Bang or whimper? We’re still here, which means we have a vacancy for an apocalypse scenario. The one we choose will be revealing
In the end, the end of the world passed without incident. If anything, people seemed to enjoy it, going by the number of parties thrown in its honour: there may be something perversely cheering about the thought that we’ll all go together when we go, every Hottentot and every Eskimo. Magazines ran ‘what to wear during the apocalypse’ features. One young man on Twitter promised to run down the street naked except for body glitter. In Russia they were stockpiling tinned goods, which is a different sort of good time. Presumably, few of us were taking it very seriously, although the distinction might lose meaning in this context — what could qualify as a non-frivolous response to Armageddon? Besides, whether you really buy it or not, perhaps there is something festive about the thought that the end of the world is in the diary, something you can turn up to and see how it goes, like speed dating.
And now it’s over. If the world did change, it must have done so in rather subtle ways. There’s an extensive literature on the behaviour of disappointed millenarians, and they by no means all take the hint. Nevertheless, the precise coalition of eccentrics that formed around the ‘2012 phenomenon’ seems difficult to replicate. So, since the next big date in the Meso-American long-count calendar isn’t for nearly 400 years, let’s assume we have seen the last of the Mayanists and the Timewave Zeroists and the welcoming committee for Planet Nibiru. In the meantime, if we want to jolly ourselves with visions of general conflagration, we shall have to discover new ones. Try to see it as an opportunity. We don’t have to rush into anything; we can shop around for an apocalypse that works for us.
To achieve significant popular interest, a number of elements have to be in place. Firstly, there must be precision about timing. Without that, it is difficult to get the hype cycle up and running (the Y2K bug is the one to beat, here). Some vagueness about the nature of the threat helps keep a big tent of interests together, and a largish helping of supernaturalism — in the classic case, a divine plan — dulls the terror and sense of arbitrariness that commonly mar the prospect of mass death. Alas, if we insist on all these conditions, the pickings look slim.
St Malachi, the 12th-century Bishop of Armagh, prophesied that there would be only 112 further popes before ‘the city of seven hills will be destroyed, and the dreadful judge will judge his people’; we are now on the 111th, so I presume it’s a straightforward actuarial task to determine how much time is left. Alternatively, there’s a window from about 2018 to 2028 when Jesus might return, if you agree with Dr F Kenton Beshore, president of the World Bible Society in California, about what one Biblical generation after the foundation of Israel amounts to. After that, the prophets seem to have nothing in the diary for about a century. Rather late for me, as Philip Larkin said.