Apocalypse Not by John Greer

Author:John Greer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Viva Editions
Published: 2011-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

Long before Brothers and Southcott had their time in the spotlight, though, the center of secular apocalyptic in the Western world had leapt the English Channel and found a new and welcoming home in France. There the same sort of over-the-top absolutism that cost England’s King Charles I his head had not yet encountered a limiting factor on the scale of Cromwell and his Roundhead army, and flourished to the point of absurdity, by turns encouraged and undercut by a large and greedy aristocracy and a national church far more obviously interested in worldly wealth and influence than in saving souls. The sheer improbability of meaningful reform in the face of these entrenched powers inspired a great many French intellectuals to dream of a perfect society that would arrive all at once if only the existing order of things could somehow be overthrown.

These Utopian dreams drew on one or both of two broad currents of thought. The first of these was rationalism, the belief that a perfect world could be brought about by discarding the heritage of the past and rebuilding all human affairs on the basis of pure logic. By the early decades of the eighteenth century, ideas of this kind had begun to win support across a broad sector of France’s middle classes and even found an audience here and there in the aristocracy itself. In 1750, when a group of scholars headed by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert announced the forthcoming production of the first modern encyclopedia, the rationalist movement found a banner around which to gather.

The Encyclopédie, published in fifteen volumes between 1751 and 1765, subjected the traditional ideals and customs at the foundation of French society to scathing critique. In the oppressive political climate of the time, this had predictable results. Diderot and many of his coauthors spent time in prison repeatedly during the production of the Encyclopédie, and publication was suspended several times by the royal censors, but the resulting furor sent sales skyrocketing and made the Encyclopédistes heroes to all those—and there were many of them in France and elsewhere—who found the fossilized social order of eighteenth-century Europe increasingly hard to tolerate.

The second current that shaped the secular apocalypticism of the time was primitivism, the belief that a perfect world could be brought into being by discarding everything that was false, artificial, and unnatural, and allowing humanity to return to a presumably natural state of peace and harmony. The major figure in the primitivist movement in eighteenth-century France was the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who spent most of his life in France and whose wildly popular writings—On the Origins of Inequality, The Social Contract, and others—asked all the hard questions about the origins and logic of a social system that gave unearned wealth to a few and condemned everyone else to pay the price. Rousseau’s primitivism cohabited uneasily at best with the rationalist current that dominated the cultural conversation of the time; Rousseau himself was briefly allied with Diderot and the

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