end last May because, as its billboards said, "the Bible guarantees it." Alas, this did not prove to be a money-back guarantee.
And you might have heard, if you fell into the orbit of the wrong bore at a dinner party, that many residents of Looneytown think the world will end on Dec. 21 this year, thanks to various ancient calculations the Mayan civilization left behind. (I imagine the Maya in the afterlife, yelling down: "Thanks for massacring all of us and screwing with our math!")
Perhaps this preoccupation is understandable: Fear, says the historian Joanna Bourke in a book of that title, "is the most pervasive emotion of modern society." But we allow our attention to be captured by the cartoonish, improbable visions of our end, while pretty much ignoring the rather more frightening facts staring us in the face.
How many people noticed that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists this week moved its doomsday clock one minute closer to midnight (i.e., doom), so that now it sits at five minutes to? A couple of years ago they'd moved it back to six minutes, buoyed by the efforts of U.S. and Russian presidents Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev to make cuts in their nuclear arsenals. Unfortunately, they haven't seen much progress since then, and in fact have seen troubling signs of regression on the nuclear-weapon and global-warming fronts. Even more insidious (and irksome for a bunch of high-level scientists), they detected a growing trend in policymaking to ignore scientific evidence in favour of political expediency. "The world's in a pickle," said one of the scientists involved in the decision, Princeton's Robert Socolow. "Many people want to live better than they do now on a planet of finite size." He added that the group was effectively giving Earth a bond rating, "and it strikes us as more dangerous than two years ago."
But people don't want to hear that message, it seems. They'd rather go see a thriller where post-apocalyptic zombies do war with a ragtag army led by Oscar Wilde and Emily Dickinson. For a true horror movie, though, you can't beat Lucy Walker's excellent documentary Countdown to Zero, in which a procession of scientists and politicians inform us that we're bound for the incinerator unless we rid the world of nuclear weapons. I was too scared to get up for popcorn when Jimmy Carter came on screen, estimating that as president, he would have had 26 minutes to respond to a report of a Soviet nuclear strike – to decide the fate of the world, essentially. Nyet, said Mikhail Gorbachev, appearing next. That estimate was too generous, and in truth, the leaders had "only a few minutes." (There have been false alarms in which the decision was imminent, most notably with Boris Yeltsin in 1995. Fortunately, Mr. Yeltsin was sober and didn't push the button.)
Never mind Mayan soothsayers and Biblical ranters – this is the real stuff of nightmares. And unlike God's wrath, there is actually something to be done about it.