Jubilee or Bust

Tilting at the Armageddon mills

Back in September, we had another rapture warning, or rapture promise. Some people - internet people, no one I know - seemed pretty excited about the rapture.

In case you’re not into these things, in the rapture, all the good people physically disappear from the earth into heaven. Then the sinners, still on earth, proceed to get their just desserts in a series of escalating misfortunes that ends with the end of the world. It’s one interpretation of the Book of Revelation, at the very end of the Christian Bible.

The Book of Revelation was written by the other, other Saint John, while exiled to the Aegean island of Patmos sometime in the first century. It’s an arcane book of punishment on a cosmic scale. Its obscurity and vitriol have tempted surly readers to believe it’s about current events and public figures consistently going back to when it was committed to papyrus so many centuries ago.

In the last few decades, the rapture has been the subject of a best-selling Christian fiction series, with the associated film treatments by Kirk Cameron, and an atheist-friendly version on HBO.

My only friend…

The end of the world has its charms. You don’t have to go to work tomorrow or pay off the credit card. There’s nothing to regret, since it was all going to end anyway. And there are no survivors to speak ill of you. It simplifies things.

The end of the world doesn’t bring out the best in us. It may lead you to give away your belongings, but only to suckers dumb enough to take them. The young like the end of times because it means you don’t have to do your homework or listen to grownups. The old like it because it means no one will get to have fun after they’re gone.

Tapping my own youthful and inchoate enthusiasm for the apocalypse, I wrote a book about the end of the world, called The Last Bad Job (see 2024’s “The Joys of Crackpot Literature”) when I was in my twenties. It’s a fun, wild book, and it cured me of wanting to go back to the theme.

Age-old tradition

The end of the world has been part of my world since I was a kid. I went to Catholic school, but the apocalypse was highly de-emphasized by the working-class Irish, French Canadians, and Italians of New England.

And we didn’t need the Holy Roman Apostolic Church to tell us about the end of the world. It was waiting in the form of Soviet-sponsored radioactive fire. The Cold War was on the news. Mad Max was at the movies. The Day After and The Twilight Zone played on late-night TV. It was scary, sure. But it was also a reason to treat school and the whole serious adult world like a joke, as was my wont.

Nuclear armageddon was a mainstay of my childhood nightmares. When I was in the sixth grade, I had one so upsetting I managed to convince my mother to let me stay home sick from school. Later, while batting a ball off a tee to pass the spring afternoon, a sudden hailstorm struck. I ran inside, sure that the dream was a premonition and the end was at hand. I still remember the little spheres of ice letting off steam as they melted in the grass.

By high school, the Soviet Union had dissolved. But a South Korean preacher still managed to get on the worldwide news one fine fall day my sophomore year by promising the world would end. That news item caught my attention to the extent that I worried my eternal damnation would take the form of running endless wind sprints at that afternoon’s football practice.

Put your left foot in

The end of the world is a vague phrase. It could mean as much as the end of all life in the universe, or as little as the end of a way of life in a single locale. The phrase most often means something in between, either human extinction or an end to our current global civilization.

The reasons in the imagination include comets, world wars and epidemics. But the most common and least remarked-upon end for most civilizations is also the most common and least remarked-upon end for most stories: People simply lose interest.

This is the story hit upon by David Graeber in The Dawn of Everything, a large-scale elaboration upon the insights of Yale agronomist and freelance anarchist James C. Scott.

Simply put, humanity and civilization are fair-weather friends. The relationship sours. But instead of a revolt, people tend to drift. In today’s parlance, they quiet quit. They inquire less often about that year’s fashions and governments. They forget the slogans and make the flags into rag dolls for their kids. Cities wither, simply because there’s less of a point to being there.

From this perspective, the one honest anthem for civilization might be The Hokey Pokey.

Vandalism and petty theft

Civilization is an acquired taste. And acquiring a taste requires effort. The young always have to be seduced or intimidated. Then, even when the seduction and intimidation is going great, a lot of them think it might make more sense just to burn the whole thing down.

Dream interpretation

Exodus is a famous story of people who tired of the civilization they were in, and made their escape.

I was at an event featuring Doug Rushkoff about a year ago, and he was talking about Jacob’s son Joseph, who was able to interpret Pharaoh’s dream into agricultural policy. By buying and storing surplus grain from seven rich years, and selling it over the course of seven lean years, Joseph and Pharaoh invented large-scale debt slavery, Rushkoff said. Farmers who’d sold their crops to the Pharaoh would not long after sell their lands and even their lives to the Pharaoh for food to survive.

Joseph interpreted the dream, and hit the heights. He got the revenge of being able to forgive his brothers from a great height when they came to Egypt to buy grain.

But then the world that Joseph created outlived him. It was a world of slavery - the same slavery to which Joseph’s descendants would eventually be subjected.

The lesson is to be careful about how you interpret dreams.

Shark jumping

A civilization offers a place for its participants to put their energies, inside a story about who they are in relation to their neighbors, and ultimately to the broader universe.

A civilization can only get bigger or fall. Nothing else really qualifies as a good story for a civilization. The problem is that stories get stale. What happens when a TV show is on too long? It can’t change the story. It can only get lost in sub-plots or raise the stakes. It eventually does one or the other too many times.

Escalate too frequently and you break the trust with the audience. Too much dawdling and people forget why they paid attention to begin with. Either way, people feel ripped off. How does a rip-off end? Hostages will pretend to be volunteers, but only for so long.

Thus arising, thus receding

The meditators warn that stories are always coming for you or coming from you. No matter which. Best just leave the stories alone.

Occlusion

Lately, more people in New York and America at large have been getting excited about socialism. My daughter, who just turned ten, said socialism sounds like a good idea.

I don’t think it’s a good idea. And I struggled to explain why it’s not a good idea, without having to bring up Stalin or Mao. My best answer to her was that a promise is only as good as the person making it.

But socialism is appealing again, simply because the cult of property ownership has taken over too much of human life. The story told by the forces that decide our workdays, our entertainments, our prospects and those of our children is one in which it’s gotten successively harder to imagine a future.

This is how you get people sitting in their SUVs with a big gulp of mocha frappuccino poised below their chin, talking into their iPhone about how excited they are for the rapture.

Border defense

The best thing most civilizations can say for themselves is that they protect you from other civilizations. And the best thing you can say about some stories is that they protect you from other stories.

Accumulations

Jeanette Winterson once wrote a great passage about people in hot-air balloons scrubbing the excess talk from the clouds above London.

To live, we need to remember. But remembering is also killing us. Forced forgetting, though, may kill even more of us, in still worse ways, like when Pol Pot declared year zero.

The overflow of cultural requirements, trivia and so on have always been the uncomfortable burden of people who keep records. The story bogs down. Early civilizations, like the Babylonians and the Hebrews who escaped Egypt, had a solution called a Jubilee, when the king would break the tablets, forgive certain debts and free certain slaves.

Zero - zero

The word Jubilee isn’t on many people’s lips these days. It’s been steadily on the decline since 1861, according to the Google viewer. Also on the decline since then is another beauty, emancipation.

One reason that no one in our debt-smothered society thinks of the jubilee much anymore may be because the United States had an unofficial jubilee less than a century ago. It was called The Great Depression and the Second World War.

Calamity resets the scoreboard. Come June, it’s been 80 years since the last World War ended. The social change seen in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States was possible in part because of a grudging respect among people who’d been through a depression and a war together, enough that they’d at least talk to each other.

But not all scorekeepers agree on which calamity is foundational, and counting forward from other calamities, what they claim are deeper zeroes, truer origins and more fundamental realities.

Mechanics and corruption

The Romans knew that the civilization they were peddling was at least two-parts poison. So they had the annual Saturnalia - where the slaves played the part of masters and the masters played the part of slaves for a weekend - to keep it going.

The Roman political heavyweights also instituted debt forgiveness now and again to keep the whole brutal powder keg from exploding. Of course, they’d tip off their favored courtiers, courtesans and in-laws on when to heavily borrow money they’d never need to repay.

If the United States were to do a jubilee, the first one would have to be sudden, unexpected and backstopped by what’s still the most potent military on the planet. The financial losses, while immense, would be borne by far fewer people than would be relieved, and even emancipated.

If only

Forgiveness of all personal debts worldwide or even just nationally, down to the overdue-book fees at a small-town library, would be no small feat. Fortunes would be made and lost, no different than in a civil or global war, but with significantly less human damage.

If only we had a highly unpredictable president with a history of vexing lenders, and an opinion of himself that extends to the Old Testament…

I mean, if the United States declared a Jubilee, it would take some pressure off the already strained cult of property ownership. The strain is warping it into a death cult, as more of life moves towards a scenario where we’re searching for our username and password to enter an online portal to enter a complaint about having been unfairly assaulted by a Boston Dynamics robot.

If the United States could declare a Jubilee, and then promise not to do it for another 80 years, far more people would be inclined - perhaps even excited - to believe people like us would be here for another 80 years to keep that promise. People might be a little less giddy the next time someone promises that the apocalypse is on its way.