Apocalypse now

When have the times ever been not “apocalyptic” – to use the common misnomer? I very much suspect that every age and all times have appeared “apocalyptic,” with the eschaton or End of the Age near at hand, to many of those attuned to the idea. Western and Christian history reveals the recurrence of the rise and subsidence of apocalyptic fears throughout the centuries, and even during more peaceful circumstances, the thought of it has still lurked just beneath a relatively calmer surface. Our current global epoch is undoubtedly fraught with apocalypticism, even among those who possess no identifiable faith and whether or not they put their sense of impending catastrophe in those terms. We have gone through a pandemic, engendering widespread lack of trust; there are wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere, and even shockingly casual talk of using nuclear weapons; reports of the massacre of Alawites and Christians in Syria are now being heard, following the ouster of the Assad regime from power; there is the ever-present threat of climate change, with that of the mass extinction of numerous species and an increasing likelihood that peoples in the global south will be forced to flee their own lands en masse just to survive; we have worries about energy and “sustainability,” pitting the maintenance of our overburdened civilizational infrastructure against sure and certain knowledge that our resources are not infinite, and all of them are damaging to the environment in one way or another; the United States is in the throes of a major, some might say deranged, political upheaval – with people now living in terror of being deported, losing their jobs, losing their Social Security benefits and government medical assistance, etc.; Europe is in a state of awakened anxiety, scrambling to deal with an entirely unprecedented international situation; there is apprehension about where technology is taking us, especially in the area of Artificial “Intelligence” (another misnomer)… And so it goes. I have probably left out quite a lot of other deeply disturbing realities. But the point is, it’s difficult to avoid the feeling that, just perhaps, we are living in an age that can be called “apocalyptic” with real justification.