"Look!” says the angel, “he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and all the peoples of the earth will mourn because of him. So shall it be!”
The Book of Revelation is the ultimate I-told-you-so. There is no mistaking the scale of the horrors to come, or the foreboding with which they are prophesied. But no mistaking, either, the relish. Wow! Here comes the mother of all disaster movies.
The reason for the relish is partly obvious: humans find accidents fascinating: the bigger the spill, the bigger the thrill. Something else, however, lends to the Apocalypse a spice absent from even the most cosmic of motorway pile-ups: a sense of justice. Mankind, we are told, has brought this upon itself. After hubris will come nemesis. As we sowed, so shall we reap. Our chickens are coming home to roost, or sins returning to haunt us. How awful. How delicious.
I cannot read the baleful commentary from the yellowing pages of the old year's archive, nor the lip-snacking surprise with which the wholly unsurprising assassination of Benazir Bhutto is being discussed this weekend, nor the predictions of cataclysm in Pakistan (or Afghanistan, or the Middle East) looming in the year ahead, without noticing something. In the air is an unmistakable hint of apocalypse. As 2007 closes there is almost an appetite for the prospect that dreadful and definitive events will occur and show us the error of our ways. How awful. How delicious.
Take Iraq, Afghanistan and the War on Terror. It is not the hawks, neocons and hardliners alone who half-will a strike by the forces of evil so horrific in scale as to be a knockdown vindication of what they said all along. Many of the antiwar brigade, too — we who from the start have railed against the occupation of Iraq — have in our secret hearts suppressed a twinge of disappointment that the surge of US troop reinforcements in Baghdad has been accompanied by a reduction in civil atrocities. We kind of thought — did we? — that the whole place was going to go up in one enormous explosion, leaving almost everybody dead, and settling the argument finally in our favour?
The truth is less theatrical: that post-Saddamite Iraq was a nest of unresolved schisms, uncorrected imbalances and unrequited injuries from which America and Britain would have been more sensible to stand aside, leaving the principal combatants to scrap until they had tested and exhausted each other,
and were ready to deal, as now they may be.
Instead we waded in, looked like international bullies, and got caught in the crossfire. We lost much money and many lives to no advantage while helping to launch the al-Qaeda brand.
But never mind. 2008 should be quieter in Baghdad, Iran could sort out al-Qaeda, hostilities will sputter on in Afghanistan where neither side can win, Pakistan will keep a useful military dictatorship either centre stage or in the wings, Tony Blair will not resolve the Arab-Israeli dispute, Gaza will languish, the world will not learn to love the Israelis, a new American presidency will execute no U-turns but exercise a little more care on the road, the Russians will be pugnacious but draw short of conflict, Africa will rot and Latin America stumble around, China will belch, steam and rumble, Australia will agonise, and the Earth will continue fairly disgracefully and a little unsteadily in its orbit.
For the foreseeable future, fits and starts, ups and downs, tits and bums, to and fro, stumbles and recoveries, swings and roundabouts — and from time to time a modest bang, many dead, a shocked pause, and then business as usual — these are the stuff of history in ants, humans and other insects. But hey, we need a story: and where's the narrative in that? And never quite deserting us is a craving for justice as we fitfully think we see it, and a wish that events — wars, bombs, plagues, God, the weather, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, whatever — will somehow visit judgment upon us, somehow resolve things; and say for good who was wrong and who was right.
“The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God's wrath. They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press and as high as the horses' bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia.” Striking, isn't it, how Revelation wants to get the detailed measurements right?
Will global warming, as predicted in detail by what the politicians call The Science, raise sea levels as high as the horses' bridles? For this, too, is (I sense) part of the hunger for apocalypse that characterises our generation. Tens of thousands of the elite of politics, the media and the universities, and hundreds of millions of Western citizens vaguely uncomfortable about the way we live now would actually be a tiny bit disappointed if planetary temperatures started to drop. This doesn't mean global warming isn't true, but shows that maybe we want it to be true for reasons not of the head but of the heart and conscience. A dangerous background for the development of scientific reasoning.
Unease about the way we live now lies at the centre, too, of that most ghoulish modern yearning: a secret desire for an economic crash. I swear I'm not imagining this. Many who have much to lose from tumbling house prices still cannot suppress a tingling sense of rectitude when we hear figures suggesting a drop. We British look at the national debt (appalling); we look at the balance of payments (horrific); we look at personal indebtedness (shocking); we see the steady demise of industry, and the growing legions working in services, marketing, the media and PR; and we feel that it's somehow all wrong. Nobody makes anything any more. We read Anatole Kaletsky and half understand his explanations of how everything's going to be all right... and yet... surely we don't deserve to be this rich? Shall we not be punished for it?
I have not lived long enough to have much sense of whether apocalypticism is a perennial human condition, but seem to remember my boyhood as a time when we thought the human race was improving morally, and the future was good. Half a century later do we really feel that now? I think we think we're in a story where something awful happens in the final chapter, we don't entirely want to avert it, we haven't quite reached it yet, but we feel the faint approaching rumble of the hooves beneath the Four Horsemen. Conquest, Murder, Economic Inequity and Pestilence, the Bible seems to suggest. “US Imperialism, Terrorism, Property Crash, Global Warming,” we think.
Patent nonsense. Potent nonsense. One day perhaps there will be a really big bang — everybody dead. But this almost by definition will come when least expected, and probably not in 2008.
Matthew Parris