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Preface

THE DOOMSDAY VIEW OF THE WORLD

THE IDEA THAT MAN is born into sin is as old as the story of Adam and Eve. It spawns the doomsday cults and the belief that only through repentance and self-denial can man aspire to redemption and save the world. It is manifest in the abstinence of Lent, the fasting of Yom Kippur and Ramadan and the various New Age groups that deny themselves material pleasures and seek solace and forgiveness by adopting a primitive lifestyle that they claim is compatible with nature. This has given rise to the ‘back-to-nature cults’ that predict that man’s tampering with nature will lead to the end of the world as we know it. In the early days it spawned the Luddite movement and opposition to mechanisation of transport and the telephone. Today it sees industrialisation, modern farming methods, genetically modified crops, scientific medicine, nuclear power and the internal-combustion engine as heralding the end of civilisation.

Fortunately, all the end-of-the-world cults have been proved wrong, but, undeterred by this abysmal record, they continue to echo a deep-seated, inherent fear that, unless man repents and changes his way of life, he will be instrumental in destroying his world.

The aesthete, the hermit and the back-to-nature movement all reflect this mindset. Today, politicians and persuasive pressure groups play on this same basic fear. They scare us with tales of an inevitable catastrophic effect of global warming, which they blame on the carbon dioxide (CO₂) we produce; they play on a fear that an epidemic of obesity, caused by overeating, will kill our children before they reach a mature age; they claim that our indulgent lifestyle is consuming Earth’s precious resources, that pesticides will kill off life in our oceans, that chemicals in food will poison us all and that invisible rays from nuclear power stations, overhead electric cables or mobile phones will kill us with cancer. They are today’s prophets of doom using modern media methods to disseminate fear so as to propagate their belief that the end of the world is nigh. This book examines the evidence for and against some of their apocalyptical predictions.