How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [130]
Radical feminists foresee a day when patriarchy will collapse and men and women will live in egalitarian harmony—the Second Coming is actually a return to an imagined golden age before there were wars, violence, rape, slavery, and the subjugating “isms” that go with male domination. In Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, for example, the author goes back 13,000 years to find history’s bogeyman. Before patriarchy there was “a long period of peace and prosperity when our social, technological, and cultural evolution moved upward: many thousands of years when all the basic technologies on which civilization is built were developed in societies that were not male dominant, violent, and hierarchic.” As Paleolithic hunting, gathering, and fishing gave way to Neolithic farming, this “partnership model” of equality between the sexes gave way to the “dominator model,” and with it came wars, exploitation, slavery, and the like. The solution, says Eisler, is to return to the equalitarian partnership model where “not only will material wealth be shared more equitably, but this will also be an economic order in which amassing more and more property as a means of protecting oneself from, as well as controlling others will be seen for what it is: a form of sickness or aberration.”
Environmentalist, Marxist, libertarian, and feminist Armageddons are being fought with the belief that the survival of the species is at stake. Either men will lead us into nuclear obliteration, or corporations will sink our environmental lifeboat, or capitalists will spend us into oblivion, or the state will destroy us. But in the end the Antichrist will be defeated, replaced by the Kingdom of Bliss. The fire that will cleanse.
HOLDING THE CENTER
The fact that such diverse apocalyptic visions can proliferate on the cultural landscape tells us that they are deeply rooted in the human mind. There is something going on here that cries out for an explanation. We saw in the last chapter that sometimes apocalypticism is prevalent among the oppressed, disenfranchised, or marginalized—the Jews oppressed by Romans at the time of Jesus’ evangelism and promise of the Kingdom of God on Earth that was soon to come; the 1890 Ghost Dance among the Native Americans who were on the brink of extinction when the prophet Wovoka preached that the Great Spirit would come to destroy the whites and return the buffalo; or the belief among some members of the Nation of Islam (including Farrakhan himself) that a messianic mothership is in orbit around earth that will soon bring deliverance. Hold a people down long enough and learned helplessness arises, leading to feelings of utter futility, which gives rise to fatalism, and that end in apocalypticism, with a hoped-for paradisiacal state to come.
But this is not true for all millennial groups. As the Time/CNN poll showed, millions of white, middle class, American Christians believe that the world is soon coming to an end. It would be a long stretch to classify these folks as oppressed, disenfranchised, or marginalized. Likewise, the people who purchased over thirty million copies of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth are anything but in a state of learned helplessness or cognitive dissonance. Indeed, some recent polls and studies indicate that religious people, on average, may be both physically and psychologically happier and healthier than nonbelievers. Apocalypticism requires a different explanation here.
Perhaps it has something to do with the need for justice, where the evils of events like the Holocaust are lessened by the fact that the Lord