The End is Near!

As usual

Well, isn’t it always? We start dying as soon as we are conceived, in fact. That is probably why when we are young it is so hard to realize we can die at any moment. If we did, we would probably be like the immortals of that Jewish tale about the immortal people; too much mortality and too little end up being quite the same.

Once upon a time, the fable goes, a traveler heard about a tribe of immortal men, and, after years spent looking for them, he eventually arrived at the place where they were said to live. There, he found only a few people half-asleep, lying buck naked on the ground. No beautiful stone buildings, no music, no arts. Wondering where the immortals would be hiding, he asked one of the lazy folk around, only to find out they were the immortals. They had indeed built beautiful stone buildings millennia before, but it has all turned to dust, as everything eventually does, and they realized it was just not worth doing anything, as nothing really lasts as much as they did.

We get married, have children, build stuff, only because we think we will have the time to appreciate all of this. But the end is always near, and will come like a thief at night. Not only for our lives, but also for the lives of our cultures and civilizations; right now we have the awful privilege of witnessing the end of what started with the downfall of the Roman Empire, got sick 500 years ago, and eventually turned terminally sick 200 years ago. Civilizations last much longer than the people in them.

For those who ignore history, it is all so new it can only signal the end of the world. The Second Coming, or some mythological monster arriving to eat us all. For those who do know some history, it’s just a new version of a very old song, the same motifs repeating in a different key with different instruments and tempo. For instance, when Rome was falling the pagan Romans accused the Church; after all, all those tragedies could only happen because the old gods had been forgotten! St. Augustine commissioned a young Portuguese friend, Paulo Orósio, to write a book showing that not to be the case. He did it: the seven volumes of his History Against The Pagans told how history is a succession of tragedies, but Christianity is not one of them.

Having forgotten all tragedies of past history – or rather having never heard of them –, used to a degree of luxury and comfort unheard-of in centuries past, people nowadays cannot understand the decadence of society around us without resorting to precisely the same argument of the pagans of old: “[this or that awfulness] is happening because people forgot God, forsook Christianity”, and so on. Well, both Saint Augustine and his Portuguese buddy would disagree. Awfulness is the rule, and comfort is the exception.

Moreover, the Christian God – unlike the pagan gods – is not in the feeling-good business. On the contrary, He said it to be “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”, and His business is precisely getting us into the kingdom of God: “He said to them all, If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.” No cheap gas for our SUVs in that.

Civilizations die for two reasons: the first is that they forgot what they were about; in this case of ours, it started happening 500 years ago and got only worse from then. Check. The second is that – in its final madness, the civilizational equivalent of dementia – it gets too greedy. Check, again.

When things started going really bad, people forgot the basic Christian tenet that we are custodians of the rest of Creation, and started treating it as the Prodigal Son treated his father’s inheritance. In other words, not only squandering it but also mistaking property rights for absolute rights. Just as it is not morally correct to buy a huge farm and turn it into a desert, it is not morally acceptable to suck all oil out of the soil to burn it into electricity in order to watch Big Brother on a 50” TV set. We are not absolute owners of all that oil; it belongs to God, and we – as our children and grandchildren we deprive of it – merely its custodians. It should be basic Christianity, and our dying civilization was a Christian civilization. The Christian Civilization, in fact. But we forgot all about that, and here we are. It cannot last, of course, but what will come afterward is as much a mystery to us as the Middle Ages would have been for St. Augustine.

Just like with the deaths of most people and with bankruptcy, the end comes very slowly, then all of a sudden. The “very slowly” part is over; all it took was 500 years of progressive madness. The “all of a sudden” part is just beginning. But…

It is not the End of the World, it is not necessarily the End of Times, and there is indeed a good probability that we will not be devoured by some Lovecraftian monster from outer space. It is just the transition between a dying civilization and a new one. Will the next one be Christian? I certainly hope so, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it. Will it be better? Well, better for whom, first? And where? After all, one of the hallmarks of the last decades of this dying era is globalization. Quite sadly, all those beautiful traditions of folk clothes were replaced by blue jeans and t-shirts. Without the societal systems that put globalization in place, we will probably have very different cultures appearing, whereas nowadays we only have the sad homogeneity of a weak cultural porridge held in place by mass media, everywhere. Some new societal institutions will be better for some, others will be better for others, and the only thing we can know is that we cannot know, not any more than Saint Augustine or Paulo Orósio could.

Let us fasten our seat belts, for it is going to be quite a ride.