The people liked the prospect of the end of the world

The people liked the prospect of the end of the world because it would be a spectacle, something to relieve the fearful monotony of their lives. Funerals and weddings were commonplace, and nothing could have been so interesting to them as the coming of the end of the world ... unless it had been a first-class circus.

Edward Eggleston

The apocalyptic vision to which we subscribe has a superficial scientific gloss -- "climate change" -- but at bottom, both visions prescribe economic suicide, and both promise that self-sacrifice will bring about a golden age.  In the case of the Xhosa, that golden age was the time before the British invaded.  In our own, to quote famed environmentalist David Brower (director of the Sierra Club and then of Friends of the Earth), it's "back there about a century when, at the start of the Industrial Revolution we began applying energy in vast amounts to tools with which we began tearing the environment apart."

Landes describes those who initiate and build support for these movements as roosters, for they crow an exciting new message, and their opponents as owls, those counseling caution and skepticism.  To drown out the warning owls, roosters must rally elites to their cause.  That is how the global warming movement made its inroads: with governments and a small cadre of activists taking the lead.  Once the authorities pronounce themselves in favor of the prophecy and it "pays" to believe, many more ordinary people will join in.  In the case of the Xhosa, the initial rooster was a simple orphan girl.  The key to the triumph of her vision was her uncle, a well-known preacher and diviner who preached her message and convinced the chiefs -- including the chief of chiefs, named Sarhili.

Apocalyptic movements are urgent.  It's now or never.  If action is not taken quickly, it will be too late.  Xhosa believers set about destroying their cattle and grain immediately.  United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon (the global warming apocalypse owes more to the U.N. than to any other single institution) told the Global Environmental Forum in 2009, "We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet."  More generously, Prince Charles in March 2009 gave us "100 months to alter our behavior before we risk catastrophic climate change and the unimaginable horror that this would bring."

However, as Landes points out, just because the apocalypse is wrong does not mean that its effects are not profound.  In the case of the Xhosa, the beneficiaries of the false apocalypse were the British -- the very people the Xhosa thought they were expelling through their sacrifice took over the lands the Xhosa could no longer cultivate.  China, which is heavily investing in the energy we spurn, is the most probable beneficiary of our folly.

Global warming and national suicide

Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.

Heinrich Heine