How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [128]
The millennium combines the best in pattern-seeking and storytelling. What could be more dramatic than the pattern of a round number ending in three zeros with a story about the end of time and our redemption to follow? Damian Thompson expressed this nicely in his work on The End of Time: “It seems to represent a deep-seated human urge to escape from time, which in the earliest societies was usually met by dreams of a return to a golden past. Apocalypticism offered a radical change of direction, a move forward into a world ruled by the saints in which the enemy had been vanquished.” Even for those with no particular religious inclinations toward a millennial holocaust, there are plenty of secular versions to go around, starting with what I call the beautiful people myth.
HEAVEN ON EARTH
Long, long ago, in a century far, far away, there lived beautiful people coexisting with nature in balanced eco-harmony, taking only what they needed, and giving back to Mother Earth what was left. Women and men lived in egalitarian accord and there were no wars and few conflicts. The people were happy, living long and prosperous lives. The men were handsome and muscular. well-coordinated in their hunting expeditions as they successfully brought home the main meals for the family. The tanned, bare-breasted women carried a child in one arm and picked nuts and berries to supplement the hunt. Children frolicked in the nearby stream, dreaming of the day when they too would grow up to fulfill their destiny as beautiful people.
But then came the evil empire—European White Males carrying the disease of imperialism, industrialism, capitalism, scientism, and the other “isms” brought about by human greed, carelessness, and short-term thinking. The environment was exploited, the rivers soiled, the air polluted, and the beautiful people were driven from their land, forced to become slaves, or simply killed.
This tragedy, however, can be reversed if we just go back to living off the land where everyone would grow just enough food for themselves and use only enough to survive. We would then all love one another, as well as our caretaker Mother Earth, just as they did long, long ago, in a century far, far away.
There are actually several myths packed into the beautiful people myth, proffered by no one in particular but compiled from many sources as mythmaking (in the literary sense) for our time. This genre of storytelling, in fact, tucks nicely into the larger framework of golden-age fantasies and has a long and honorable history. The Greeks believed they lived in the Age of Iron, but before them there was the Age of Gold. Jews and Christians, of course, both believe in the golden age before the fall in the Garden. Medieval scholars looked back longingly to the biblical days of Moses and the prophets, while Renaissance scholars pursued a rebirth of classical learning, coming around full circle to the Greeks. Even Newt Gingriclu had his own version of the myth when he told the Boston Globe on May 20, 1995, that there were “long periods of American history where people didn’t get raped, people didn’t get murdered, people weren’t mugged routinely.”
The concept of Heaven on Earth is part of the larger mythic theme represented in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man: “The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come.” Sometimes that future state of bliss is to be found in another place entirely, as in “the firmament”—an overarching vault resting on pillars at the end of the Earth with windows to view God and the angels above, and from whence the rains come. But as often as not Heaven is a state on Earth, or sometimes even a state of mind. The most famous Heaven on Earth metaphors, of course, come from the Bible in numerous