End of the World vs. Future so Bright

The End of the World,

or the Future is so bright I need sunglasses

Michael Dolan/B.V. Mahayogi

The events of the last few weeks have been eye-opening: Hurricanes in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico left a trail of devastation. Earthquakes in Mexico left Mexico City destroyed. An armed man shot thousands of rounds into a crowd of concert-goers in Las Vegas. A madman in Korea has threatened the madman in Washington with Hydrogen bombs. Is the end of the world near?

I think it was Alexis de Tocqueville who said that Americans prefer sentiment to truth. As I comb through sources looking for meaning this seems to ring true.

In the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting, for example, News sources ask us to focus on everything from the firing mechanism of automatic rifles to the Facebook pages of killers. We hear the compelling personal stories of panicked country music fans who were stampeded by a rain of bullets at an outdoor concert at a tragic massacre.

The President is flown in to offer his condolences. Cable News, Twitter, Facebook, cover the minutiae of every moment. But there is no attention to what it all means, no interest in understanding the cause of so much urban blight. Nowhere are we encouraged to think about the ethos that leads to this kind of dysfunctional society.

Politicians on the right call for moments of silence and prayers for the family; politicians on the left call for legislation that restricts gun ownership. Religious figures claim that this is punishment from God for the hedonism of our times.

We are offered a constant diet of sentiment, but little perspective, truth, or meaning. Absent from the public forum are any public intellectuals who are willing to give perspective on our culture of violence. Apart from the analysis of the killer given in an FBI psychological profile, we have no insight into the motives involved in the massacre.

The killing is all the more shocking for the lack of motives we are told. But perhaps the riddle may be solved by looking in the mirror. Perhaps the motives for massacre can be found in the endless culture of exploitation that molds our daily life. There may be some deep thinkers would could give some insight into these events, but perhaps their voices have been silenced. After all, introspection might threaten the bottom line of corporate media sponsors. We are to avoid the prophets of doom.

And then again analysis seems to fall into two camps: the optimism of progress vs. the apocalyptic. The prophets of doom tell us these massacres presage the end of the world where prophets of progress tell us not to worry. There is a warring dichotomy between "the end of the world is near" and the “future is so bright I need sunglasses.”

These different perspectives on the future have been around for a while. I grew up in the 1950s when the space race was on. The future was full of endless wonder. We felt that by the year 2000 we would conquer Mars, commute with flying cars, wear invisibility suits and anti-gravity belts. Engineers were optimistic about atomic motorcars, using uranium generators. Science fiction was no longer the stuff of fantasy.

Counter-posed to the optimism of engineers and science fiction aficionados, some Christian sects predicted the end of the world. During the Cold War of the 1960s it seemed perfectly credible that the world would end in atomic war.

As the year 2000 approached, many millenarian movements felt that the world would end. The ancient Mayan calendar was calculated to the year 2012, at which time it was predicted that time would stop.

I have watched the battling dichotomy between these two world-views for a life-time: the technocrats claim that the future holds only progress, while the prophets of doom tell us the end of the world is near. According to the prophecies of the ancient Vedas, the world is not to end soon. The Mahabharata predicts a gradual decline into what is called Kali-yuga or the “Age of Iron.” This prophecy holds that the age of technology began some 5,000 years ago and will continue for another 400,000 years or so as humans gradually decline into barbarism. The world ends as T.S. Eliot put it, "not with a bang but a whimper."

It seems that today there are two camps; either you follow the optimism of the futurisitc technocrats or you are branded as a doom-saying Luddite. But it wasn't always so. Many intellectuals in the last century grew to question the prevailing model. One of the most prescient minds of the 20th century studied the decline of Western Civilization through the rise of the megalopolis in the iron age. Lewis Mumford was a scholar, a literary and social critic who wrote extensively on cities, architecture, technology, literature, and modern life.

Lewis Mumford

He was one of the last great intellectual humanists of the 20th Century. the whose most important views are found in The City in History, 1960, Technics and Human Development, 1967, and The Pentagon of Power, 1970.

His analysis of civilization is noteworthy. While most 20th scientists expressed the optimism that we are in an age of continuous discovery and technological progress, Mumford was less sanguine:

“Plainly, a civilization that terminates in a cult of barbarism has disintegrated as civilization; and the war-metropolis, as an expression of these institutions, is an anti-civilizing agent: a non-city. To assume that this process can go on indefinitely is to betray an ignorance of social facts: decay at last halts itself. While the tasks of building, co-operation, and integration are never finished, unbuilding may be completed in a few generations. The chief question now before the Western World today is whether disintegration must be complete before a fresh start is made.”

Mumford's works explore how modern life while apparently offering opportunities for personal growth, for wider expression and development, really subverts spiritual growth and promotes an empty, soul-destroying conformity. He focuses on the paradox of progress. Scientists propose to explain everything, but end in the meaninglessness of a random universe.

Mumford could see even in the 1950s that the advance of technology while promising the utopia of endless development ends in the dysfunctional megalopolis.

The Megalopolis

In books like The Myth of the Machine, Mumford shows in lucid detail how the modern ethos of karmic exploitation released a Pandora's box of mechanical marvels which eventually threatened to absorb all human purposes into the religion of science and the myth of technology. An interesting example of his study of architectural dystopia in the age of iron is his article critiquing the building of the giant World Trade Center in New York, in 1970. Mumford Article on World Trade Center

The Myth of the Machine

In his later years, Mumford was more optimistic: he held out hope that the problems we face might be solved through spiritual advancement:

Certainly it is not in extensive cosmonautic explorations of outer space, but by more intensive cultivation of the historic inner spaces of the human mind, that we shall recover the human heritage.

 The Pentagon of Power, 1970.