Links - 26th June 2020 (Apocalyptic Thinking)

Apocalyptic thinking in the age of Trump - "It’s almost as if being called the Antichrist is a compliment — it means you are a powerful man. Whether done in jest or not, describing Trump in apocalyptic terms is, in the end, about setting boundaries. When we call Trump “the Antichrist,” we transform his election into an event that’s comfortably out of our control but one that can also serve as a rallying point. “Belief in the Antichrist has fostered group loyalty by dramatizing the satanic nature of every enemy facing the faithful community”"

Apocalypse Not: Here's Why You Shouldn't Worry About End Times | WIRED - "When the sun rises on December 22, as it surely will, do not expect apologies or even a rethink. No matter how often apocalyptic predictions fail to come true, another one soon arrives. And the prophets of apocalypse always draw a following—from the 100,000 Millerites who took to the hills in 1843, awaiting the end of the world, to the thousands who believed in Harold Camping, the Christian radio broadcaster who forecast the final rapture in both 1994 and 2011.Religious zealots hardly have a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking. Consider some of the environmental cataclysms that so many experts promised were inevitable... Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: "The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth's atmosphere." Over the five decades since the success of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 and the four decades since the success of the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth in 1972, prophecies of doom on a colossal scale have become routine. Indeed, we seem to crave ever-more-frightening predictions—we are now, in writer Gary Alexander's word, apocaholic. The past half century has brought us warnings of population explosions, global famines, plagues, water wars, oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, Y2K bugs, mad cow epidemics, killer bees, sex-change fish, cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics, and climate catastrophes. So far all of these specters have turned out to be exaggerated... The classic apocalypse has four horsemen, and our modern version follows that pattern, with the four riders being chemicals (DDT, CFCs, acid rain), diseases (bird flu, swine flu, SARS, AIDS, Ebola, mad cow disease), people (population, famine), and resources (oil, metals)... Of all the cataclysmic threats to human civilization envisaged in the past 50 years, none has drawn such hyperbolic language as people themselves. "Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet," says Agent Smith in the film The Matrix. Such rhetoric echoes real-life activists like Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society: "We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion ... Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach... The lesson of failed past predictions of ecological apocalypse is not that nothing was happening but that the middle-ground possibilities were too frequently excluded from consideration. In the climate debate, we hear a lot from those who think disaster is inexorable if not inevitable, and a lot from those who think it is all a hoax. We hardly ever allow the moderate "lukewarmers" a voice: those who suspect that the net positive feedbacks from water vapor in the atmosphere are low, so that we face only 1 to 2 degrees Celsius of warming this century; that the Greenland ice sheet may melt but no faster than its current rate of less than 1 percent per century; that net increases in rainfall (and carbon dioxide concentration) may improve agricultural productivity; that ecosystems have survived sudden temperature lurches before; and that adaptation to gradual change may be both cheaper and less ecologically damaging than a rapid and brutal decision to give up fossil fuels cold turkey."
"This time, it's different" doesn't just apply to financial crises

The end is always nigh in the human mind - "The latest incarnation of the destruction-redemption myth is brought to you by numerological number-cruncher and evangelical Christian radio host Harold Camping. Originally predicted to unfold on 21 May, the rapture has now been postponed until October after a no-show. It is easy to mock, but such apocalyptic scenarios are not the exclusive property of religion. Secular end of days may be found in Karl Marx’s end of capitalism and Francis Fukuyama’s end of history, along with scientistic doomsdays brought about by global warming, ice ages, solar flares, rogue planets, black holes, cosmic collisions, supervolcanoes, overpopulation, pollution, nuclear winter, genetically engineered viruses, the grey goo of runaway nanotechnology – and let’s not forget Y2K, the millennium bug. In 2004, UK Astronomer Royal Martin Rees put our chances of surviving the 21st century at 50 per cent. Stephen Hawking famously warned humanity that contact with aliens could result in our enslavement or extinction.Like Camping’s rapture, many of these prognostications have failed to unfold. Given that there can only be one apocalypse, most of the others will too.Why, then, do we find the basic narrative so appealing? What is the underlying psychology behind apocalyptic prophecies, both religious and secular? The answer lies in the emotional and cognitive processes of our brains.Emotionally, the end of the world is actually a renewal, a transition to a new beginning and a better life to come. In religious narratives, God smites sinners and resurrects the virtuous. For secularists, the sins of humanity are atoned through a change in our political, economic or ideological system. Environmental prognostications of calamity are usually followed with reproaches and recommendations for how we can save the planet. Marxists projected communism as the liberating climax of a multistage process that requires the collapse of capitalism. Proponents of liberal democracy proclaimed the end of history when the cold war was won by democracy and liberty.Most recently, the US Tea Party’s messiah is John Galt... Cognitively, there are several processes at work, starting with the fact that our brains are pattern-seeking belief engines... Apocalypse thinking is a form of pattern-seeking based on our cognitive percepts of time passing... Apocalyptic visions also help us make sense of an often seemingly senseless world. In the face of confusion and annihilation we need restitution and reassurance. We want to feel that no matter how chaotic, oppressive or evil the world is, all will be made right in the end. The apocalypse as history’s end is made acceptable with the belief that there will be a new beginning."
Most of the people who hyperventilate about how the coronavirus will kill us all seem to be different from those who were hyperventilating about how climate change would kill us all. Apocalyptic thinking manifests differently depending on one's pre-existing beliefs and dispositions. Of course there're also the environmentalists who gush gleefully about humanity's extinction - I suppose even if they or anyone related to them will not be able to see the new beginning, they take vicarious pleasure in the earth seeing it

Doomsday is (not) coming: The dangers of worrying about the apocalypse - "But apocalyptic thinking has serious downsides. One is that false alarms to catastrophic risks can themselves be catastrophic. The nuclear arms race of the 1960s, for example, was set off by fears of a mythical "missile gap" with the Soviet Union. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was justified by the uncertain but catastrophic possibility that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons and planning to use them against the United States. (As George W. Bush put it, "We cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.") And one of the reasons the great powers refuse to take the common-sense pledge that they won't be the first to use nuclear weapons is that they want to reserve the right to use them against other supposed existential threats such as bioterror and cyberattacks. Sowing fear about hypothetical disasters, far from safeguarding the future of humanity, can endanger it. A second hazard of enumerating doomsday scenarios is that humanity has a finite budget of resources, brainpower and anxiety. You can't worry about everything... And that leads to the greatest danger of all: that reasonable people will think, as a 2016 New York Times article put it, "These grim facts should lead any reasonable person to conclude that humanity is screwed." If humanity is screwed, why sacrifice anything to reduce potential risks? Why forgo the convenience of fossil fuels or exhort governments to rethink their nuclear weapons policies? Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die! A 2013 survey in four English-speaking countries showed that among the respondents who believe that our way of way of life will probably end in a century, a majority endorsed the statement, "The world's future looks grim so we have to focus on looking after ourselves and those we love." Few writers on technological risk give much thought to the cumulative psychological effects of the drumbeat of doom. As Elin Kelsey, an environmental communicator, points out, "We have media ratings to protect children from sex or violence in movies, but we think nothing of inviting a scientist into a second-grade classroom and telling the kids the planet is ruined. A quarter of [Australian] children are so troubled about the state of the world that they honestly believe it will come to an end before they get older." According to recent polls, so do 15 per cent of people worldwide, and between a quarter and a third of Americans. In The Progress Paradox, the journalist Gregg Easterbrook suggests that a major reason that Americans are not happier, despite their rising objective fortunes, is "collapse anxiety": the fear that civilization may implode and there's nothing anyone can do about it... Those who sow fear about a dreadful prophecy may be seen as serious and responsible, while those who are measured are seen as complacent and naive. Despair springs eternal... As author and academic Eric Zencey has observed, "There is seduction in apocalyptic thinking. If one lives in the Last Days, one's actions, one's very life, take on historical meaning and no small measure of poignance." Scientists and technologists are by no means immune. Remember the Y2K bug?... As a former assembly language programmer, I was skeptical of the doomsday scenarios, and fortuitously I was in New Zealand, the first country to welcome the new millennium, at the fateful moment. Sure enough, at 12 a.m. on Jan. 1, nothing happened (as I quickly reassured family members back home on a fully functioning telephone). The Y2K reprogrammers, like the elephant-repellent salesman, took credit for averting disaster, but many countries and small businesses had taken their chances without any Y2K preparation, and they had no problems, either... the techno-apocalyptic claim that ours is the first civilization that can destroy itself is misconceived. As Ozymandias reminded the traveller in Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem, most of the civilizations that have ever existed have been destroyed. Conventional history blames the destruction on external events such as plagues, conquests, earthquakes or weather. But the physicist David Deutsch points out those civilizations could have thwarted the fatal blows had they had better agricultural, medical or military technology"

How Apocalyptic Thinking Prevents Us from Taking Political Action - "sensationalist speculation attracts eyeballs and sells advertising, because fear sells -- and it can sell everything from pharmaceuticals to handguns to duct tape to insurance policies. "People react to fear, not love," Richard Nixon once said. "They don't teach that in Sunday school, but it's true." Nothing inspires fear like the end of the world, and ever since Y2K, the media's tendency toward overwrought speculation has been increasingly married to the rhetoric of apocalypse. Today, nearly any event can be explained through apocalyptic language, from birds falling out of the sky (the Birdocalypse?) to a major nor'easter (Snowmageddon!) to a double-dip recession (Barackalypse! Obamageddon!)... This over-reliance on the apocalyptic narrative causes us to fear the wrong things and to mistakenly equate potential future events with current and observable trends... The danger of the media's conflation of apocalyptic scenarios is that it leads us to believe that our existential threats come exclusively from events that are beyond our control and that await us in the future -- and that a moment of universal recognition of such threats will be obvious to everyone when they arrive"
Ironically the article also falls prey to apocalyptic thinking

Anthony Grafton on "Left Behind" and Apocalyptic Thinking | The New Republic - "By the early 1990s, in other words, the millennium was firmly established as a richly mutable object of historical research, one which rewarded study from many different points of view. Scholars realized that millennialists, in the west, were far too diverse to be characterized by simple formulas, and their goals and movements far too complex to be forced into a single analytical pigeonhole... Though our authors caution against simple explanations, all of them, in the end, resort to one: the desire for change, and hopeless discontent with the existing world... Humans, he points out, seem to have a propensity—one that appears in cultures and societies so disparate from one another, in time and in space, that it might even be natural—to look for an order in time. Time—or so humans wanted to believe for millennia, and many still do—is not a merely natural phenomenon. It embodies a deeper order. It has a direction—forwards or cyclical (or, more often, both at once). It is coded. And there is a key, which can take almost any form."

Apocalypse Not! How Science Is Distorted To Serve The Activist Agenda - "Take the Great Bee Hoax, for example. If you’re still relying on the mainstream and social media for your information, you probably believe that honeybee populations are crashing worldwide, that without bees to pollinate our crops we’ll all soon starve, and that we’re in this sorry state because evil pesticide companies are reaping huge profits and despoiling the environment, while crony regulators look the other way.At least, this is what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer seems to believe. When the Agriculture Department recently suspended its annual census of U.S. honeybee hives due to budget cuts (a decision that was soon reversed), the Democratic senator from New York rose in high dudgeon claiming — what else? — collusion... the USDA’s beehive census has been one of the main sources of evidence that refutes alarmist claims of honeybee declines. According to the USDA count, honeybee populations, far from “plummeting,” have actually risen by about 150,000 hives in the last 20 years. Most foreign governments keep official counts of their bees, and bee populations are rising abroad, too... The Pseudo-Scientific Method was mobilized to create the “bee-pocalypse” narrative about honeybees over the past six years. An early, memorable landmark was the Time magazine cover story of Aug. 19, 2013, “A World Without Bees?” It shows the power of activists and a few rogue scientists, abetted by feckless magazine editors who uncritically parroted the latest alarmist studies’ claims without even bothering to check them against readily available facts... The scientists who glommed onto the “bee-pocalypse” narrative never bothered to go back and correct the record. As we’ll see in the next installment, they simply swapped out crises, jettisoning honeybees for claims that it was actually wild bees that were facing extinction, and then moving on to claims that all insect species will soon die out – because, of course, of neonicotinoid pesticides."

Why Computers Won't Takeover the World, with Steven Pinker - "I think that the arguments that once we have super intelligent computers and robots they will inevitably want to take over and do away with us comes from Prometheus and Pandora myths. It's based on confusing the idea of high intelligence with megalomaniacal goals. Now, I think it's a projection of alpha male's psychology onto the very concept of intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, to achieve goals under uncertainty. It doesn't tell you what are those goals are. And there's no reason to think that just the concentrated analytic ability to solve goals is going to mean that one of those goals is going to be to subjugate humanity or to achieve unlimited power, it just so happens that the intelligence that we're most familiar with, namely ours, is a product of the Darwinian process of natural selection, which is an inherently competitive process."