The Phobic Noughties

Running When No-One Pursues

Dread and fear, when misplaced and irrational, are debilitating and paralysing. Fear can be a very sound and rational state--when the threat is real and the danger consequential. But when people fear what is harmless or no danger at all we usually regard them as disturbed, or unbalanced. But when an entire society is swept up in irrational fears we face a cultural malady that inevitably has religious roots.

The particular social hysteria which has gripped Western cultures and peoples in the past ten years has been a phobia of end-times, apocalyptic, doomsday calamity. Toby Young, writing in the Telegraph, reviews the last decade (that is, the first ten years of the new century), and characterises it as a decade of longing and yearning for chaos. He writes:

One of the most striking things about the Noughties is that when terrible things did happen – when planes really did start falling out of the sky – we greeted them with barely concealed excitement.

We watched them being replayed over and over again on CNN, drinking in the wild overestimates of casualty numbers and nodding along enthusiastically as experts confidently predicted all the cataclysmic consequences to follow. It was a form of mass hysteria – something akin to Freud’s death wish, but writ large.

If the past 10 years had one defining characteristic it was that they allowed human beings to give full expression to their yearning for chaos, one of their darkest unconscious desires. It was the decade in which people’s appetite for destruction became almost insatiable.

What is happening when a culture or generation expects, looks for, or is mesmerised with an expectation that it is all going to end? What is going on in people's minds when dark apocalyptic end-time visions incarcerate a culture? An apocalyptic doomsday scenario has to have a cause of some sort. Probably the most tortuous and "long-bow" explanation is that this current state of fear results from the deliberate manipulation of the masses by the rich and monied. Here is the intellectual left at its finest.

Among the liberal intelligentsia, the conventional wisdom is that this sense of foreboding that came to typify the decade was generated by corporate and political forces that had a vested interest in keeping the masses in a state of ignorance and fear.

Adam Curtis, the BBC documentary-maker, advanced this hypothesis in The Power of Nightmares, his three-part series in 2004 about the links between Islamism and Neo-Conservatism.

He argued that the widespread panic about the threat of Islamist terrorism had been manufactured by the British and American governments, in collusion with the media-industrial complex, to justify their erosion of civil liberties and accretion of power. The brouhaha over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the War on Terror was a case in point. . . .

But what such theories neglect is the sheer enthusiasm with which people embraced this scaremongering. If the climate of fear that characterised the decade was the result of a sinister plot, it was a conspiracy in which ‘the masses’ were eager participants.

One of the biggest phobic concerns of the decade has been the digital revolution and the internet. It opened up the technical feasibility of an Orwellian society.

Flick through any tabloid newspaper of the period and you’ll stumble across headlines like this: ‘HOW USING FACEBOOK COULD RAISE YOUR RISK OF CANCER.’ Or this: ‘HOW COMPUTERS CAN HARM YOUR CHILDREN’S FUTURE… BY DAMAGING THEIR BRAINS.’

Or this: ‘USING THIS PHOTO, OUR REPORTER POSED AS A 15-YEAR-OLD GIRL ON MYSPACE – ONE OF THE WEBSITES USED BY MILLIONS OF TEENAGERS. WITHIN HOURS SHE’D BEEN TARGETED BY A PREDATORY PAEDOPHILE. HOW SAFE IS YOUR CHILD?’

There were some genuine crises, however. In Young's book the global credit crisis deserves its sobriquet.

There is one area, however, in which it’s difficult to argue with the prophets of doom: the global financial crisis of 2007-2009. The major US and European banks came perilously close to collapse in 2008 thanks to their exposure to toxic debt and would have failed if it hadn’t been for last-minute state intervention.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that by decade’s end these banks will have lost $2.8 trillion. In Britain, the nation’s economic fortunes could be charted by the rise and fall of property prices, an obsession that came to define the decade.

As with other disasters, however, the consequences of this financial meltdown haven’t been as catastrophic as some Eeyores had hoped. By the third quarter of 2009, the economies of the US, Japan and Germany had all returned to growth, with only Britain still officially in recession.

Contrary to some predictions, the credit crunch did not lead to the Second Great Depression. Indeed, for three quarters of the Noughties, the global economy boomed, producing a sustained period of unrivalled prosperity.

Young's basic point, however, is that things are a lot better than our fears and hysteria would lead us to believe. We have spat out "Bah, humbug" at so much in the last ten years that a wonderful decade has been missed. Society has made the past decade a "glass half empty", argues Young.

As such, people were expecting huge upheaval. All kinds of strange cults sprang up, eagerly looking forward to an earth-shattering event.

Among the technocratic elite this took the form of conjuring up the spectre of the Millennium Bug, but there were thousands of other examples. The world’s population was waiting, with ill-disguised glee, for the 20th-century equivalent of the meteorite that triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs.

When nothing happened, people felt cheated. But instead of concluding that their prognostications of doom were irrational, they looked elsewhere to affirm them. They began searching for the slate-cleaning catharsis that had been denied them on December 31 1999.

In this way, all the anxiety that had been building up in the last decade of the second millennium seeped into the first decade of the third, poisoning the atmosphere.

What should have been a happy period – perhaps the happiest in history – became a fairly miserable one. For the first 10 years of the 21st century, mankind was in the grip of a fever dream in which they saw their world destroyed over and over again.

We believe that the hysteria and the phobias and the dark apocalyptic visions will not pass away any time soon. Unbelief oscillates between the extremes of unbridled optimism over the glories of autonomous man and his wondrous powers to the opposite extreme of dark pessimism that terrible calamity awaits. The vaunting of human pride brings guilt: true, deep, atavistic, profound guilt before the Living God. This guilt--far deeper and more profoundly atavistic than any superficial trivial Freudian construct--stands ready at a moment's notice to erupt, incinerating instantly the vaunted hopes and dreams of Over-man. The world becomes a dark, dangerous, minatory, and ultimately deadly place. Fears real and imaginary haunt our darkening dreams.

For the Christian, however, this is not so. The Lord has established the earth on its foundations: it will not be moved. His faithfulness and covenant oaths bind Him to the earth and its continuance.

Tremble before Him all the earth; indeed the world is firmly established, it will not be moved. Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; and let them say among the nations, "The Lord reigns." Let the sea roar, and all it contains; let the field exult, and all that is in it. Then the trees of the forest will sing for job before the Lord; for He is coming to judge the earth. O give thanks to the Lord, for He is good . . . . " I Chronicles 16: 30--34

The future is bright with promise for mankind, because He has sent forth His Son and crowned Him King over all the earth. His reign is the realm of the Gospel: good news to mankind. Whilst temporal and localised judgments will occur--they will not be the end, but a cleansing, a new beginning.

The earth is truly the Lord's and the fullness thereof. As we contemplate the coming year, we early anticipate the 2010th year of our Lord's reign.