Apocalypse How or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Avoid Armageddon Anxiety

From the NZ Skeptics Conference November 2015...

Remember all those times when the world came to end? No? Well I do, because in 18 years of leading the New Zealand Skeptics, I was called on almost every time to comment on whether we'd really cop it from the next rendition of the rapture, the approaching asteroid, global goobies, sociopathic software, eugenics and genetic engineering, planetary patterns or yes, even gay marriage.

We're not dead yet. But it's not for want of enthusiasm in the armageddon arena. Claims that the end of the world is coming hit the main headlines pretty much every 18 months, and they can result in people selling houses, taking kids out of school, giving businesses away, euthanizing their pets; all on the basis of some bloke's biblical numerology or alien contact or precognitive vision. And, when they get it wrong – which is every time so far – the True Believers wait for the recalculation and revise the timeline for the next arrival of Armageddon.

There's a long list on Wikipedia for end-of-the-world dates. One early example concerned some apocalyptic Anabaptists who took over the German town of Munster in the 1530s. It did not end well. One man declared himself to be the Messiah of the last days with Christ set to return real soon; he went on to take 16 wives; instituted summary execution; and he and his cronies lived the high life while the rest of the town was left to starve. It ended in a bloody siege in 1535, with the ring-leaders ripped to pieces with red hot tongs and their bodies hoisted up in cages to rot; one had his genitals nailed to the town gate to serve as a salutary example.

Not that the example took. In 1843, the Second Coming predictions of New York farmer William Miller spread far and wide – thanks in part to 600,000 promotional newspapers distributed across New York alone. When nothing came of that prediction, Miller followed it up with revised dates for spring 1844, then a re-re-revised date of October 22 1844.

Even with the well-publicised failures under his belt by that point, Miller's prophecy saw 100,000 people get ready for the end of time that October day. When that came to be labelled the Great Disappointment, for obvious reasons, it still didn't seem to dim the enthusiasm for further predictions of Christ's imminent arrival, such predictions being made by the various spin-off groups and other visionaries in 1874, 1914, 1959, 1975….and so it goes.

Miller's efforts inspired the formation of the Jehovah Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists; the Bah'ais picked up some of his ideas. Possibly the most notorious spin-off was the Branch Davidians, one off-shoot of which was wiped out in the 1993 Waco Texas stand-off led by David Koresh who believed the world was doomed by a coming nuclear war.

More recently, American Christian radio broadcaster Harold Camping got a lot of attention, and a lot of donations, predicting the rapture for May 21st 2011, with the destruction of the world to follow via fire, brimstone and plagues culminating on October 21st that year. What wasn't so widely publicised were his earlier contentions that Judgement Day would arrive on March 21st 1988 and then September 6 1994.

As per common practice, yet another reinterpretation followed when the 2011 rapture failed to arrive. When asked would he return the money his company had taken in from those people he had taken in – said to be as much as $40 million dollars – Camping's response was “We're not at the end. Why would we return it?”

Perhaps some comfort can be derived by noting that Camping's Family Radio network was said to have suffered significant loss of assets, staff and revenue. As for other consequences of Camping's Great Disappointment, I guess I can be pleased that I saw only saw two reports of suicides related to the fears that man raised. One Russian teenager hung herself terrified that she was not righteous enough to be one of the saved: “Whales are trying to beach themselves and birds are dying – it is just the beginning of the end,” she wrote in her last diary entry. “We are not righteous people, only they will go to heaven, the others will stay here on Earth to go through terrible sufferings. I don't want to die like the others. That's why I'll die now.”

Apocalyptic visions have not been restricted to those with religious fervour – every time a planetary alignment comes up there are predictions of gravitational waves shredding the Earth, and nearby comets are also good news for doomsayers.

Science writer John Gribbin is still embarrassed by his 1974 book The Jupiter Effect, which predicted major catastrophes on Earth based on planetary alignments. That prediction was set for March 10 1982, eight years from publication, so the book sold well, at least in its initial print run. When the Earth failed to fall apart on time, Gribbin and his co-author put out a book theorising that the effect had actually taken place in 1980 with little show for it, though they did claim it caused the eruption of Mount St Helens. By 1999, Gribbin became one of very few apocalypters to actually say he was sorry he had had anything to do with his doomsday idea.

A more plausible doomsday was that predicted as a result of the Y2K bug. After all, there were reasonable grounds for concern and identifiable mechanisms to create the widespread problems predicted as a result of the failure on the part of software developers to look far enough into the future.

We'll never know how much of that was averted by the measures taken to ameliorate the issue – something which global pandemic warnings have to contend with as well – but we do know that some of the anticipated outcomes occurred, albeit at a very small scale. My main memory of Y2K fallout is of coming home late from the Split Enz concert in Auckland that night to find my kids all collected together around their grandmother's bed waiting, as one put it, “to hear the sound electricity made when it died”.

In 2012, I had lots of correspondence from school students, many doing assignments on the Mayan calendar which was thought to have predicted the end of the world for December 21 2012. Some were genuinely concerned that there was something in the hype, and were clearly looking for some reassurance.

The idea went that the Long Count calendar put together by some very talented ancient Mayan astronomers would run out after 5,126 years, somehow causing a global catastrophe. I spent much of that year pointing out that my office calendar ran out every year but that didn't mean I didn't have to get back to work after the New Year holidays.

Then the calendar apocalypse was joined by the alleged rogue planet Nibiru said to be heading towards Earth on a collision course. Then this all got jumbled up with Nostradamus predictions, Christian, spiritualist and even Native American beliefs. Predictions of reversals of the Earth's magnetic field were conflated with claims that the poles themselves would tip over. Solar storm watchers expected something big to happen and, if that wasn't big enough, the Solar alignment with the galactic centre or possibly the Milky Way Dark Rift was going to zap the entire galaxy. All this stuff was going down on December 21 2012. Remember that?

Closer to home, some time this month three mountainsized asteroids are to create massive earthquakes and 600-metre high tsunamis wiping out everyone around the Pacific unless they move 500km inland. This information was apparently provided by “conscious aware light energy beings” who kindly urged that the warning be passed on to people in positions of authority in New Zealand.

Consider this your warning – you have a choice, stay here and wait for the impact or head for Twizel now. Actually, not even Twizel is going to help….

As a susceptible teenager I was hooked on the British drama series Survivors. While most of my teen confreres were worrying about getting enough tartan in their life to attend the Bay City Rollers concert, I was worrying about how to make matches and whether I could talk a fortified village into taking me in despite my appalling eyesight.

Of course pandemic concerns haven't gone away, what with SARs, swine flu and bird flu. I confess to sniggering a bit when my husband stocked up on Tamiflu and bought a box of face masks, just in case – though the latter did come in handy in the sewage dust-storms we had after the February earthquake.

I did get taken to task by one radio listener late last year, who chastised me for my “relaxed approach” to the exponential threat of Ebola. He went on to say:

Top hospitals seem taxed to handle one or two cases, and fail at that. How would they handle 10, 100, 1000, 10,000? I would've thought with your knowledge of the 14th century Plague, 1918 flu epidemic etc you might be somewhat more realistic/pessimistic.

My response was to say that I was not particularly sanguine about Ebola, but that I did have concerns about kids here in New Zealand who were having panic attacks about the potential for catching it due to the over-hyped way in which it was being reported – and a time when we have distressingly low rates of immunisation and distressingly high rates of child poverty and abuse.

It's sad, I told him, that it has really taken having one case in Europe and a couple of cases in the US to get some solid research into possible vaccines and better treatment programmes for what has always been an African-based disease, no doubt helped by a couple of popular movies/ books on Ebola (and its cousin Marburg) which has meant that it had some “presence” in the Western social meme.

Yet the single biggest simple thing we can do to reduce mortality in Africa is widespread distribution of mosquito nets to prevent malaria. Really cheap, really easy, really under-supported.

And I reminded him that Ebola is relatively hard to catch compared to many infectious diseases; measles has around 8 times the transmissibility for example, and killed 122,000 people in 2012; 2.6 million annually before widespread vaccination came in. But relatively few of those deaths occurred in the West, so we tend to ignore it as a health issue.

As of the time of writing, the models for sustained growth suggested 10,000 cases per week by the end of that November – I concluded that I'd walk out on a limb and predict that it wouldn't get to that. I guess I continue to be optimistic about people's ability to react and respond appropriately to major threats.

Let's hope I'm right! I said. And, yes, I was. That time. But the epidemiologists tell us that there will be come a time when the fears will be justified. Whether from antibiotic-resistant bacteria, superflu strains or maybe a really nasty Ebola variant, there is the chance that we will one day face the same kind of challenges our ancestors did in plague-ridden Europe or smallpox-ridden Oceania.

I'm often asked why apocalyptic visions capture the hearts of some as well as the headlines. As a species we have a negativity bias which makes us imagine the worst is going to happen. That has its uses, evolutionarily speaking, in making us a little more cautious about things, but it also has its problems.

We're also prone to paying attention to authority figures, and giving up our autonomy to those who seem to have the answers. Not so good if the answer is to leave this earthly plane to join the alien spacecraft hiding behind the approaching comet. Thirty-six people died that way in the Heaven's Gate cult led by Marshall Heppelwhite.

Of course, you can see the benefit to those authority figures – usually, but not always, males. There's immense psychological power and a good deal of egoistic, economic and sexual goodies to be had. They may genuinely believe they have secret information from God, aliens, ancient civilisations. But they may also be suffering from delusional paranoia. Jim Jones was a highly dangerous example of that, and 918 people died as a result.

What these apocalypters present is a sense of certainty about the future. They appear to have a line to special knowledge and this attracts people, especially the psychologically vulnerable or the under-educated.

Personally I think it's pretty culturally offensive for people with no knowledge of Mayan mythos, anthropology or cultural practices to reinterpret that civilisation to suit their own ends. In much the same way that was done to them by people supporting the ancient astronaut claims of the likes of Erik von Daniken, or the apocalyptic pseudogeology of Graham Hancock.

I do have some optimism for the future – as more and more of these events are promulgated through the internet, more and more of them are seen by everyone to be false alarms. Snopes has done a lot to explain many of the urban legends out there, as have people like Phil Plaitt with his Bad Astronomy site. There is hope that such stories will increasingly be filed under the weird news category, not as national news. This may be inoculating the digital generation through a form of desensitization therapy. Or, to put it less technically: familiarity breeds contempt. Of course, as a conscientious skeptic I do have to allow for a smidgen of uncertainty. It would be arrogant to assume we know everything and can, ourselves, predict the future with absolute certainty.

Maybe one day a doomsdayer will get it right and NASA and all the other space-watchers will have missed a huge comet hurtling towards Earth. Maybe someone will finally crack the Bible's real coded message and accurately predict the Second Coming. Maybe the next AI breakthrough will bring us Skynet and the world of the Terminator.

But I'm not going to worry about it.

What I do worry about is the many people harmed – economically, psychologically, and physically – by doomsday prophecies; far more harm has been caused by that than by the purported outcomes of those prophecies. whatstheharm.net – a valuable resource I urge you all to bookmark – lists news reports covering over 1,800 people harmed through fears of the apocalypse – mostly murders and suicides occasioned by beliefs in the end-times, whether religiously based or New Age fantasy.

I was worried in the 90s when we had a Minister for Civil Defence who stated that he wasn't too worried about our lack of preparedness for a major disaster as the end time was almost upon us in any case.

What worries me is having my children come home frightened because a man on the bus said there was going to be more huge earthquakes in our city – he later contacted me and spoke at length about his research which sounded quite plausible up to the point when he mentioned he was waving a crystal over a map to get his data. I asked him for some specific predictions, which he supplied. I also asked him how many times he would have to get it wrong before he would begin to consider that his crystal wasn't providing any useful information. Fortunately the magnitude 9 whoppers he predicted did not eventuate, and he didn't call back.

I felt sorry for the believers who sold their businesses and their homes in New Zealand and abroad, to meet the end of the world predicted by a Korean fraudster. I guess one thing to be said for him: at least he didn't tell his followers to bring their world to a real end by mass suicide. It's been known to happen.

Mainly I believe that it is vital for people to use critical thinking skills and to take a stand when they see dangerous beliefs being promulgated unquestioningly – Western history would be a lot happier if people had done this when women were said to have no souls, when Jews were said to be murdering Christian babies, or when blacks were said to be intellectually inferior to whites.

I recently read a schlock piece of fiction positing the San Andreas fault finally letting rip – by the end of the first 24 hours there was mass rape, murder and cannibalism occurring throughout San Francisco. I'd like to think that the pop-up energy and community kindness we experienced in Christchurch from 2011 onwards are more reflective of the normal response to a local worldshattering event.

To end on a poetical footing, perhaps Robert Frost had the most lyrical warning for us as to the real danger underlying apocalyptic fears:

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favour fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.