The Mayan calendar runs out at the end of 2012, a purported signal that the world will then either face an apocalyptic end or realize a complete transformation of consciousness. Author Daniel Pinchbeck did a lot to popularize the idea, and on my second favorite radio program, Coast to Coast AM, you hear about the 2012 Mayan calendar hypothesis all the time. There’s even a fun sounding movie on the theme coming out in the fall from Sony Pictures. With an economic depression threatening us, naturally these ideas acquire some enhanced plausibility.
Last night, I started reading Pinchbeck’s book —
2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl — and, apart from its being very vividly and effectively written, the thing that struck me most so far is his description of growing up in Manhattan under the shadow of scientific materialism:
We were humanists with little interest in science, yet science and its technological expressions were the stabilizing force, the glue holding together our drab and doomed world. Materialism seemed iron-clad; evolution told us how species arise and die out — even the sun would flare out and collapse someday; entropy was the inevitable rule bringing an end to all things.
He cites Bertrand Russell on the modern age — “Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation’s henceforth be built.” Pinchbeck continues:
We could chalk up the success of our species to the law of the jungle, genetic mutation, and the survival of the fittest. We implicitly accepted that our identity and memory, feelings and ambitions, were, as DNA researcher Francis Crick confidently proclaimed, “no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
No scientist, as of yet, had figured out how consciousness emerged in the brain — but we were assured that it was only a matter of time before that last detail was ironed out….We could rest assured, as well, that therw was no life after death, no continuity of soul or flight of spirit.”
Russell’s word for this — “despair” — summarizes the outcome of the social forces unleashed or at least hurried along by Darwinism. Pinchbeck goes on to tell how he dropped out of Wesleyan University from of “a combination of intellectual boredom and erotic failure,” after which he began a search for meaning amid modern nihilism that lead him ultimately to his…interesting theories about the return of a Mayan “plumed serpent” god to earth, an archetype for the transformation of consciousness.
Did I mention that Pinchbeck is Jewish? How could he not be?
I’m not mocking the idea, common to many religions, that history has a sell-by date. The Talmud itself gives its own deadline by which the world either needs to spiritually reform itself or face the consequences. Perhaps more on that another time if you’re interested. (The deadline year is
6000 in the Hebrew calendar, which works out to 2239 CE.)
What’s fascinating is the way that from 19th century spiritualism (a/k/a modern necromancy) to today’s New Age spirituality, alternative religious views have been advanced by a combination of despair, depression, and boredom that followed very naturally for many people from the triumph of materialism in the form of Darwinian theory. Natural selection was seen as having displaced the Biblical God from having had any role in life’s splendid unfolding. Yet the need for spiritual engagement persisted.
This is the obverse side of Darwinism’s social impact that we’ve discussed here already, perhaps to excess. On one hand, you have people driven by materialism to secularism and its allied worldviews.
On the other hand, you have people who are motivated to reject materialism because it’s so empty — but who then, having done so, don’t know where to turn, with traditional faiths being as spineless and dispirited as they are (cf.
Francis Collins), and end up embracing these very colorful New Age belief systems.
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