When I was a boy, the London theater district was a magnet for old men with a message carried on sandwich boards or placards or on smudgy leaflets that they would press into my hand. “The end of the world is nigh” or “Prepare Ye for the Terrible Day of Judgement.” The old men looked so much like the prophets in my illustrated Bible that I had to believe them. I never expected to be around now, in the 21st century. I never thought we’d make it to 1960.
I admired the old men for their steadfastness. Year after year, they stalked the city streets in all weathers with the same message. Some died and were replaced by ready-trained teams of new old men. The end of the world was always nigh, and we had no trouble believing in it. The war damage reminded us how it had so nearly happened in the recent past, and the atomic bomb seemed to guarantee that it would happen in the near future. I always hoped that the world would end before the vacation ended and I had to return to school.
Years later, I discovered that the same old men had emigrated to the USA and were parading on New York’s Broadway with the same message of doom. Sometimes I felt like stopping them and saying: “Yes, yes, I know, I’ve heard about it.” Sometimes I felt I should join them. But time passed, and the hope and fear of the apocalypse receded. But it has never quite gone away. As we tiptoe anxiously through the 21st century, we are still surrounded by prophets of doom, but we rarely see the old men with placards anymore. They use social media instead, but their warnings are no more reliable than they ever were.
There is something deeply and darkly appealing about the idea of the end of the world. It solves all problems — personal and political — in an instant. Doomsday has been prophesied for most of recorded history, and probably long before that. It was announced in the Book of Revelations but without an exact date. Wikipedia has a list of some three hundred famous apocalyptic predictions. The earliest was for the year 482 and was announced by a Portuguese bishop. But 1,542 years later, we are still waiting. New doomsday warnings have come at a steady rate, one every few years. You may recall that December 21, 2012 was big business for a while, just as the year 2000 had been. There were doomsday specials on television, dozens of books, hundreds of websites, and a Hollywood disaster movie called 2012 starring John Cusack.
Considering today’s political landscape, you might expect apocalyptic predictions to be coming thick and fast. But there have been disappointingly few. There is a general sense of anxiety, prompting some people to stock up on guns and survival supplies. But bullets and canned beans won’t be much use in a real apocalypse. Hollywood has shown us many times over exactly what the post-apocalyptic world will look like, and it’s not pretty — a perpetual power cut with no supermarkets open and rampaging teenagers loose in armored vehicles on the streets.
We may have to wait patiently until 2026 for the next big day when an asteroid strike is forecast to destroy the entire world. By that time, of course, it may be too little, and far too late.
