On the world ending (again)
In the course of my 22-year existence, I have been privy to the imminent destruction of the world around seven to eight times, give or take a few.
There was Harold Camping, the California-based Christian radio broadcaster who relentlessly heralded the end of the world; first in 1994, then in 1996, then finally, just last year in May… which he abruptly rescheduled to October when doomsday didn’t happen. Indeed, Camping works under the notion that if you predict something often enough, you might just get lucky. Or unlucky, rather.
Then there’s the specter of Nostradamus, whose supposedly spot-on predictions of the assassination of the Kennedy brothers, the rise of Hitler, World War II and Saddam Hussein have made him the most infamous prophet of doom in recent history. In terms of the world coming to an end, his greatest contribution in my lifetime was fanning the flames of all that pre-millennial paranoia back in 1999. Along with the Y2K bug, which was premised on the fact that computers were all going to fail and the monetary system would crash, Nostradamus proffered the coming of the Anti-Christ and the start of World War III. This year, yet another one of his prophecies have been linked to the end of the world, said to come in a form no other than Psy’s mega-hit, Gangnam Style.
Forget about planes falling from the sky and the earth opening up from under our feet; apparently, the new indicator of things to come can be found in our most popular cultural artifacts: Gangnam Style, and its fast approach to the one billion mark on YouTube. Since you may be wondering how Psy’s dancing-horse moves could possibly signal the end of all mankind, here’s the ominous quatrain: “From the calm morning, the end will come, when of the dancing horse, the number of circles will be nine…” I’ll leave you to scratch your heads over the marvelous coincidence.
Finally, there’s today, Dec. 21, 2012, which officially denotes the end of the Mayan calendar. Or at least one of its calendars. According to archeologists, Mayans were too brilliant as mathematicians and record-keepers to stick to just one calendar. They developed many different kinds, including a cyclical solar calendar and a sacred almanac. In particular, the date 12/21/12 marks the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar, which began in 3114 BC. And if you’re still reading, then we all know how that turned out.
Consider this. Throughout the centuries, the way we measure dates has actually changed several times. The twelve-month calendar used today is based on the Gregorian calendar of Pope Gregory XIII, but before that, the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Chinese, and Mayans all had their own calendar systems. In addition, these early calendars all differed according to the geographical location of the people who made them. In temperate countries, for example, the concept of a year was determined by the seasons, specifically by the end of winter. But in tropical climates, with only two seasons, time would have been based on the cycles of the Moon.
In the end, time is a social construct, unconstrained by the metal hands of any clock. After all, what are minutes, anyway? What are hours? What are days? Simply a way to mark the passage from light to dark. Time is there to compensate for our inability to handle chaos, which is why we turn it into a straight line and agree to be bound by it. As Einstein himself has said, time is relative.
So if the end of the world is nigh just because an ancient Mayan calendar said so, then I wonder how many worlds ended as all the other markers of time got lost in the deluge.
And just as much as the concept of time was created to give us a measure of control over our lives, so predictions about the apocalypse are created in the same way. Say it with me: Human interpretation, human interpretation, human interpretation. Which makes the idea of doomsday a social construct as well.
Take Nostradamus’s poetic ramblings about the future. For instance, did he really accurately predict the assassination of JFK and his brother, Robert? Here’s the first half of the quatrain: “The great man will be struck down in the day by a thunderbolt, an evil deed foretold by the bearer of a petition.” According to the prediction, another falls at nighttime.
Why was it automatically assumed that the great man struck down was JFK? Gandhi was also assassinated. So was Martin Luther King, Jr., and so was the president of Vietnam in the ‘60s, Ngo Dinh Diem, who, incidentally, had a brother that was later assassinated as well.
With human interpretation comes the play of power relations, as well as the enormity of one’s subject position. Who else could the great man be that Nostradamus was referring to, other than John F. Kennedy, leader of the most powerful, most hegemonic nation of the world during that time? Resistance and opposition leaders among peripheral races couldn’t possibly be the chosen one.
On a similar note, why is the end of the Mayan calendar accepted as doomsday with such ease? Maybe because they’re mythical Others, beings from a lost age, caretakers of an Atlantis-like civilization immensely advanced for their time. We can’t help but adhere to their ancient wisdom. Or maybe it’s because of Hollywood, and the end of the world images they constantly reproduce.
Either way, if things were to end, I’d love for it to go by way of Gangnam Style.
