Sep 14 2009
Do you feel special?
We are all products of our generation. Our ideas, beliefs and basic tenets are imprinted in us from infancy; as we watch our parents go about their lives, their behavior is absorbed into our impressionable minds. That we should apply the culture of our time with a prophetic event is no great leap of logic. We view the world around us through the lens of our upbringing and our ingrained prejudices. That people who grew up under the constant threat of nuclear attack would equate the Apocalypse with nuclear holocaust is understandable. However, let us not forget that every generation has done the same. Why would we be different?
The children of the Cold War were brought up in an environment where nuclear holocaust was imminent. As the video informed us, a nuclear blast could happen at anytime, with or without warning. A nuclear blast would be preceded by a great light, and would bring calamity and violence. The threat of nuclear attack was as normal as getting sunburn or eating lunch. This information was programmed into the minds of the Cold War generation. It inspired a culture of wariness, promoting the idea of sudden death amidst normalcy.
Charles Strozier argues that many fundamentalists believe that the apocalypse shall come in the form of nuclear holocaust. It is very reasonable, to those who subscribe to endism, to connect nuclear war to the End of Days. Among those who preach this doctrine are people who were brought up during the Cold War; the vivid apocalyptic imagery of Revelations parallels their childhood stereotype of how a nuclear attack would look like. The light that warns people of a nuclear attack could easily be “a great star [falling] from heaven burning as it were a lamp.” (Revelations 8:10) The intense violence visited on people, the destruction of nature, combined with the symptoms of radiation poisoning sound a lot like the signs of the Apocalypse in the Bible.
However, humanity’s ego and self-importance causes them to forget that throughout history, people of have always believed their eras to be the last days of mankind. This is the most important thing Strozier pointed out. The people alive now are no more special than those that live last century. Yet we are so preoccupied by ourselves, so impressed by our technologies, our achievements, our uniqueness, so convinced of our advanced state, that we deserve to be made special by being the last generation. We have forgotten that millennial prophecies and dates for the Rapture have come and passed. The plagues of Europe followed by the development of firearms could arguably be the nuclear holocaust of the seventeenth century. Every generation is convinced that mankind could not become more violent, more impious, more destructive–every generation has been proven wrong.
But then again, this generation is more special than the last.
Angela, Dr. Schwartz is right—you are a sharp historian. As you point out so well here, history is filled with disasters—whether from volcanoes, plagues, earthquakes and floods or wars. And when it happens it does seem that the suffering group has met a special catastrophe. Furthermore, the observers who are not touched by it directly often see it as a sign of the end time. We have witnessed this over and over, despite the fact that the end doesn’t come, at least not the final one, and what is the case is recurrence of being duped into believing that this really is the one and only special time. One key element of all this is the way that rulers and writers and religious leaders use apocalypse rhetorically to encourage the anxieties and fears that accompany the end time belief. Continue to think about this historically too, for the Reagan era, since we are reading Watchmen for next week.