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PDF FormatThe belief that global disaster is at hand is not new. In one form or another, it has been with us since the beginnings of human civilization. Pagan cultures from Mesopotamia to the Aztecs were always alert to the possibility of imminent cataclysm, while Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all posit a coming day of divine judgment. There is, however, a profound difference between the end-times predictions of our forebears and the apocalyptic prophecies of today. In the past, visions of the end of the world often contained a strong measure of hope alongside the requisite fear and trembling. In the great monotheistic religions, the end of days was always to be followed by divine redemption, in which evil would be conquered, celestial justice would be rendered, and man would return to an Edenic existence, either on a utopian Earth (as in Judaism) or in the kingdom of heaven (as in Islam and Christianity).
This mixture of fear and hope survived well into the age of secular modernity. The social and economic upheavals of the Industrial Revolution were tempered by the belief that scientific progress would lead to a better world for all; World War I was to be “the war to end all wars;” the abyss of the Holocaust was followed by what many saw as the redemptive act of re-founding the Jewish state; and even the threat of nuclear annihilation failed to snuff out collective faith in human advancement. It is worth remembering that at the very moment the world came closest to nuclear war, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, America was hurtling past the Soviets in the space race and would have a man on the moon in less than a decade.
Since then, the general mood has changed considerably. Humanity appears to have, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once put it, “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” And nowhere have the symptoms of this collective ennui become more apparent than in our attitude toward technology. Certainly, the scope and pace of technological advancement has always had its critics and opponents, from the Luddites and Mary Shelley to modern eco-terrorists and technophobes. But until recently, the belief that science and technology had, at the very least, the potential to lift mankind to new heights managed to retain its grip upon the spirit of the age. Now, however, technology seems to be used mostly as, at best, a means of amusement, convenience, and pleasure. At worst, it is thought of as an instrument of dehumanization and destruction. Humanity, having pronounced the death of God, is now busy pronouncing the death of the Machine.
Indeed, the moon landings—the pinnacle of human technological progress—now seem to have been more of an end than a beginning. Despite the rapturous enthusiasm that greeted the first mission, later trips to the moon were met, for the most part, with boredom. The only exception was the Apollo 13 accident, which, of course, had the attraction of being a disaster. Since then, NASA’s flagship program has been the Space Shuttle, which, while having its scientific virtues, is essentially a glorified reusable satellite. Forty years after Neil Armstrong, humanity remains resolutely trapped in low Earth orbit.
This became painfully apparent when former president George W. Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration in 2004. The ambitious plan was not met with rapturous enthusiasm or fear and contempt. For the most part, the reaction was one of total indifference. Real excitement was reserved for faster Internet connections, more complex and realistic video games, and more elaborate cellular phones. It was, perhaps, fitting that during the same week the swine flu outbreak monopolized the headlines, NASA quietly revealed that it was scrapping its plans for a permanent lunar base. The primary reason for doing so was, of course, budgetary constraints. And indeed, NASA’s $17.6 billion budget for 2008 falls well short of the $21.33 billion spent on video games during the same year in North America alone.
While technology has almost ceased to be regarded as a means of engineering a better future for mankind, it has certainly not lost its capacity to terrify us. Scientific and medical breakthroughs that would once have inspired the human imagination are now routinely met with suspicion and even outright, unreasoning terror. A striking case of this occurred with the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a massive particle accelerator built on the Swiss-French border. The scientific community greeted the event with unreserved enthusiasm. Indeed, many physicists claimed that the LHC would lead to major scientific breakthroughs that might grant them unprecedented insight into the origins of the cosmos. As the world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking explained,
The LHC will increase the energy at which we can study particle interactions by a factor of four. According to present thinking, this should be enough to discover the Higgs particle, the particle that gives mass to all the other particles…. Their existence would be a key confirmation of string theory, and they could make up the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together. Whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe.
A great many people, however, were convinced—or convinced themselves—that the LHC would, upon ignition, destroy the Earth. MSNBC correspondent Alan Boyle reported “fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.” One opponent referred to the device as “a cosmological bomb billions of times more powerful than the atomic bomb.” The assurances of noted physicists that the LHC was perfectly safe did little to assuage the sense of dread, which spread through the media and quickly took on a life of its own.
It is comforting, perhaps, to simply write this off as mere technophobia, but it actually reflects a broad social phenomenon. Apocalyptic fear of technology has even been enacted into normative law—most notably by the European Union—in the form of the “precautionary principle,” which holds that if a given technology has the potential to cause catastrophic harm, it may be prohibited even in the absence of scientific consensus on the issue. Needless to say, the flaw in such a principle should be readily apparent to any thinking person: It is both a blank check and a self-fulfilling prophecy, because almost any technology has at least the potential to cause or contribute to possible catastrophe. The seemingly innocuous electric toothbrush, for instance, is made of plastic, which is not biodegradable; and it’s powered either by batteries, which may leak and cause harmful pollution, or by electric power, which consumes fossil fuels and contributes to global warming. One is forced to conclude from this that the precautionary principle is not so much a legal or scientific principle, but rather a manifestation of collective panic.
This is not simply a case of the foolishness of crowds. To believe that technology may have its dark side requires little more than healthy skepticism. To believe that a physics experiment is going to destroy the Earth, however, requires exactly the opposite. It requires an active suppression of the critical faculties, a suspension of disbelief so profound that it can only be described as willful. So much so that one is forced to conclude that something about humanity today is not only prone to catastrophic thinking, but actually attracted to it.
