"...It is as though we have convinced ourselves that history has been our undoing. We wish that it had taken us elsewhere, but finding that it has deposited us in the precarious present, we begin to believe that it possesses its own forces and its own paths, and that it is carrying us with a with a momentum all of its own towards its final destination at the end of the world..."
Marina Benjamin "Living at the End of the World" p4
Apocalyptic thinking takes a measure of disgust with the present day, the view that it is, in some way, in a state of decay or decline. In this sense much of the rhetoric of punks early days in London was apocalyptic, the Sex Pistol's slogan "No Future" for instance. The apocalypse, the end of things, seems always to hang just out of our sight, just around the corner. Think about political rhetoric with its preoccupation with visions of collapse and decline. It is a kind of thinking we are all familiar with, unless we are complete optimists, which is not common. We all feel that anything that we have or cherish wil not be eternal but will begin to decay or finish.
Apocalyptic thought is this in extreme, a generalised feeling that, for whatever reason, the world is going to the dogs, that it is ceasing to make sense. Apocalyptic thinking generally involves a disgust wth the present day, to the extent that there is a wish to completly negate it. It is ultimately the idea that the world is so loathesome, so unpleasant and decayed from some mythic former time, that the only thing it is good for is destruction.
"The allure of generality, of totalising visions of the world and the events unfolding within it, cannot be so easily set aside, even when, as in the case of apocalypse, it opens the door to allow irrationalism to reasseart its grip on the future." p23
Many proponents of apocalyptic thought seem to have given up on any attempt to change or influence the world in which they live and suffer from a powerlessness, either believed or actual. The End of the World returns them to a sense of power as they sit and check off the events, counting down to The End. Suddenly the world is not a chaos without meaning, unconnected events take on a significance, the is a story or narrative where there was not one before. As Benjamin states, apocalyptic thinking is not good at actually looking forward because all it is concerned with is endings. What it is good at is giving meaning to the world as it is lived. Apocalyptic thinkers
"...posit a causal link between events so materially, geographically and temporally disparate, any self-respecting journalist would insist on their complete seperateness. They weave a continuous story out of the random and episodic, seeing simple truths underpinning extraordinary complexity and supernatural intent behind what looks like chance occurance." p45
All of this makes belief in apocalypse, The Rapture etc. very appealling for a variety of reasons, some of which are covered above. Another obvious one is that the believer can set themselves apart from whatever decay or wrongdoing that they recognise in the world, becoming seperate rather than complicite in the world that they dispise. They can pity those who do not see as they do. Most apocalyptic sects are seperatist.
It is also appealling in that to believe is to have a kind of passivity. The End WILL come, whether you like it or not. It feels active to be making the links, watching for the signs, but in real terms there is very little action. I see it as a 'get out' clause in thinking, from having to actively engage with the realities of the world, a kind of throwing up of hands nd saying "well don't say I didn't tell you so".
All quotes from Benjamin, Marina "Living at the End of The World", Picador, London, 1998
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