June 2 2018
ALLIS WELL THAT ENDS WELL.
I was struck by a line in David Brooks’ column in the New York Times on May 25. He wrote, without further elaboration, “We’re in the middle of some vast historical transition, and it’s very hard to know what to believe in”.
Brooks has difficulty to find a cause to believe it. I do not. I believe that we are rushing to the END. Bonhoeffer, in his book CREATION AND FALL, which deals with the beginning – Genesis 1-3 – quite paradoxically starts with the total opposite: ”The church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end.”
That is so true: we don’t really know how creation started. We do know how it will end: Christ will return and make all things NEW. Yes, all is well that ends well.
Those of us who believe this, have something to go by, and shape their lives accordingly. Those who believe this also see matters with different eyes: the real vast historical transition – and very few believe this – is from a man-shaped planet – which is quickly collapsing – to a renewed world remade according to God’s intentions: that will be extremely exciting and the REAL GOOD NEWS.
BUT………
People who have followed me know that I am a Collapsitarian, a person that is convinced that we are on the cusp of something totally different, totally ominous, totally catastrophic. The signs are out there, and I see the state of American politics as just another sign of a historical transition.
History is important. We have seen instances of ‘historical transition’. Luther’s Reformation, his courageous fight against the all-powerful religion of his day heralded a historical transition, something that did not happen in isolation, but was fueled by such inventions as the printed press, which gave people the ammunition to form an opinion.
In setting the stage for this Cultural Revolution, THE BLACK DEATH acted as a preparatory element, a full century and more before Luther made his monumental move. Otto Friedrich in his THE END OF THE WORLD, in his chapter on THE BLACK DEATH, which killed 30-50% of Europe, writes: “If anything had been learned during the Black Death, it was that the church and its priests were helpless in fighting the plague…..Some tribute to it not only the general decay in papal authority but the growth of the Lollards and the Hussites and all the other dissenters and rebels whose impassioned demands for a new way ultimately burst forth in the REFORMATION.
Carbon Power, the use of coal, oil, natural gas to fuel machinery, starting at the end of the 18th Century, heralded another age, an age now harboring calamities exceeding the ravages of THE BLACK DEATH, such as epidemics, floods, hurricanes, unbearable heat, disastrous economic conditions, water wars, droughts, and territorial disputes. Throw in religious fanaticism, raising its ever-more ugly head, and my premonition of imminent disastrous times, appear to be completely justified.
Some similarities to today.
The Black Death in the mid-14th century coincided with a schism in the Roman Catholic Church, with two Popes in power, one in Rome, and one in Avignon, southern France. Today we see similar religious strife in all branches of religion: Pope Francis is the most hated prelate of all times because of his relaxed stance on such controversial phenomena as divorce, homosexuality and related sexual matters. The Protestant wing is deeply divided along these same lines, while Islam experiences immense differences between moderate and fundamental wings.
The times they are a’changing.
Stability is gone, yet uncertainty in economic and political fields seem to have the opposite outcome in religious matters: in times of financial and social troubles, institutions of faith seem to become more rigid, with reasoning being abandoned, dialogue suspended and hatred and animosity ruling the day.
Yes, we live in times of some vast historical transition, and for many people it’s very hard to know what to believe in, so they dig in and stick to the ‘old-time-religion’.
It so happens that, what I believe is at odds with the general teaching of the church, which still is almost exclusively ‘heaven’ oriented. Will the carbon-carnage make a difference? Will a universal plague ameliorate or harden the hearts of the people? If the BLACK DEATH is an indication, disastrous times will make people more rebellious.
A timely warning.
On May 28 the Globe and Mail had an article with the heading,
“Will we be prepared for ‘Disease X’ – the next pandemic?”
TOM KOCH, professor of medical geography at the University of British Columbia and the author of Cartographies of Disease and Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground, wrote:
Ebola is back, again active in Africa. Influenza is about to begin this year’s march in Australia. Measles outbreaks are broadly reported and the list goes on. What’s next in the world of infectious diseases?
The World Health Organization calls it “Disease X,” a previously unknown pathogen that likely will cause the next pandemic. It will be new, spread quickly and, if history is a guide, carry a mortality rate greater than 30 per cent.
Every century has had its Disease X. There was plague, of course, recurring periodically between the 14th and 19th centuries. Then there was yellow fever, which in the 18th century decimated eastern U.S. cities. In the 19th century cholera was the global threat. More recently, it was influenza in 1918 and polio in the 1950s. AIDS, Ebola, SARS, MERS, West Nile Virus and Zika: all evidence of rapid evolution in the microbial world.
Because the new bug will be, well, new, we will be largely unprepared. Nor should we be surprised. Since influenza first spread globally from domesticated poultry in China in 2,500 BC, certain conditions have always presaged the arrival of a new pandemic disease. All are present today.
First, there is deforestation – the destruction of natural ecosystems to provide housing and food for cities. Bacteria and viruses are displaced and must survive by migrating to new places and populations.
Deforestation is powered by urbanization – the growth of dense settlements that become reservoirs for the migrating microbes – new destinations for the bacterium or virus forced out of its niche by human advance.
Then there is the trade that supports those evolving cities and their industries. Microbes are mostly homebodies. They don’t travel on their own but instead move with travelers and the goods they carry. Once, that meant sailing ships that spanned the globe and locally the ox carts of local providers. In the 19th century cholera travelled from New Orleans up the Mississippi River in steam boats and then new trains that linked southern and northern cities. Today, modern microbes circle the globe with us on airplanes, either caught in cargo, captured in the wheelbase or with infected passengers on board.
Income inequality has always been a boon to the bacteria and viruses that have plagued humanity. Impoverished people who are ill-housed and ill-fed are stressed. Their immune systems are weaker and their environments insecure. They become the perfect vehicles for disease propagation.
Finally, there is nothing like war to promote the advance of microbial legions. Troop transports assured 1918 influenza would spread from the United States to Europe where the First World War created hugely distressed populations that were the perfect targets for the new disease. Troops returning home carried the virus with them.
In our defence, experts are increasing surveillance while scientists strike to create “platform technologies,” broadly designed medicines and vaccines that in theory can be modified to target new microbes once they are identified. Still, even with a vaccine almost ready, it took more than a year for an Ebola vaccine to be developed and tested. By the time it was ready for distribution the West African epidemic of 2014 was mostly over.
Even with the most advanced technologies it will take weeks, and probably months, to isolate the precise nature of Disease X, months if not years then to engineer a vaccine or cure. It then takes months if not years for a new drug or vaccine’s testing, commercial patenting, manufacture and then distribution. By then it will be too late.
All this is the failure of our successes, the downside of our modern achievements. The only answer is to assure that public health organizations – from city-health departments to international agencies – have the funding and support they will require to react when Disease X emerges. Unfortunately, we are, in most countries, more concerned with health efficiencies than health preparedness. WHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control have had their budgets cut in recent years. To prepare and to insure our health and survival, we can and must do better.
And so, we wait for Disease X and, too, the tools to fight it.
So far Tom Koch.
Laurie Garrett in 1994, in her THE COMING PLAGUE said essentially the same: “The extraordinary, rapid growth of the Human population, coupled with its voracious appetite for planetary dominance and resource consumption, has put every measurable biological and chemical system on earth in a state of imbalance.
“Extinctions, toxic chemicals, greater background levels of nuclear and ionizing radiation, ultraviolet penetration if the atmosphere, global warming, wholesale devastations of ecospheres – these were the changes of which ecologists spoke as the world approaches the twenty-first century”.
Neither Koch nor Garrett mention the melting of the Arctic where pathogens may be uncovered that have been hidden for thousands of years.
I have long maintained that next time when disaster strikes, it will be accompanied by an array of other calamities.
“We’re in the middle of some vast historical transition, and it’s very hard to know what to believe in”, writes celebrated columnist, David Brooks.
What does this signify?
“It is hard to know what to believe in”.
Politicians will not tell us. They never predict a difficult future. They never mention Climate Change in a bad light. They always see the sunny side, such as the immense potential of renewable energy. They always promise more economic growth in a finite world.
Don’t look to churches to tell us. They most certainly will not tell us to prepare for a New Earth and start living that condition now.
The Bible, however, pulls no punches: Matthew 24 makes the startling claim that the coming disasters will be so totally devastating that (verse 22), “If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive!”
That’s what is in store: the final judgement is upon the world in the form of natural disasters, earthquakes, pandemics, all happening simultaneously: neither technology nor medical science can prevent it.
The final judgement over this terrified world will reveal itself in its inevitable self-destruction of the culture.
Emperor Nero set his own capital, Rome, on fire. He had no clue what he was doing. We too have not the faintest idea of the horrible fate that today threatens the entire human civilization.
Humanity, totally estranged from God, has become drunk on its own technical prowess and mesmerized by its own grandeur: this same human race will end itself through its own radical self-delusion, polluting itself into oblivion, destroying whatever it has built, in a spontaneous act of suicide.
World history is, indeed, a continuous series of suicide; world history is an always repeating leap into the abyss. That is what humanity does without prompting: God does not have a hand in all this.
Just as THE BLACK DEATH by all accounts led to THE REFORMATION, so it could well be that all the disasters that now are brewing and will burst forth in all their ferocity in the near future, will make people pause and wonder whether there is a God and whether this God is of any use.
Yes we are in the middle not only of a vast historical transition, but we are on the very last gasp of human sinfulness.
The Black Plague brought the worst out in people. The coming series of the ultimate disasters will do the same.
But ALL IS WELL THAT ENDS WELL: Revelation 21: 1, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth!”