In the second of three Saturday afternoon talks at Mill Hill Chapel asking ‘What Happened to the Future?’, we welcome back writer Tim Black to discuss why the apocalyptic exerts such a powerful pull on the modern imagination.

End-thinking seems to abound today. Politicians and activists alike warn daily of the ever-impending climate catastrophe. Others talk excitedly of the next pandemic or of the world-ending threat posed by AI. What’s driving the prevalence of apocalypticism today?

Writing over 40 years ago, Susan Sontag attributed ‘the taste for worst-case scenarios’ to ‘the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable’. Is the contemporary taste for the apocalyptic fuelled by something similar, by a fear of a profoundly uncertain future, or is there something more going on?

After all, beyond mainstream doom-mongering, countless niche strains of apocalyptic thinking are flourishing, too, from the dark fantasies of Islamists to the dreams of a neo-reactionary right, convinced that the era of Western liberal democracy is coming to its decadent end. There seems to be a proliferation of such conspiracy-minded groups, all self-righteously ‘in the know’, denouncing others as evil or duped, and keenly anticipating a final reckoning.

Historian Norman Cohn, writing of millenarian cults at the dawn of modernity, claimed that the essence of apocalyptic thinking lay in ‘the tense expectation of a final, decisive struggle in which a world tyranny will be overthrown by a “chosen people” and through which the world will be renewed, and history brought to its consummation’.

Could we be seeing a revival of this millenarian sensibility today, rich as it is in Manichaeism and conspiricism? And, if so, why? What is it about the apocalyptic that exerts such a powerful pull on the modern imagination?

Speaker:

Tim Black is a columnist, and books and essays editor at spiked. His writing has also appeared in the EU Observer, the Australian, the Independent, La Repubblica and others. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Sussex.