(no subject)

[sen_no_ongaku]

I was thinking about this post on my occasional predilection for viewing the world in survivalist terms, and I'm curious as to whether considering the possibility of, and half-seriously preparing for, a brutal dystopian post-apocalypse world is particular to the Atomic generation or if it's been around for longer. Put another way, for how long has the ability to conceive of living to see humanity's works destroyed -- and having to cope with its aftermath -- been relatively common? Is it as common as I seem to assume it is?

I'm not really talking about religious eschatonology*, the intervention of some supernatural force to effect some sort of ontological world-changing event, although modern-day expectations of such a disintegration might simply be a new way of expressing those impulses. I'm talking the collapse of the nation-state down to the city-state level, maybe even lower, as the result of human action.

Eh?
___

*which, as I understand, was fairly common in Western culture until the discovery of geological time around the 18th century rendered the long-standing belief that Second Coming was imminent markedly (thought not completely) less compelling.

Comments

From Balsamic Dragon

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's sort of unique to our era. However, before that there were a lot of "stranded on an island with no civilization" stories which had similar themes.

[2h2o.livejournal.com]

I agree with Balsamic that it's unique to our era. First, most of human history has been spent at or just barely above the city-state level. Second, the sorts of world-changing events that survivalists worry about either were not possible or were viewed as acts of God that could not be predicted or avoided (and might even be "good"). Third, only in the modern era have individuals had the means (both in terms of wealth and in terms of freedom to act independently) to prepare for such an event.

Close...

[(Anonymous)]

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=eschatology (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=eschatology)

The field of eschatology is very much alive, it's simply that the definition of apocalyptic has gone from the Catholic "end of world and timespace as we know it" type of apocalyptic thought back to the original post-Messianic definition of apocalyptic, which is more interested in the resolution of all things spiritually (typically at the time of a person's corporeal death) than in a particular moment in time at which all things will be resolved simultaneously for all people.

In any case, while the concepts are not dismissed, the idea of the Revelatory judgment day is somewhat less important in modern eschatology than it has been in the past, and the field is more rich than either the definition you are using (a very common one), or the dictionary.com entry, suggests.

[silvarwyrm.livejournal.com]

Hrm, brutal dystopian post-apocalypses (apocalypsi?) are hard to prepare for without your own self-contained farming setup. I vote that you settle for assembling a hurricane/blackout/blizzard/earthquake emergency kit. :P