I find decline more probable than fall. I take with a pinch of salt all that survivalist stuff, where the machine stops (anyone read that EM Foster story, by the way?), and everyone eats each other for a few years, before settling back into the palaeolithic.
What I find much more likely is a world based on coal and wind energy, where even the middle classes lead economically pinched lives, there are workhouses / labour camps, and a lot of subsistence farming. I think the technological dream – transhumanism, space travel, immortality – all that stuff – to be basically nonsense.

Eschatological speculation isn’t wrong or crazy, but doing so with the attitude of superior insight or knowledge is.

My first contact with End Times stuff came when a Jehovahs Witness left a pamphlet at our house predicting that the End was imminent. But my Catholic mother patiently explained to my eight year old self that the JWs had a lot of wrong ideas aout religion and I should pay them no attention. Maybe it’s still her voice assuring me that the End is not now.
I did go through a spell of dreading nuclear war in my teens. I think everyone did in the early 80s. Oddly though, I found Ronald Reagan reassuring there despite the rhetoric of his political opponents. I recall a press conference where he was being badgered by a reporter as to why the US had not exacted retaliation for the bombing of the Beirut marine barracks, and Mr Reagan, exasperated, replied that, Yes, the US was doing everything it could to find those responsible and bring them to justice, “But we aren’t going to kill a bunch of innocent people and tell the world ‘Look we got even’” Right there I considered that the man could be trusted with his finger on the Button

Nobody wants to hear that their puppy is going to die one day. But it is.

Tierney takes obvious pride in being a “contrarian,” which automatically makes me highly skeptical of anything he says.
I’m honestly conflicted about Ridley, since I’ve never read any of his books and I don’t want to condemn him out of hand. But he’s a die-hard cheerleader for Bjorn Lomborg’s magical cornucopianism. Anyone who can sign off on the notion that global warming will not threaten polar bears because they will perceive the threat and decide to evolve into something else has just put a big asterisk next to his own predictions.

I’m only a couple years younger than Rod, and growing up during the 80s, I was completely freaked out by the nuclear arms race and the cold war. I remember my 7th grade science project was a a map of metro Detroit with concentric blast rings detailing the effects of a 25 megaton detonation centered over I-75 and I-94, complete with estimated casualties, and damage estimates. I honestly did not expect that I’d live to see my 30th birthday, as I figured we’d all be vaporized in a nuclear fireball before to long, but my 30th birthday came and went ten years ago. But it definitely made a permanent impression on my psyche.

My grandmother’s King James’ Bible had a section in the appendix called the harmony of the gospels. So I read those stories over and over. “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” End images are especially negative, like Mad Max, nuclear annililation, wars and rumors of wars.
Still, my favorite image in any END, is of a bride making herself ready. There is such a beauty in the entire process.

Rombald,
When I think decline I think of the US ending up like Britain– a has-been super-power, but still an OK place to live, compared to most of the world.
While I agree with you about transhumanism and the like, I would not dismiss the possibility of transformational technologies. That’s happened repeatedly down through human history. The great medieval scholars never foresaw gunpowder or the printing press. Jefferson thought it would take centuries to settle the US– for all his technophilia he never guessed the railroad. I take it as axiomatic that the future will be different from just about any guess, gloomy or sunny, we can make about it.

I think it’s impossible to convey to people too young to have lived through the Cold War years how ever-present fear of nuclear holocaust was — especially in its final decade, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979) through the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989). How many people here remember the early 1980s film “The Day After,” about a nuclear attack on the US? Watching this six-minute clip of the actual attack in the film (watch for John Lithgow in the first frames) brought back chills. How can you have lived with that threat as part of your everyday life and not have been marked in some way by it?

For me, the effect was the opposite. I remember sitting in the little churches watching the rapture movies, particularly the one that ended in a black screen with the swooshing of a guillotine. My dad was WAY into the end is near stuff in the ’70s; we had all those books. Now I’m extremely skeptical of any and all apocalyptic scenarios, probably too skeptical. I have hysteria fatigue.

I found The Day After to be typical Hollywood disaster fare, with more holes in the plot than a block of Swiss cheese. The really horrific film of this genre was the British-made Threads– the actors were complete unknowns, the special effects muted yet brutal, and nothing was left to the imagination. (The last part of the film took things out 13 years where still the consequences were grim)

I also grew up in the Late Great Planet Earth era. Rather than gloom and doom and an end of the earth Jesus prophecy of the time of the end indicated that Good news of the Kingdom would be preached unto all the nations- Matthew 24:14
I find insightful the words of Issac Newton in his work Observations on the prophecy of St John.
The folly of Interpreters has been, to foretel times and things by this Prophecy, as if God designed to make them Prophets. By this rashness they have not only exposed themselves, but brought the Prophecy also into contempt. The design of God was much otherwise. He gave this and the Prophecies of the Old Testament, not to gratify men’s curiosities by enabling them to foreknow things, but that after they were fulfilled they might be interpreted by the event, and his own Providence, not the Interpreters, be then manifested thereby to the world. For the event of things predicted many ages before, will then be a convincing argument that the world is governed by providence. For as the few and obscure Prophecies concerning Christ’s first coming were for setting up the Christian religion, which all nations have since corrupted; so the many and clear Prophecies concerning the things to be done at Christ’s second coming, are not only for predicting but also for effecting a recovery and re-establishment of the long-lost truth, and setting up a kingdom wherein dwells righteousness. The event will prove the Apocalypse; and this Prophecy, thus proved and understood, will open the old Prophets, and all together will make known the true religion, and establish it.
http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/diplomatic/THEM00209

I think we desperately underestimate the extent to which the nihilism of Gen Xers is a result of that fear. We don’t talk about it, ever. But I’ve spoken to a few friends who admitted, after a few beers, that they never, ever expected to live to their thirties.

I am about the same age as Rod. I remember the impending doom of nuclear holocaust. I remember the TV film “The Day After” and other media productions of the same ilk. I remember the fears of “nuclear winter” long before global warming. I remember inflation and high oil prices. I remember pundits prognosticating economic collapse, the ruin of the middle class and the Great Depression part II. My father was obsessed with the idea of collapse. He used to watch the TV show Ruff House about how you can survive the next economic collapse. I remember predictions about how communism was too strong and the capitalist system was going to collapse. I remember all the predictions of doom piled one atop the other. Every single one of them were wrong. Whilst all the negativity appears to have seeped into Rod bones, that experience and history as it has unfolded since the 1970′s has made me regard doom mongers with the utmost contempt.

Someone, I think V. Lossky, said something like ‘the statements of the Revelation are strange but not as strange as the interpretations’.
The problem is metaphysical myopia. The last days were inaugurated some two thousand years ago, they could last another two million, or even billion. That’s the thing about time – it’s a scalar quantity, but we see it in vector. We have only dim, fleeting visions of scale.
Ridley has some odd presuppositions. He says economic growth has accelerated because of mixing ideas, trade etc. While superficially true, growth has been accompanied by a self-defeating paradigm of debt and immoral monetary speculation; hence protectionism, nationalism, endless war syndrome, etc.
While he bemoans protectionist movement and expresses approval towards globalization, he sees future, salvific innovation as bottom-up. This is truly strange when we see, for example, a mega-corporation like Monsanto patenting seed, soil bacteria, and even the soil itself. Perhaps he sees a world population of iPhone app developers. His litany of utopian speculation is neither optimistic nor sane.
It can, and likely will, get worse — a lot worse. At least according to our frame of reference. We know the end of the story, but there are no chapter markers. To make predictions in a chaotic dynamical system involving capricious human will is futile. To mold the future for our descendants may be only in thoughts, words, and deeds in our never ending present; as a butterfly fluttering his wings in Brazil, the changes wrought in the future may be great.
I’m not sure what books helped form my worldview, but C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters probably contributed. Those, and others are on my bookshelf, waiting for my 2-year-old.

Well, I’m 2-3 years older than Rod and I don’t ever remember the overwhelming feeling of nuclear holocaust in the air. And I grew up with educators who had a healthy sense of skepticism about stuff like “The Late Great” whatever – there was an abundance of that stuff from global famine to overpopulation, if you recall.
So I tend to agree that much of the apocalyptic talk is overblown (no pun intended). As someone pointed out, decline is one thing, collapse another.
The 19th century folks who looked forward to the 20th being filled with ‘peace, prosperity, and progress’ made a lot of mistakes, but they sure saw a lot of prosperity and progress by any reasonable definitions of the terms. And especially as compared to what they were living with when they made such predictions.
This talk of “depends on how we define progress” is precisley why we end up with so many scientists arrogantly defending science against, well, everything. If we can’t agree that man experienced a lot of progress in economy, medicine, technology, industry, aerospace, etc etc than one might reasonably conclude there’s no basis on which to have a discussion. Sure some of the outworkings have been a mixed bag, but that’s a lot like throwing out the entire Enlightenment because David Hume was something of a turd.

Rod writes “I think it’s impossible to convey to people too young to have lived through the Cold War years how ever-present fear of nuclear holocaust was — especially in its final decade, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979) through the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989).”
For me it was the days of October 1962- The Cuban missle crisis. Maybe I was a young boy and impressionable then, but this saga gave me the biggest scare of nuclear holocaust. Much worst than Afganistan.

It occurs to me in thinking about this further that the only other form of book or media that affected me as powerfully as “Late, Great” was the NBC miniseries “Holocaust,” which is the first time I learned about the murder of the European Jews. I was hit very, very hard by that, and struggled for a long time as a kid — I think I was 10 when it came on, and my parents let me watch it until night three, when I got completely freaked out by it — to understand how something like that could happen at all, especially in a place like Germany. I still believe the Holocaust was one of the keystone events of human history, and it having happened once, I am sure it can happen again — and the degree to which we tell ourselves that we have gotten past that, that we’re too progressive and sophisticated ever to yield to something like that again, is the degree to which we lie. The lesson I absorbed from that miniseries is: this is what we human beings are capable of; civilization is just a facade.

Original sin is all the theory one needs. It also helps explain why a desire to get control over one’s fate by dark comforts of declinism is merely another symptom of the self-same disease, but one it is easier to be blind to.

On the other hand, Rod, our civilization also provoked the visceral rejection of the Holocaust and turned Nazi Germany into a byword for evil (to the extent that some of us have turned it into a parody).
Human history is replete with genocides. They happen all the time. The big difference is that in the 20th century, genocide suddenly started becoming unacceptable.
Ask yourself if we would have cared 150 years ago that Hutus were killing Tutsis in Rwanda or that there was ongoing genocide in Darfur? Of course not.
The historical importance of the Holocaust isn’t that it happened, but rather the reaction to it. And that is what tells me that civilization may well be more durable than you think.

I hope at least some of you talk about the book or books you read at an early age that, for better or for worse, in some sense set your personal template.
The 1974 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia and its yearbooks (I was 12 when we got ours), and the 1975 edition of The Columbia Encyclopedia. In giving me everything from a decent summary of the best current nutritional research, to informed profiles of all the world’s nations and peoples complete with crisp National Geographic-worthy photography (in the former case), to decent thumbnails of Heideggerian ontology, they fed a boundless curiosity and sense of sparkling wonder, provided triple-blade protection against nostalgia, presentism and futurism, fortified a temperamental cultural classicism, a pre-cable allergy to TV “news” values, celebrified punditry and culture warriors of all sorts, and a patient, gradualist respect for scholars able, with good editors, to communicate with a broad public, from junior-high students to those marked “adult” by calendar decree.
Captcha: fast recovers (How do you do that thing you do do?)

I think one of the worst things that we can think about th Holocaust is that it was a once-upon-a-time-in-history kind of thing.
Stalin and the USSR wiped out whole nations and people from within their midst. What about Rwanda? Khmer Rouge? Pol Pot? Ethnic cleansing in the Balkans? These were all genocides. The fact that Eichmann did not organize them with his deadly efficiency does not ameliorate their effect on humanity.
If there is one thing that the Holocaust shows us, it is the evil of the human heart. If Germany can go from the most urbane and educated country in Europe to barbarism in a short decade or two, no nation is immune.
But as a young man – fascinated by the Holocaust and its history – I always took great solace in the hatred Americans have of totalitarians.

Ask yourself if we would have cared 150 years ago that Hutus were killing Tutsis in Rwanda or that there was ongoing genocide in Darfur?
I still wonder how much we care now.

I had the same reaction to the Late Great Planet Earth, Rod. I kept a backpack ready to go in my closet through my high school years because I knew that if and when the Rapture happened, my family would be taken and I’d be left behind. I know it doesn’t make sense — I believed the lunacy enough to be ready for the End Times, but not enough to consider myself a Christian, or, at least, “their” kind of Christian. So my plan was to head to the mountains and try and do my own version of My Side of the Mountain. I also remember doing duck and cover exercises in grade school, and being released from school early so we could all practice running home as quickly as we could in the event of nuclear war — not that it would have done any good. There was a major SAC base west of town and the sight of B52s cruising overheard was a fairly common sight.

Books that were influential in my thinking in high school included: the works of Emily Dickinson, Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Mann, and The Betrothed (Manzoni); what’s funny is that, as an adult, I don’t like fiction much, and nearly exclusively read non-fiction.

Anderson, enough people cared about Rwanda to at least send a token UN force there. It may have been too little too late, but it was a response.
Likewise, there is still pressure begin applied to the Sudanese government on Darfur. Major news organizations do report on the situation. Again, the resources applied may be insufficient, but there does seem to be a consensus that (a) what’s happening is wrong and (b) we ought to do something about it.
That’s an entirely new thing.

Rod said: I think it’s impossible to convey to people too young to have lived through the Cold War years how ever-present fear of nuclear holocaust was
I am so with you on this – I am older than you and in my childhood we practiced air raids in school – for the day when the bomb came – little kids running to the gym with the claxons blaring, getting into this standard crouch with our arms above our heads – I remember looking up at the huge steel beams that held the roof of the gym up and thinking that my little 5 year old arms were not going to protect my head when those beams came crashing down. During the Cuban Missile Crisis – we were sent to stay with relatives who lived outside the fallout zone of the metro NYC area – just in case. This was the crucible that the much maligned baby boomers grew up in – it is interesting that no one has attempted to look at how this affected our world view. I know that for me – these experiences shaped a strong aversion to war and military solutions.
But I am not a hard core doomer and I think part of the issue is how much one is willing to recognize the appeal of doomerism – and to make the effort to separate from that appeal and engage in a more realistic assessment. Doom is so entertaining – we do so love those doom movies right? There is also the relief of the boredom of everyday life as well as belief that doom scenarios are the only way we can solve all our problems and begin again. The whole doom industry thrives off of those factors and if you spend even a little time checking out the net sites of the doom prophets and the comments of their followers it becomes so apparent that they exaggerate, misinterpret, as well as reject anything that looks positive. Some even seem to enjoy their apocalyptic visions. Meanwhile they accuse the non doomers of being close minded and engage in constant self congratulation on their insight.
I do think we have tough times ahead and that we are on the wrong path. We will run out of oil someday and climate change is surely one scary development. So I see decline although I see opportunities in that decline. I’d also point out something about that favorite example of doomers – the collapse of the western Roman Empire. We learn history from the perspective of the elites so we think of said collapse as a disaster – which it was for the elites. But life actually improved in many important ways for most people after the loss of the western Roman Imperium.
My concern is more that our preoccupation with doom, our sense of the inevitability of doom, our fear, will lead us to allow greater centralization of power and wealth, loss of our freedoms and even more degradation of our planet. So when you listen to a doom forecast ask yourself about the agenda of the forecaster as well as how his gang might benefit from you buying the doom forecast.

Tscott writes:
May 19, 2010 10:41 AM
“Still, my favorite image in any END, is of a bride making herself ready.”
Love this. My favorite image, too.

When I first read the end of the “world” in scriptures I bought the Kool-Aid. That was until I learned to discern the Greek for myself and found out it should have read the end of the “age”. That is “dispensational age” which meant the end of the old way of relating to God. Now I read that the “new dispensational age” is without end: that is the new manner of relationship to God.
However that doesn’t solve the problem of the physical limitations of this planet and the intricacies of turning everyone into millionaires somehow

I have always believed as Ridley and Tierny that there are no such things as existential threats. I grew up during the 1970′s and heard all of the doomsday crapola from that time. It was all wrong. I also remember the famous bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich, the one that Paul lost.
The only threats to freedom and prosperity are political. These have always been the only threats to freedom and prosperity. As long as people are free to create and innovate, any problem can be solved.
I believe that “threats” and “crisis” are used to promote political agendas and to elevate the power standing of the faction using them. I think that the “right” is as guilty of this as the “left” although much of the rhetoric of such disasters (global warming, etc.) usually comes from the left.
Any social structure is a hierarchical pyramid. The people at the talk always want to restrict innovation because innovation flattens the pyramid. Perpetual innovation is the only guarantee of freedom.
People talk about resources. The only true resource in this world is the creative human mind. The only way to waste this resource is to not use it.

Cecilia
Yes, ultimately, this fascination with doom is just another flavor of utopianism. As St Thomas More will tell, Utopia is Nowhere.

How many people here remember the early 1980s film “The Day After,” about a nuclear attack on the US? Watching this six-minute clip of the actual attack in the film (watch for John Lithgow in the first frames) brought back chills. How can you have lived with that threat as part of your everyday life and not have been marked in some way by it?
Well, wasn’t the post-9/11 hysteria entirely an indulging in and venting of that?
It was safe to do so in 2001 with the USSR gone and Al Qaeda evidently so weak and primitive. ‘Dirty bombs’, suitcase nukes, the annihilation of cities, the poisoning of reservoirs…every paranoid Cold War trope was indulged in after 9/11. And in rural areas of the U.S. every Indian War trope as well.
Practically none of it had any realistic connection to Al Qaeda- and Americans frankly didn’t care that it didn’t. It was all maudlin, awful, embarrassing- and unabashedly therapeutic. All the Cold Warrior machismo in the face of destruction of the Reagan years was thrown to the winds.

I not only read “The Late Great Planet Earth”, but my parents took me to see it as they felt it would educate me. It totally freaked me out and convinced me everything was futile. Luckily I stopped taking it seriously after I got a little older.
I enjoy your doom-p02n diatribes, even though I think it is completely off base. You ought to read the book “The Progress Paradox” as it might make you think that things are getting better.
For example, while the 20th century is held out as a horror show in human history (and awful stuff happened), major progress was made as well. On balance deaths by warfare (as a percentage of population) decreased as the century progressed and overall casualties of war were comparatively low!
Now the concept that civilization is only a facade is a little goofy. Civilization is real, but somewhat unstable. It’s seems a lot like a chaotic system which can oscillate between modes of peace and aggression.

I also remember the famous bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich, the one that Paul lost.
Yes, Simon won a bet with Ehrlich about metals prices. He also lost a bet with David South over timber prices, and then refused a rematch with Ehrlich over biodiversity loss and global warming. His record is one win, one loss, and one abstain–hardly worthy of the legend around him.

Global warming is a scam. Everyone knows that. The chief promulgator of global warming has bought himself a $6 million ocean-side mansion in California, and probably gets there either by private jet or first class airline travel. I will consider global warming and other such issues once I own my own $6 million mansion and have my own jet to fly anywhere I want when I want to. Until then, these people can take this global warming stuff and shove it.
There is no such thing as a real crisis. All “crisis” are invented non-sense to justify rent-seeking parasitism by those who benefit from the promulgation of such. We will not have a real economy until we rid our country of the rent-seeking parasites. The productive people in this country have a right to live free of rent-seeking parasites.

I’m an apocalypticist myself, but I’ve always found delight in the irony of the fact that Ray Bradbury, who invented so many of the ghastly scenarios which terrified me as a child, is an optimist himself:
“We’re doing fine with technology and medicine has improved all our lives. Until 1939, millions of people died, millions of children died. But with penicillin and sulfanilamide, people stopped dying. Jonas Salk came along, developed the (polio) vaccine. In medical terms the world has been changed all for the good.
“Technologically speaking, we have created here in the United States and given to the world new genetic structures for foodstuffs all over the world, better breeds of corn, better types of wheat, so we’ve improved ourselves incredibly.
“Now, we have to conquer the death rate on our highways. … We kill 40,000 people a year on our highways, and we worry about 10 anthrax letters written by some pharmacist in New Jersey. Come on. To hell with that. There was no anthrax attack. We’re a panicked nation when it comes to reacting to nothing.”
http://www.scvhistory.com/scvhistory/signal/newsmaker/sg082303.htm

Global warming is a scam. Everyone knows that. The chief promulgator of global warming has bought himself a $6 million ocean-side mansion in California
Ah yes, the old argument about how “global warming isn’t real because Al Gore is fat.” Coupled with the argument that “global warming isn’t real because it would cost too much,” it handily disproves the 150+ years of documented instrumental tests showing that certain gases trap heat in the atmosphere and that mankind has been releasing gigantic amounts of those gases.

One more thing: fans of personality-based arguments shouldn’t be so quick to cite discredited cranks like Julian Simon. He famously argued that we would always be able to develop technological solutions to any problem. If he was right about that, why is he dead?