2012: A Growing American Legend and Its Cultural Influence

In an interesting conversation with a close relative, the concept of non-human causes for global warming entered our discussion. I'm divided on this issue, not about climate change and global warming, but on entertaining the "non-human caused" side of the argument. I feel a strong pull toward entertaining ideas that I know are non-factual in order to not be "biased". It can be a strange thing to be "unbiased" toward an argument that I know holds no factual truth. I feel however, that one always gains by listening to others, no matter what idea they present. Also I deeply love this person, I was pretty much required to listen.

Now this may actually be an argument you have not heard yet, no matter what side of the issue you are on. This argument goes something like this...

Global warming is neither a human caused event, nor is it a preventable one. There is nothing we can do to change what is coming, we must accept it, and prepare for it. In this example the process by which the earth's temperature was warming was due to a recent massive earthquake off the eastern coast of Asia, which had tilted the earth's axis and changed our climate.

I had heard nothing of this theory. I was expecting maybe the marine bacteria hoax, sunspot activity, or even the "natural global warming cycle" arguments, but I was taken totally by surprise with this one. I promised I would research it myself, and I did. Months later, after sifting through quite a lot of internet articles, blogs and YouTube videos, (and admittedly, getting very sidetracked) I found references to the Dec 28, 2004, 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, which altered local geography, moved small islands entire meters...and has caused a slight wobble in the earth's rotation. I had to do a bit of digging to find out that this wobble has nothing to do with the degree of tilt of our rotational axis, and the most dramatic global consequence (apart from the obvious) may be an earlier resetting of the leap second. In part, the difficulty in finding this information was that I was looking for a seismic event that was said to affect the axial tilt of the earth, and that did not happen.

Interestingly, I was met with my own past on this search, and perhaps more answers than I had intended to find. Because I was looking for a shift in our axis, one of the search terms I used was "polar shift", "polar drift" and "polar movement". What I found may seem bizarre to many, but to me, it was an all too familiar romping grounds of my youth. Armageddon, the impending end of the world, the coming of the Antichrist, the second coming of the Messiah, terrible tribulations, galactic alignments, Alien Civilizations, Nostradamus prophecies...all ideas I had believed died after Y2K came and went, and the world did not rip itself apart. They were still all here, alive and well, and gaining strength like never before. The date of course had changed to December 21, 2012, from proposed earlier dates of 1999, 2000, 2001, and May 5, 2005. The current and pull of these ideas is so strong they even have an audience in recent presidential elections (try Googling "Obama Antichrist" for an interesting read).

These were all reminiscent of things I had grown up with, digested, and eventually rejected and thought to have been divorced from. My immediate family were devout Reagan supporters, and very conservative Christians who dutifully studied the bible and Christian doctrine. We attended a Bible School which did not just preach, but taught Christian beliefs, where they were founded biblically, how to use scholarly tools for our own study such as a Concordance and reference bible, as well as which bible translations were better for reading, and which were better for in-depth study. Our particular branch of study focused on evidence for Pre-Tribulation rapture as well as the Fig Tree Prophecy concerning Israel and the Second Coming. A great deal of emphasis was put on the Apocalypse of John, as well as events during the seven-year Tribulation.

If any of you have read Revelations, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and the other prophets concerning any of this, you'll know that the Tribulation is to be a time of both great evil and suffering. It is biblically described as so horrific that current movies describing a post apocalyptic future do not even come close. I do feel that our cultural preoccupation with Apocalypse comes from these themes, being deeply ingrained in not just the minds of us as individuals, but deeply rooted in our very culture. One does not even need to have any contact with formal Christianity to identify with these same themes.

My search through these ideas led me through a strange series of connected, yet disparate subjects. Some of the connections associated with all of this are not even supported by Christian belief, however they borrow Christian ideas to lend themselves authority, as well as borrowing from other religions, science and more secular ideas of Millennialism, science and numerous prophesies.

One such theme is the idea that the earth's crust would slip around its mantle, moving the North Pole dramatically, either to the equator or even reversing the orientation to the south pole. Dramatic climate changes and natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, massive flooding and drought are mentioned as results of such a dramatic reshaping of our geography. Einstein is borrowed to lend authority to this idea as well, but I found no explanation directly as to how or what he predicted. The closest I found was a mention by him that the earth's magnetic field should have run out of energy long before 4 billion years, and that some mechanism must be keeping it intact. The topic of the eventual weakening of our magnetic field and how it causes the poles to reverse, is very fascinating, and worth a look if you get the chance. There is, however, no substantiated report anywhere that Einstein ever predicted the crust of the earth would slip around the mantle, or even that the physical poles would reverse.

Another common theme is the end of the Mayan "Long Count". In this, the Mayan Calendar only runs to 2012 (this is a derived date which makes a few assumptions, but currently is the most widely accepted one). The reasoning behind this is that the end of the Mayan Calendar's cycle with no explanation implies a cataclysmic end of the world. Many point out that it could be merely the end of this age and the beginning of a new age, much like how we view the end of our centuries as the end of one time and the beginning of a new one, as well as the markers between millennia. Most of these scenarios are accompanied by the idea of violent, turbulent and destructive change at the end of the Mayan Calendar. The Mayans had a complex year, which was the merging two different ways of marking time. Their year was comprised of 360 accounted days, and five additional days that were thought to not be part of anything. Bad luck was associated with these days, and it was said anyone being born during these five days of the year would have a very troubled and hard life. I've noticed that most purely informational articles indicate that at the end of the "Long Count", the cycle merely starts over again. This is a very simplified overview of the Mayan Calendar, but some see the end of the Mayan Long Count as another form of the end of the millennium.

Another theme that seems to be more on the fringes of this movement is the "Planet X" or Nibiru scenario. In many accounts, this huge, mysterious tenth planet in our solar system is on a very elongated ellipse that takes it several thousand years out of the inner solar system, then returns. By some accounts, our asteroid belt and earth is part of one of these return visits, where before the Earth was part of the solar system, there was another planet called "Tiamat", which was pulled from its orbit, half of it being pulverized and the other half drug closer to the sun by Nibiru's return trip into the inner solar system. The shattered portion of Tiamat became the asteroid belt, while the intact fragment settled into a stable orbit, becoming present day Earth. In some accounts, Nibiru is inhabited, and responsible for the evolution of humans from other primates. Some accounts point to the Nibiru as the biblical Nephilim, who are said to be a tyrannical race of Giants who have since gone extinct. To support this, examples of excavated skeletons of humans up to 32 feet in height, down to 8 and nine feet are mentioned. There is little historical, and no scientific evidence supplied with any of these accounts. To be fair, most accounts are from times before the age of reason, however, accounts given afterward still have no accompanying evidence. In the most recent examples, the physical evidence vanishes before any serious study can be made. It is interesting to note that Nibiru is associated with the Babylonian god, Marduk, who slew Tiamat and formed the earth from her corpse.

Where does all this come from? All of these very strange ideas seem fantastic at best. It is too easy to simply dismiss them as the delusions of the mentally ill. There are too many who believe in pieces of this, pieces of that. One may talk about cults, about people who live at the fringes of our society. Perhaps the only people who would believe in such a thing are lonely outcasts with nothing to look forward to. Yet you still have to wonder, where does it come from? How do all these ideas get tangled together, what kind of person makes these stories up? What reason do they have? How many people believe in this? On some level, the answer could be more alarming and illuminating than we want to admit.

The underlying theme for all of these seemingly wild speculations is "Millennialism". This notion is ancient, seeming to have roots in beliefs as old as Zoroastrianism. Millennialism is not a specific belief, but rather a group of beliefs with a common, underlying theme of a thousand year cycle or in a physical, earthly thousand-year reign of Christ. Cyclical beliefs are older, and commonly believe each thousand year cycle ends in tumultuous chaos and evil, until the final defeat of evil by good (Note that some forms of Zoroastrianism are not as concerned with "good vs. evil" as they are with "order vs. disorder"). Christian themes of Millennialism tend toward belief in tumultuous change preceding the Millennial Reign, while others feel this time occurs afterward. For most Christians, the topic is one of personal opinion and not as central to the Christian faith as topics as Baptism or Communion rituals. For both Zoroastrian and Christian Millennial beliefs, the Millennium is not the end of the world, but will be marked by very hard times.

Millennialism was as normal part of the early Christian church until it was ruled heresy by the Church around the 4^th century. For the most part Millennialism had been abandoned until the Protestant Reformation, where it resurfaced in three versions, mainly divided among the timing of Tribulation the Millennial reign and the Rapture. Hitler's view of the Third Reich was another form of Millennialism, as are most beliefs in the thousand-year cycle, or the coming of a Millennial "Golden Age". It is evident that none of these beliefs had a single author, but are old concepts, resurfacing with new faces and symbols, which permeate our culture on many levels, from popular media, cinema and fiction to religion, philosophy and politics. They are powerful and motivating symbols that have a proven ability to move entire populations.

Even the current global warming, or "climate change", has not been untouched. In the face of solid, scientific consensus and evidence of the impact of human caused carbon emissions, the more dire the warning, the more the west tends to look the other way. Could this basic belief at our very core be part of the cause for this? Are the warnings we have been given by the scientific community worldwide being met with this basic belief? Are we so slow and sluggish to act because ingrained in our culture is the idea that this was bound to happen, fated...even foreseen, and there is nothing we can do about it? If so, this is a dangerous assumption on our part. Many hundreds of predictions have come and past without fulfillment or proven false. Even if prophecies and Millennial ideas are actually correct, there is no guarantee that our current climate and energy crisis has anything to do with this, or that the hand of a benevolent force is going to bail us out at the last minute.

Even in political dialogue, especially now with the upcoming elections, we hear how we must first determine if global warming is even correct, and then we must determine if that impact is even human caused, and then whether or not we can actually change it, and lastly, if any of the ideas that are currently on the table are capable of producing these changes. On a very basic level, this is a mutual agreement that the current crisis is the result of divine forces and beyond our control. More and more we edge toward arguments that favor "preparation and adaptation" to the new and coming change, which may, or may not be beneficial or harmful. The scientific community has already come to a consensus, through thorough investigation and analysis of hard data. That consensus is that we are undergoing a drastic, harmful climate change, and that it is human caused. This is not philosophy or faith or religion, but science.

Perhaps a deeper truth lies in a duality of an unconscious acceptance of Millennialism, and the conscious denial that this is where the argument against acting for change is coming from. We have an incomplete understanding of how the very basic nature of our culture works. To us, consciousness and intelligence resides within the brain of the individual. Our culture encourages the abolishment of tradition and the overturning of long held cultural beliefs, but few of us understand how potently our own oral traditions hold us to the past.

Our idea that a new notion can uproot and forever abolish old beliefs may be blinding us to the reality that most of us still harbor these beliefs. We fail to realize that we act upon them in our every day lives without thought. These traditions do not need empirical proofs, scientific substance, logical reasoning or even legal evidence. They make up opaque body of knowledge, which is rarely understood, yet often invoked as "common sense". Common sense is dangerous as a final argument as it does not require evidence, but is self-reliant. Common sense is what we all accept as truth because we all accept it is truth.

Can we afford to ignore the reality of our worldwide crisis on this basis alone? Will we hold the notions of superstitious prophecies above logic and reason? Will we continue to allow our past to steer us into self-fulfilling prophecy, and plunge into another dark age? I hold that we do all have a choice, and that it is all of us that hold that choice. Each one of us can take hold of our own destiny, exercise our free will and volition, choose for ourselves, instead of allowing an ancient Apocalyptic past turn into a modern reality.