The news is terrible. Is the world really doomed?

The economy’s bust, the climate’s on the brink and even the arts are full of gloom. Has there ever been an era so bleak? By Andy Beckettm www.guardian.co.uk
18 December 2011 It is a crisp bright winter morning, but in a windowless basement gallery at Tate Britain, minutes after opening time, there is already quite a crowd for the paintings of the end of the world. The 19th-century artist John Martin has an erratic reputation, the exhibition has been running for months, and entry is a not-very-recession-compatible £14. But his grandiose panoramas of churning floods and cities aflame are being eagerly studied by today’s ticketholders. Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin is one of them. She is a youngish lecturer in communications at the University of Limerick in Ireland, on holiday in London; as an employee of both the public sector and academia, she understands that the future may not be too cheery for Ireland, Britain and the rest of the western world. Apocalypse is the title of the show. “The work is of the moment,” she says, a little professorially, as we talk in the gift shop. “The sense of imminent doom, the scenes of cities being destroyed – it goes with the recent riots, with what’s happening to the planet’s ecology.” Above us on the wall is an exhibition poster: a detail from Martin’s best-known picture, a hellish vortex of crashing rocks and collapsing sky, like a cross between a heavy metal album cover and Hieronymus Bosch, called The Great Day of His Wrath. “I also quite love the gothic,” she says with a smile. “I’m thinking of getting one for my office.” “The apocalypse,” wrote the German poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger in 1978, “is aphrodisiac, nightmare, a commodity like any other … warning finger and scientific forecast … rallying cry … superstition … a joke … an incessant production of our fantasy … one of the oldest ideas of the human species. Its periodic ebb and flow … has accompanied utopian thought like a shadow.” It is haunting us again. A sense of doom dominates recent films such as Melancholia, in which a vast unknown planet suddenly appears from behind the sun and converges inexorably on Earth; and Take Shelter, about a taciturn American Everyman, living quietly with his family somewhere on the suburban plains, who starts dreaming extravagantly about devastating coming storms and social breakdown. There is doom television, such as the BBC1 series Survivors, a post-apocalyptic soap opera that ran from 2008 to 2010, about the struggles of ordinary Britons after a deadly flu pandemic. There is doom literature, from the exhaustingly erudite – Living in The End Times, by the Slovenian superstar philosopher Slavoj Žižek – to the more digestible – The Coffee Table Book of Doom, by Steven Appleby and Art Lester, published in time for this Christmas, and complete with cute cartoons and would-be wry discussions of the likelihood of an asteroid strike or global food shortage or “supersize hurricane”. There is doominess in pop music, not just in the usual genres such as metal, but on the fashionable fringes of dubstep and techno, where the much blogged-about young record label Blackest Ever Black issues echoing, funereal instrumentals with titles such as We Must Hunt Under The Wreckage Of Many Systems. There is an ever louder babble of apocalypse-predicting subcultures, amplified and partly sustained by the internet: peak-oil doomers, who believe the world’s energy supplies will collapse and mass famine will follow; Christians who anticipate an imminent day of rapture when believers will ascend to heaven and non-believers will perish; interpreters of the ancient Maya calendar who, contrary to mainstream scholarship, are convinced that the world will end on 21 December 2012; and traditional survivalists, stockpiling tinned goods and constructing rural “survival retreats” to sit out armageddon, who in recent years have been more active than for decades, according to one of their gurus, James Wesley Rawles, American author of the 2009 bestseller Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse. This autumn, as the estimated world population passed seven billion, an earlier prophet of doom, Paul Ehrlich, co-author of the 60s and 70s bestseller The Population Bomb and professor of population studies at Stanford University in California, resurfaced in the British press to warn that demand for the planet’s resources would soon decisively exceed supply. “Civilisations,” he reminded this newspaper, “have collapsed before.” Especially in Britain, the media love frightening forecasts: from the rightwing Daily Express, with its fondness in recent years for near-constant, alarmist front-page weather warnings, to the leftwing New Statesman, whose 5 December coverline read: “The death spiral: Is it too late to avert a British Depression?” Even The World in 2012, the latest edition of the Economist’s annual compendium of predictions, abandons its usual relentless capitalist cheerleading for warnings about an economic “Great Stagnation” and further “mayhem on the streets” of the west. “The world won’t end in 2012,” writes editor Daniel Franklin. “But at times it will feel as if it is about to.” In July, the word “apocalypse” appeared 60 times in British national newspapers. In August, 70 times. In September, 92 times. In November, 100 times. Usually calm Guardian columnists have started to ponder armageddon. After the chancellor George Osborne’s bleak autumn statement on the economy, Zoe Williams discussed the pros and cons of food hoarding. In November, Simon Jenkins declared: “Today’s [economic and political] predicament is unquestionably worse than the 1970s.” The same month, Ian Jack wrote: “Build a bunker with a vegetable plot on some high ground and leave it to your grandchildren: dangerous levels of climate change now look all but inevitable.” […]