Today stories and movies about the apocalypse are ubiqius. Fueled by climate anxiety and a general sense of uncertainty and instability, the genre is in high demand. But this has not always been the case!
Only very recently, in the second half of the 19. century dystopian literature and the apocalypse as a topic of public debate became popular. According to British writer Dorian Lynskey, Mary Shelley still had to struggle with strong objections when she published her dystopian novel “The last Man” in 1826. “Such a story was considered absurd and obscene”, according to Lynskey. The same, Lynskey claims, goes for Edgar Allen Poe’s short text “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” published in 1839 about a comet destroying earth in the future.
Both literary works are secular. In Christian congregations however, doomsday stories have always been present and the apocalypse in the book of Daniel and other similar texts enjoyed waves of huge popularity among Christians over time. Edgar Allen Poe was said to have been directly influenced by the frenzy around the US-American prophet and congregation founder William Miller, who in 1830 predicted “the second coming of Christ” for the year 1843.
“My principles in brief, are, that Jesus Christ will come again to this earth, cleanse, purify, and take possession of the same, with all the saints, sometime between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844,” William Miller wrote. From 1840 on, “Millerism” and the predictions were extremely popular in the USA.
This chart explaining Miller’s calculations I think quite vividly shows the efforts of apocalyptics to create scientific plausibility while being deeply rooted in magical traditions.
Millers prediction was probably the first popular apocalyptic prophecy in modernity and set off a long series of similar warnings, some religious and increasingly more secular ones like the infamous Millenium Bug at the turn of the 20. to the 21. Century. Dorian Lynskey calls this apocalyptic spill-over into non-religious discourse “secular eschatology”. It developed in the aftermath of the “Year without Summer” (see my other posts here and here) and several comet sightings in the first half of the 19. Century, reached a first major peak in the aptly titled “Fin de Siecle” in the 1890s, and sky-rocketed after World War II and with the invention of the H-Bomb in the 1950s.
Today’s climate change discourse inevitably finds itself in that lineage. As Britsh climate campaigner George Marshall writes in his book “Don’t even think about it. Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change”, “Environmentalism has its own unfullfilled prophecies.” Unfullfilled warnings are in fact a problem for any climate communication. Marshall writes: “All of these are entirely plausible and many are as valid as ever. It is just that they never seem to happen when anyone says they will, and people have a limited capacity for staying on red alert.”
Thanks to David Weber-Krebs for the lead to Dorian Lynskeys book.