Doomsday

Morality of Mortality

As children, we only see the world in good and bad. Lying is bad; being nice is good. Talking to strangers is bad; eating all your food is good. The world was defined very simply and starkly into two warring camps—yet, as adults we understand that there is a great deal of fluctuation being good and bad. Growing up, being forced to make choices, accepting responsibility and reading Harry Potter, we gain an appreciation for nuances of morality. They can be common things, like a white lie to spare someone’s feelings, or tossing a recyclable cup into the trash bin. But Alan Moore takes this idea of balancing good and evil and pushes it to the extreme! Is it right to kill one person to save nine others, a hundred others, a whole planet? Who has the right to make these decisions? Is it an honor or a burden or both to usher in an age of cooperation? That is the concept that I am grappling with after reading The Watchmen.

I think the question is this: can we hold one person to be both savior and murderer? In Ozymandias’ eyes, the world was on the fast track to destruction. But is his solution, killing thousands of people to bring an era of peace, worth the price? Our salvation can only come with the compromising of morality. What right does he have to make this decision?

This discussion is easily applicable to acts during war. War dictates a certain need for stark pragmatism. To what extent can we, who live in relative safety, judge the immoral actions taken in defense of the country? (For once, lets not take into account whether or not it was actually in danger or whether or not those actions were actually justified.) Who is responsible, ultimately, for those actions, those who give the orders or those who carry them out?  Who has blood on their hands?

Rorschach serves as our foil. Since the mass murder was fait accompli, would it not be better to remain silent? Rorschach was not willing to compromise and condone this mass murder (for this is what it amounts to) by his silence, even though it would mean the destruction of the fragile peace. His code of ethics dictates that he must expose the truth of Ozymandias’ scam. However, this unbending morality would render the deaths of so many meaningless.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. As Adrian Veidt, the public face of Ozymandias, asked in an interview, “Does [crime-fighting] mean upholding the law when a woman shoplifts to feed her children…?” I am not wise enough to answer that question.

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.

Misunderstanding the Apocalypse

When presented with a text, a commentary on the text and a critique of various commentaries on the subject of the text, it is easy to blindly believe in what is written. However, when the subject in question is as controversial as the Apocalypse, the luxury of faith in others is withheld. While thorough exploration of more commentaries might help one create a solid argument, what is clear at the moment is that humanity has displayed a trend of exploring and misunderstanding the Apocalypse.

As Lee Quinby found out while writing Millennial Seduction, all that we do is tainted by our own bias. This means that with every translation, such as from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to English, brings minute changes to the text until eventually the text is transformed in a manner similar to a sentence used in a game of Telephone. Each translation also carries the cultural elements of the translator, which increases the changes made. In order to fully accept a text, one must also accept the possibility of misinterpretations as well as the eventuality of counter-interpretations.

Even if one’s ideas on the Apocalypse might be contested, one is in good company. The various theories that revolve around the Apocalypse are notable for their authors. As Frank Kermode explores in Sense of an Ending, contributions to the library of interpretations of the Apocalypse come from figures such as Newton, Shakespeare and Dante. They, amongst others, have tried to reach through time and space to predict the coming of the end. However, almost all who have tried to put a date to this glorious demise of humanity have been proven wrong and the rest remain unproven. Thus the trend of misinterpretation continues.

The cause of these incompatible views center on the Book of Revelation, and even that text is contested. The world at large fail to even agree on who wrote the text—whether it was Prochorus acting as scribe to St. John or John himself who wrote down the word of God. If the origins of the text cannot be ascertained, what hope is there to truly understand the text, and the culture that spawned it.

Perhaps vagueness is part of the beauty of the Bible. Perhaps confusion and uncertainty creates a fascination with the subject. Perhaps the planet will cease to spin when the meaning becomes clear. Perhaps mankind was meant to misunderstand the Apocalypse.