FEAR AND TREMBLING AT THE END OF THE WORLD (original) (raw)
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Critical consciousness against Armageddon: The end of capitalism vs. the end of time
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2019
Critical consciousness against Armageddon: The end of capitalism vs. the end of time In The Muqaddimah Muhammad Ibn Khaldun (2015) [1337] explains the rise and fall of ancient civilisations such as Persian and Byzantine empires. According to Khaldoun, empires are founded when nomadic tribes settle in one place. As they build their civilisations and cities, however, decadence kicks in. While they construct their churches and palaces, and while they write their books and poems, city dwellers slowly but surely lose their barbaric strength and vitality. Attracted by empire's wealth, new barbarians attack its borders. At first, the new empire easily defends itself from these attacks. As empire's citizens dive into decadence, however, sooner or later a new tribe becomes strong enough to conquer empire's armies, murder its leaders, burn its cities, and build its own empire. As the new tribe settles in, and as the new empire grows, its citizens turn into city dwellers and become weaker and weaker. After several centuries, the new empire becomes too decadent and gets destroyed by a new generation of barbariansand the cycle starts again. For Muhammad Ibn Khaldoun, universal history of humankind is "the endless repetition of political power passing between the desert nomads and the city dwellers" (Jandri c, 2017: 91). With different variations, "a cyclical concept of time and theology" is characteristic for many non-Abrahamic religions (Peters, 2019). In contrast, Abrahamic religions are based on a linear concept of time. The first verse in the Bible says: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John, 1:1). As the humankind "wouldn't have gone down the path of modern scientific inquiry at all without the predominance of the world-view associated with the Abrahamic faiths" (Fuller & Jandri c, 2019: 203), the linear concept of time is built into the basis of Western sciences. The linear concept of time is reflected even in our most advanced theories of the universe. According to Steven Hawking (n.d.), "All the evidence seems to indicate, that the universe has not existed forever, but that it had a beginning, about 15 billion years ago. (…) We are not yet certain whether the universe will have an end." In spite of obvious contradictions, the linear concept of time and the cyclical concept of time are far from incommensurable. Analysing universal history of humankind, the historian Richard Barbrook shows that "historical time is now not just cyclical, but also linear. "(in Jandri c, 2017: 91) Traditional history explores causal relationships between human events (such as wars) and natural events (such as earthquakes)for instance, we know that large eruption of Mount Etna in 1669 has turned the nearby town of Catania into shatters and caused depopulation and poverty. In our age of the Anthropocene, however, we now know (and painfully experience) ancient tribal wisdom that we, human race, are one with our planet. Unlike eruption of Mount Etna, global warning is not an act of God but a consequence of our actions. Therefore, our models of human history need to be reconceptualized in and for the Anthropoceneand those most affected by this reconceptualization are children (see Hood & Tesar, 2019). Inspired by Michael A Peters' provocative editorial, this short response addresses the question: "Should schools teach children about 'the future of humanity' and 'end times', and, if so, what kind of approach should they follow?" (Peters, 2019). The first part of the question, whether we should teach children about 'the future of humanity' and 'end times', is a bit of a misnomer. Western schooling, in fields from natural sciences
Communism and the End of the World
PUBLIC 48, 2013
Drawing on Fredric Jameson's thesis that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, this article examines recent representations of communism, anti-communism, and the end of the world, in popular film and television, and argues that both work towards re-enforcing the utopian view that there is no viable alternative to liberal democracy and capitalism. In the context of the ongoing financial crisis and global political uprisings, representations of the apocalypse are being paralleled with a return to images of the 'communist threat'. Here, it is argued that such images aim to dissuade people from thinking about alternatives to the existing system. This article concludes with a discussion of recent reconsiderations of the 'communist hypothesis'.
PAMLA Conference, 2019
In the latter half of the 20th century, the threat of nuclear war renewed the ancient fear that the World would soon end. Now, in the 21st Century, the new threat of climate change has engendered an increasing concern for the health and well-being of Earth and its inhabitants. Throughout the history of human civilization, artists, writers, and shamans have codified our fears of death and destruction by sharing their apocalyptic visions. How and when will the world end? What does the end of the world look like? Why is the reading public so fascinated by the apocalypse? Visions of the end of life as we know it are much older that the Book of Revelations, and numerous poets have shared with us their own visions of the apocalypse. This paper will compare the apocalyptic imagery in six of American poet W.S. Merwin’s poems (such as “The Speed of Light” and “Rain Light”) with similar imagery in Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming.” Yeats was influenced by the carnage of the First World War to imagine a time when “things fall apart” (3). Merwin evokes images of ecological disaster rather than man’s inhumanity to man in “Rain Light” when he describes a hill emblazoned with “the washed colors of the afterlife” (9) at a time when “the whole world is burning” (12).
Journal of Social Philosophy, 1992
The initial inspiration for this paper was Francis Fukuyama's now almost legendary discussion of “the end of History,” which began life as a lecture at the University of Chicago's John M. Olin Center for Inquiry Into the Theory and Practice of Democracy; was published in the Summer 1989 issue of the foreign policy journal National Interest; was bandied about in public discussion from popular to academic to policy circles around the world; and then was reprinted with discussion and commentary by the United States Institute of Peace in a little volume entitled A Look at “The End of History?”
Look Above, the Sky is Falling: Humanity Before and After the End of the World
Editorial essay for e-flux journal nr. 65, the Supercommunity issue for the Venice Art Biennial 2015. See http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/topics/apocalypsis/ Amerindian cosmogonies confront us with two counter-intuitive reversals of modernity’s teleology: that the apocalypse has already happened in the past, and that everything is human. These are vital reversals, for aren’t precisely these categories of time and subjecthood now called into question by the increasing collapse of scales and agencies—of the supposed tameness of nature and the productive agitation of culture in our own societies?
The Projection of an Ending and Systems Theory: a Sociological Reading of Apocalypse as a Genre
2014
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