by Rod Amis
OTHER NECROS - Rod Amis continues his consideration of those who desire the end of the world and advocates for Love against Death.
2 August 2006: Our friends the Christians are certainly not the only ones we know who have the morbid, nearly necrophiliac desire for the end of time and the destruction of all of humanity. The eschaton is a popular myth indeed.
For example, many of those who espouse the Wiccan faith or support the worship of the Goddess, have pointed me toward the Mayan Long Count Calendar with the (seemingly) gleeful prediction that we shall come to our ends in 2012.
If you travel among the granola crowd, something not difficult to accomplish in California or New England, you have probably enjoyed this prediction, as well.
Frankly, though I have been known to make bitter statements myself, I cannot quite get behind this notion that everything must be destroyed in some great apocalypse. It seems that every millennium feeds into this kind of eschatological thinking.
As the Kansas State Board of Education elections this week have demonstrated for us, even utter silliness has a half-life. We can take some comfort in that when considering the necrophilia of our peers.
Intrinsic to all this apocalyptic, Armageddon thinking, Christian or pagan, is a strong element of vengeance. The very notion of a need for vengeance presupposes injustice.
My problem with eschatological thinking is simply that it presumes that the level of universal injustice is so great that the entire human race needs the Sodom and Gomorrah treatment. That or the winged snake god Quetzalcoatl returns to guide us into the Sacred Tree of extinction.
Why?
My sense is that, underlying all of this necrophilia, we in the West have succumbed to becoming fully guilt - as opposed to shame - cultures. In a guilt culture, by definition, the sense of unworthiness and the need for punishment becomes internalized. Then, as Freud might say, we project this guilt outward making the false assumption that everyone else is as unworthy and bad as we believe ourselves to be.
That's why I've always gravitated a bit more toward the shame cultures. In a shame culture, you might have to wear the scarlet letter today but everybody gets a turn.
In other words, your opprobrium is temporary. Today's goat is tomorrow's tormentor. The spotlight moves on to someone else that everyone can make feel bad. I know it sounds unfair but it strikes me as a lot more healthy than the guilt-trip choice: eternal damnation.
Let's face it: the revenge-laden dream of Armageddon is that your enemies (who ever "you" are) suffer forever. This Interlocutor can't be the only one who finds that a bit extreme.
As one of my rhetorical icons, Marcus Tullius Cicero, has observed: "Extreme justice is extreme injustice." So the apocalyptic impulse now touted by our Christian friends as the Paula Zahn clip from the previous post here demonstrates is too extreme.
Meanwhile, one can leave to the Wiccans and their fellow travelers as to whether we'll crash into the Milky Way in December, 2012.
For my own part, I have the sense that we are so busy at our own self-destruction that no Deus ex Machina is required. We are poisoning the very air, as predicted in Black Elk Speaks such that it is unnecessary for any deity or dragon to waste the energy needed for our demise.
Not to mention the fact that we are so bloody-minded. I look away, rather than toward, the news any longer. I am sick of the babbling classes trying to find some valid justification for the massacre of children.
No matter how much they babble, there is NOT ONE single justification for killing innocents.
Not one.
When I was a child, the population of the world was one quarter of what it is today, so I suppose it is understandable that we are beginning to behave like rats in a cage. That does not, however, mean that I should like or condone that behavior.
I asked in an essay here at the Huffington Post (February) "Where is our Emile Zola?" It could be reasonably argued that we have found her in Amy Goodman. Besides her consistently good reporting and interviewing at DemocracyNow!, her well-publicized comments to Chris Matthews on his "Hardball" program this week served to remind us that there are other opinions than those of the Mouthpiece Media. Hallelujah. That Matthews attempted to draw attention away from Amy's comments and move the focus to the flak in the suit beside her spoke volumes about what are and are not acceptable sound bites meant to maintain the party line.
I mention this incident involving Goodman, as I mention Cicero, because I believe the counter to the eschatological foolishness which the topic of this project is for us to face hard truths about solving problems, rather than waiting for the skies to open, bringing four horsemen of misery or everything to end in death and destruction.
We have a choice.
That notion of choice in human existence, as opposed to whether you pick Donna Karan or Gucci, is not considered much in our political discourse anymore. The false choices of "the Mommy State" or "Homeland Security" are the ones presented. You know the rest of the litany, whether it be false choices about defining marriage or allegiance to the flag. [Stop and think about what it means, for an instant, that you are bound to a piece of cloth. Really.]
The real choices we need to make are about those issues that lead the necrophiliacs among us to cream over the notion of apocalypse. Is human life so brutish and evil that total annihilation is seen as an answer? This Interlocutor thinks not. I do not and shall never love the bomb. (Think: "Dr. Strangelove.")
So once you get beyond the trivial questions and choices, what have you got? I would recommend that Norman O. Brown had it right years ago. You have a choice between Eros and Thanatos. Most serious commentators don't mention "Nobbie" Brown any longer - he passed away in 2002 at the age of 89 - but perhaps they should. He was a contemplative philosopher who brought insight to a generation of thinking and was adamant about the notion that we should repudiate the philosophy of repression, death and extinction.
In the next installment of this project, we shall examine antidotes to death culture.
Good night and good luck.
POST SCRIPT: The "Enjoy What Rod Does" link today features a new video from Spain, courtesy of our friends at Calabash Music, which might make you feel better about it all.
Introduction to World Without End
The Third World Without End Post: The Mahdi
The Fourth World Without End Post: The Messiah
The Fifth World Without End Post: End of Days
The Sixth World Without End Post: Dance of Death
The Seventh World Without End Post: Faith & Reason
G21: The World's Magazine
Rod's First Project at the Huffington Post
Rod's Second Project at the Huffington Post
Rod's Third Project at the Huffington Post
© 2006, Rod Amis.
E-mail your comments to rod@g21.net.
