The World of Religions No. 50 – November/December 2011 —
Will the end of the world take place on December 21, 2012? For a long time, I paid no attention to the famous prophecy attributed to the Mayans. But, for several months, many people have been asking me about it, often assuring me that their teenagers are anxious about the information they read on the Internet or affected by 2012, the Hollywood disaster movie. Is the Mayan prophecy authentic? Are there other religious prophecies of the imminent end of the world, as we can read on the Web? What do religions say about the end of times? This issue's dossier answers these questions. But the success of this rumor surrounding December 21, 2012, raises another: how can we explain the anxiety of many of our contemporaries, most of them non-religious, and for whom such a rumor seems plausible? I see two explanations.
First of all, we are living in a particularly distressing time, where man feels as if he is on board a racing car over which he has lost control. In fact, no institution, no state seems able to slow the race towards the unknown – and perhaps the abyss – into which consumerist ideology and economic globalization under the aegis of ultraliberal capitalism are hurling us: dramatic increases in inequality; ecological disasters threatening the entire planet; uncontrolled financial speculation that is weakening the entire world economy, which has become global. Then there are the upheavals in our lifestyles that have made Western man an amnesiac, uprooted person, but just as incapable of projecting himself into the future. Our lifestyles have undoubtedly changed more over the past century than they had in the previous three or four millennia. The European "of the past" lived mostly in the countryside, he was an observer of nature, rooted in a slow and supportive rural world, as well as in age-old traditions. The same was true for man in the Middle Ages or in Antiquity. The European of today is overwhelmingly urban; he feels connected to the entire planet, but he has no strong local ties; he leads an individualistic existence at a frenetic pace and has most often cut himself off from the age-old traditions of his ancestors. We must undoubtedly go back to the turn of the Neolithic period (around 10,000 years before our era in the Near East and around 3,000 years before our era in Europe), when men left a nomadic life as hunter-gatherers and settled in villages by developing agriculture and livestock farming, to find a revolution as radical as the one we are currently experiencing. This is not without profound consequences for our psyche. The speed with which this revolution has occurred is generating uncertainty, a loss of fundamental reference points, and a precariousness of social ties. It is a source of worry, anxiety, and a confused sense of the fragility of both individuals and human communities, hence a heightened sensitivity to themes of destruction, dislocation, and annihilation.
One thing seems certain to me: we are not experiencing the symptoms of the end of the world, but of the end of a world. That of the traditional world several thousand years old that I have just described with all the thought patterns associated with it, but also that of the ultra-individualistic and consumerist world that succeeded it, in which we are still immersed, which shows so many signs of running out of steam and shows its true limits for true progress for man and society. Bergson said that we would need a "supplement of soul" to face the new challenges. We can indeed see in this profound crisis not only a series of announced ecological, economic and social catastrophes, but also the chance for a leap forward, a humanist and spiritual renewal, through an awakening of consciousness and a sharper sense of individual and collective responsibility.