Modernity and Perpetual Eschatological Expectation

I'm in the middle of reading Thomas Howard's Chance or the Dance, a rather marvelous book on the different perspectives of modernity and all prior ages on the nature and backdrop of the cosmos. Howard captures some very fundamental truths very well, most particularly the difference between the sort of images of man generated by the old worldview, which held we stand under the lordship of some higher power, and those generated by modernity, which hold that we make ourselves anew, each his own image of himself. And somehow modern man always looks boring. Not always--I'll take that back--because wherever somebody retains the notion of law binding on man and demanding certain things of him, man tends to rise to a higher level. Look at sports, or war, or any other field which can still be called a discipline, which recognizes a law written into the very fabric of reality which no human may buck without consequence. Look at those religions which still generate saints, or at the least, more interesting human beings than those portrayed in Death of a Salesman. Howard drew a number of very interesting contrasts, and there's a lot more to be said about the book, but the main point I wanted to make is related to the 2012 fervor and expectation. It's an odd thing that in our age of science and technology, an ancient calendar's end should generate such apocalyptic speculation. Especially since it's the equivalent of a very long delayed New Year's Day, rather than a real prediction of the end of all things--more the declaration of the end of a galactic year, if you will, than any real attempt at calling the time of eschaton. And yet I've grown up in the midst of such speculation and expectation. Some new end times cult popping up in the news like clockwork around significant dates or historical events. A constant low level drumbeat, inherited from Hal Lindsey in the 70s, and the American heritage of millenarian thought running back through the genesis of the notion of the rapture around the turn of the century, and the notion of the New World being the promised Zion for the Mormons, and the revivals back before that. In some sense, every generation really has thought their time was the time of the end--but as Michael O'Brien pointed out, if a sick man recovers, and falls ill, and recovers repeatedly, can one say he was never truly ill or in danger of death? Can one say he shall then never actually die, since he has fallen sick unto death repeatedly before? Anyway--I think the modern age finds the notion rather more fascinating and powerful than ages past. We get the spectacle of vehement denials that it shall ever come, or vehement claims that it soon shall come. We get movies about the end from any number of perspectives, secular prophecies of an end by global warming or cooling, by disease or nuclear war, by comet strikes or massive eruptions, a constant cataloging of prophecy and natural disaster on the History and Discovery channels, a constant series of lists and surveys of potential dangers, constant recollections of the near misses of WWII--an apocalyptic war if there ever was one, against some of the most naked evil the world has ever seen--and the Cold War, especially the Cuban Missile crisis--perhaps the most spiritually costly and truly deadly war ever fought, especially because of the murk and the fog pouring forth from the propaganda arms of both sides. We live in a climate of fascination with the end. I think it may be because humanity finds itself boring. The modern mind, stripped of the means of transcendence from ages past, finds itself alone and aimless in the universe. The meaning of life is a question that has only recently gone unanswered--ages past had answers of varying qualities and levels of hope. But now we stand in a universe illuminated only by machines and physical processes, amalgamations of chemicals in the cold, dark night of the universe. And we wonder. I think many would find a crisis or an end to be a relief, a sharp imposition of necessary acts for survival, a sharp breach of the aimless wandering in the night of the post-transcendent mind.