The End Is Nigh

Today at the library I stumbled, almost literally, on a book called 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse, by Matthew Restall and Amara Solari (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).  The authors are "specialists in Maya culture and colonial Mexican history," according to the dust jacket, and it will be interesting to see what they have to say about the Mayan material.

Unfortunately, they get off to a shaky start.

Millenarianism is the belief that an impending change will dramatically change society; millenialism expects such transformations to happen every thousand years; chiliasm (from the Greek chilia, "a thousand") is the specifically Christian form of these beliefs, rooted in the biblical Book of Revelation; the destructive, end-of-world (or eschatological) manifestation of this transformation is often called the Apocalypse ... They are all, significantly, rooted in Western -- not Mayan -- languages [3-4].

I'm slightly awed by the authors' ability to cram so much misinformation into a brief paragraph.  (And they are, they report in the Introduction, going to be teaching a course on this material at Penn State in the fall of 2012.)  But then they don't claim to be experts in the Bible, or even in "Western" history.

Like chiliasm, millenarianism and millennialism both come from words meaning "a thousand," or rather "a thousand years."  They're associated with the claim in the biblical Revelation that Christ and the saints will, after defeating the forces of Evil, rule on earth for a thousand years.  The belief that the Second Coming would occur in a year divisible by 1000 is a spin-off from this, which has been elaborated into a variety of beliefs over time, but it's not biblical.  The New Testament consistently promises that Jesus will return within the lifetime of some of his first followers.  The belief that the end of this wicked age and the coming of God's kingdom on Earth is imminent runs through almost all of the New Testament, but it's "rooted" in the Book of Daniel, in the Hebrew Bible (aka "The Old Testament"), and in some other ancient but non-biblical books like the Book of Enoch.  The belief in a cataclysmic intervention by Yahweh that would change the world occurs in various forms in several of the Hebrew prophets.  As such it turns up several times, in Noah's flood and the Exodus for example; but also in Isaiah 63's imagery of Yahweh treading the winepress of the nations and soaking his garment in their blood.  (This passage is the basis for "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," Julia Ward Howe's celebration of Lincoln's Civil War bloodbath.)

Eschatology refers not to "the destructive, end-of-world ... manifestation" but to any doctrine related to the end of the world.  However, "end" here doesn't mean end as in terminus; it means the goal, or aim, toward which history is headed.  (Think of the everyday distinction between "means" and "ends.")  [CORRECTION: Of course the term I didn't look up was the one I got wrong: eschatology means "the study of the last things," and can deal not only with the Last Judgment but with death, Heaven and Hell.  Which still means that Restall and Solari have it wrong.]  Ironically, biblical scholars tend to split off eschatology as the respectable older brother of apocalyptic, with its low-class tendency to specify an exact date for the Second Coming and its trashy sensational imagery.  Apocalypse, though, means "revelation": the biblical Book of Revelation is also known as the Apocalypse of Saint John.  Over time, as with millennial, the word "apocalypse" spread out from its original meaning and came to be associated with the kinds of cataclysmic events the book describes -- the four horsemen, plagues, natural disasters, and blood in the streets to the height of the horses' bridles -- to the point that it can be used to refer to almost any major disaster and its aftermath.  So Restall and Solari have reversed the associations of eschatology and apocalypse here.

It's also worth pointing out that Christianity, Judaism, and apocalyptic literature are not really "Western" phenomena: they originated in the Middle East and Asia Minor.  While Patmos, where John the seer had his revelation, is a Greek island, most scholars agree that he was a refugee from the Asian mainland.  Christianity became a "Western" religion by historical accident.  And according to Wikipedia, "Millenarianism is a concept or theme that exists in many cultures and religions. Millennialism is a specific type of millenarianism as it applies to Christianity" -- that is, beliefs about thousand year ages and cycles are not specifically Western.  I admit that the fascination with the Mayan calendar and the year 2012 are related to contemporary American forms of "apocalyptic" belief, and it's worth stressing that against hucksters who claim to be drawing on Native American wisdom.

Like I said, that's a lot of misinformation for one brief paragraph.  It doesn't even seem that the authors even consulted a dictionary as they defined their terms; apparently they just winged it.  I hope they're more careful in their handling of Maya history, language, and culture.

The "This Is So Gay" Agenda for 2012

I chose my post on Florence Howe's memoir A Life in Motion for listing in Batocchio's roundup, but there were several other posts I considered before I decided on that one. Before I write about them, though, I realized that in an agenda I should be laying out what lies ahead, so let me mention a couple of projects I'm hoping to get to this year after long procrastination. In no particular order:

I want to write a critique of Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Eerdmans, 2006). I've seen this book mentioned several times as a decisive refutation of the prevailing scholarly belief that eyewitnesses -- Jesus' original disciples and their contemporaries -- played no role in the writing of the New Testament gospels. Because Bauckham is a serious, competent scholar, I knew his arguments would have to be taken seriously, so I read his book. I don't think he made his case, but I also realized that his claims were much more modest than the people who cited him seemed to think. He doesn't think that all four canonical gospels were written by eyewitnesses, for example. At most he seems to be arguing that some of the material in the gospels came from eyewitnesses, and most of his more skeptical colleagues would admit that much. But as one of them wrote several decades ago, the hard part is telling which material in the gospels is authentic eyewitness testimony and which isn't. Since the conservative scholars and laymen who embraced Jesus and the Eyewitnesses made it sound as though Bauckham had proven much more, and that modern critical scholarship would now come tumbling down like the walls of Jericho, I wanted to explain why this wasn't so. It'll probably take more than one post to say what I want to say about it, so I've been putting it off. This year I'll try to get to it.

Another subject I've had in mind for a long time -- since before I began writing this blog, in fact -- is that of love and affection between people of the same sex, especially but not only between men, and its relation to eroticism and romance between people of the same sex. I've written about this before, more than once, but I still have a lot to say about it, so saying it is another resolution for the coming year.

The third project I've been putting off is also one I've touched on before: the matter of "gender" and "race," specifically where East Asia is concerned. A recent article at Salon about the Filipino Manny Pacquaio alerted me that the issue wasn't dead, it just had passed from my radar for a while. A related hot issue I wanted to write about was sexual relations between East Asian men and Caucasian men; around a decade ago there was a big flurry of writing about the Rice Queen, much of it racist and/or homophobic, and I wrote quite a lot about without finishing it. It appears that the Rice Queen is no longer the hot topic he was a few years ago, but the issues involved haven't died away entirely, so I might as well post that material here. I also have an article on homoeroticism in Korean cinema that I'm quite proud of. I should do something with before it goes completely out of date; maybe, as I have with some other pieces, I'll just post it here. But first I should try to find another home for it.

Finally, I've been meaning to write for several months about G. B. Edwards' strange novel The Book of Ebenezer Le Page. As you'll see if I finally do the job, it's an appropriate subject.

And now I'll return to the posts from 2011 that I feel best about in roughly chronological order. Aside from my post on Florence Howe (which Howe herself liked, and wrote me to praise), I'd single out "Conspiracies For You and Me," about conspiracy theories of course, which I tried to put into historical context.

I've written several times about what you might call the Grammar Wars, sparked by a Salon essay lamenting Our Youth's inability to handle English grammar, spelling, and punctuation. The first was "Our Miss Brooks", followed by "Taught to the Tune of a Hickory Stick," and soon after by "Comma Comma Comma Comma Come On ..." At around the same time a friend of mine joined the chorus of loud lament for the Oxford Comma; I preferred not to.

In July I stumbled on an article from Family Circle in which a mom griped because Kids These Days aren't learning to suffer the consequences for not finishing projects. It's an evergreen complaint, of course, which could have been (and has been) written at any time in the past 150 years, but I was appalled by the writer's meanspiritedness, so I explained at length why her attitude of punitiveness-for-its-own-sake was wrongheaded.

Also in July I wrote a post on American Manhood, baffled by what still look to me like inexplicably retrograde and simply wrong-headed sentiments on the subject by a fellow blogger.

I wrote two long posts after reading Manning Marable's controversial biography of Malcolm X. The first was on the relation of political violence to Malcolm's career, and the second was on the question of separatism. I think they both turned out very well.

I have several semi-finalists from October. It was a good time for writing about the American Spring, and I wrote about attacks on Occupy Wall Street from the Right. As with that Family Circle article on kids, I noticed that many of the critics of OWS were obsessed with swatting at the Hippies In Their Minds rather than anything the movement was actually doing. As Campaign 2012 continued to heat up, I wrote about the growing panic in the Obama machine, trying to keep on-message while the country made it clear that another message was needed.

Also in October, some science fans, maybe even scientists, issued a challenge to believe in extra-terrestrial life, or else be called a big stupid. I wrote another post on the Religion of Science. Then I got into an argument about the atheist fantasy writer Terry Pratchett and his views on relikgion, which led me to write "What Do You Do With a Drunken Atheist?"

At about the same time I reread Marge Piercy's great leftist, feminist, proto-cyberpunk novel from the 1970s, Woman on the Edge of Time, and spent some time explaining why I think it's as radical and relevant as ever.

During the year I had a lot to say about GLBTQ issues, as always. I quibbled with Dan Savage's advice to a closeted college freshman, and more seriously with the obsession he shares with so many of our people -- inexplicably, to me -- that Being Gay Is Not a Choice. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I think it's a distraction, and really is just one more way we have let bigots set the terms of engagement. Though I wrote less than in past years about same-sex marriage, I did some griping about the propaganda term "marriage equality," and the serious questions it's meant to obscure.

And that sums it up for me now, though I could probably have gone on a bit more; and I will, I'm sure, in the next twelve months. Happy New Year, and fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen: 2012 promises to be a bumpy ride.