Another night in the office…

Sigh…

I've just been to a colleague's lecture on Secular and Religious Forms of the Apocalypse in Popular Culture. Two hours really isn't enough on this stuff, but it was a thrilling ride. His major point was that religious Apocalypses have a purpose, whereas secular ones don't.

More specifically, 'apocalypse' literally means 'revelation': the point isn't necessarily the destruction, it's the epiphany the individual has which qualifies them to be Saved. Dispensationalism holds that a final destruction has to happen before the eternal Reign of Heaven can be instituted. It separates the sheep from the goats, in which the 'wrong' Christians, Jews who won't convert, atheists and adherents of all other religions get what's coming to them. All the suffering has a purpose. For example The Left Behind series of books, films, games and comics, for example, explains that only the best Christians go to heaven immediately (the first one opens with airline pilot Rayford Steele (a porn name if ever I saw one) realising that his missing passengers must be the True Believers who've been given a first class ticket to heaven, and that he and his allies must Shape Up Or Be Damned (continued over 12 volumes). The remaining weak Christians have to battle the Anti-Christ (he's the head of the United Nation, naturally) to demonstrate their righteousness.

The problem for popular representations is that people getting to heaven by being nice is very boring, and in any case, the dispensationalists (the theological term for Rapture-ready Christians) don't really believe in niceness as the route to heaven. They aren't Quakers or Oxfam: they actually want to bring on the Apocalypse because it's God's plan, and you get saved by converting and/or killing as many unbelievers as possible. You should want the Apocalypse - which is why American evangelicals are so heartily opposed to environmentalism: God gave the earth to be used, not conserved (this is the theme of that Protestant Ur-Text Robinson Crusoe and interfering with global warming is like mooning at Jesus. Anyway, killing infidels makes for more exciting viewing than Good Works, but runs the risk of attracting those who just enjoy the slaughter. And there are a lot more of them than you'd think: Left Behind has sold upwards of 60m copies.

You can check whether the Rapture is near on Raptureready.com, which collates evidence on a minute-by-minute basis. Seriously. Baroness Warsi's there now, adding the wave of sarcasm I and others directed at her as evidence of Satan's rise. Currently - and I'm not kidding - they're claiming that the Satanic background to the Eagles' Hotel California, combined with the US government's increase in passport fees, signals that we are 'nearing midnight'. Personally I'd have thought that the continued toleration of the Eagles' soft rock is in itself a sign that we're living in hell already, but I'm no theologian. But they have a kind of consolation: God has a plan and will make it alright, at least for the chosen few.

Steve's converse point is that secular apocalypses don't have end-points or purposes. Up to a point, I think. There are plenty which use the end of the world as a background for explorations of familiar themes, such as masculinity or individualism: Mad Max is a thinly disguised Western for example. Others engage with politics, or the nature of human society, such as the unrelentingly grim, unsensationalist The War Game (made by the BBC and then banned - I saw it in an old nuclear bunker and it scared the bejasus out of me). Still more reflect popular anxiety about globalisation (Contagion), environmental collapse or technophobia (Terminator). They don't have an Ultimate Purpose, but they function as Jeremiads: warnings. They tell us that we are fully capable of destroying ourselves because we lack maturity as a species - like this:





There's also the erotic self-harming element: flogging ourselves with the thought that, having been stupid enough to destroy ourselves once, we'll recover just enough to do it all over again - such as in the curious Catholic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, in the knowledge that we probably won't:



In literature, non-vampire teen fiction (and also adult literature), once concerned with nuclear holocaust (Z for Zachariah, Brother in the Land), is obsessed with environmental collapse - my shelves are groaning with dead trees stamped with stories about, well, dead trees (and everything else). Science fiction, remember, is never about the future: it's about the fears of the society in which it was written. Bertagna's Exodus, Blood Red Road, The Testament of Jessie Lamb, Ready Player One, The Wind-Up Girl, Ship Breaker, Momentum, The Hunger Games to some extent, Jensen's eco-thriller The Rapture, a lot of Philip Reeve's work, Baxter's Flood, Sedgwick's Floodland… and that's just a small selection. Kids who read must be terrified! I guess that, like all the nuclear fiction of earlier generations, children's apocalypse fiction (and fiction featuring kids, like The Road) is given extra weight by the implied readers' impotence: they're innocent, and adults are doing these horrendous things to us: it's a kind of pornographic fantasy.

So religious apocalyptic culture is in a way smugly optimistic: it's the cleansing before heaven (for some), whereas secular apocalypses function both as warnings about self-harm, and as weirdly comforting fantasy.

What's the answer? Well, Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos depicts a humanity which is finally safe and happy… because we evolved to be seal-like creatures incapable of doing too much damage. Someone throw me a fish.

White Man's Got A God Complex

I couldn't resist: this is dedicated to Harold Camping, who declared that Saturday was Rapture Day. Perhaps it was: we haven't heard from him since…



I'm marking essays on Paradise Lost at the moment too, which seems appropriate.

Still here. Damn it.

Well, neither I nor anyone I know was Raptured, which is a profound disappointment: though the high wind warnings and Wolves' continuing Premiership tenancy are surely signs of the End Times.

Apart from the obvious benefits of getting rid of some religious zealots and the fun of seeing the other religious zealots left behind confounded (hopefully including the spiteful authors of Left Behind), I wanted to drift off in the knowledge that all my marking didn't matter any more. I'm a long way behind and time's getting extremely tight. I spent the weekend marking dissertations - including your effort, Ewar.

Anyhoo, I thought you'd like to hear another perspective on the Rapture:

'I mean, you're right about the fire and war, all that. But that Rapture stuff - well, if you could see them all in Heaven - serried ranks of them as far as he mind can follow and beyond, league after league of us, flaming swords, all that, well, what I'm trying to say is who has time to go round picking people out and popping them up in the air to sneer at the people dying of radiation sickness on the parched and burning earth below them? If that's your idea of a morally acceptable time, I might add. 

And as for that stuff about Heaven inevitably winning… Well, to be honest, if it were that cut and dried, there wouldn't be a Celestial War in the first place, would there? It's propaganda. Pure and simple. We've got no more than a fifty percent chance of coming out on top. You might just as well send money to a Satanist hotline to cover your bets, although to be frank when the fire falls and the seas of blood rise you lot are all going to be civilian casualties either way. Between our war and your war, they're going to kill everyone and let God sort it out - right?'

This is of course Aziraphale, rather naughtily hijacking the body of a Televangelist, in Pratchett and Gaiman's glorious Good Omens (1990), which you really need to read. It's got an added bonus for me: the real Anti-Christ in the novel bears the same name as my very good friend who works in banking and was a Tory - and is therefore a good candidate.

Are you Rapture Ready?

A tiny bunch of the nuttiest wing of Christianity is wandering the airwaves announcing that tomorrow (21st of May) is the Rapture, when the Elect (a few thousand at most) ascend to heaven, leaving the rest of us to fight it out, with or against the Antichrist.

There was even a representative of Familyradio.com on the streets of Manchester today. I'd love to have stopped him for a chat. Imagine being absolutely certain that the world ends tomorrow: that you're either going to heaven, or being left behind with the damned after devoting your life to worshipping him. How would you feel? How would you spend your last day? I'd have thought that if you're one of the elect, there isn't much you could do in 24 hours to lose your place, and therefore spending the day leafleting wouldn't be your first choice. In fact, as all the sects believe that only a small number get Raptured, I'd bin the leaflets. They're your competition! I'd keep very quiet about it. Unless you're the smug type of course. But gloaters might get a beating, and deservedly so. Is gloating a sin?

How considerate of God to get my grandmother a place early, beating the rush, and to wait until my brother's birthday (today) is over. Personally, I'm looking forward to burgling the houses of the Godly.

Needless to say, the satirical responses are legion - even Doonesbury has spent the week teasing the gullible (start here and keep clicking 'next'). But very few people have considered the practicalities. So here's some useful advice for our devout friends: