Religion
Critical Foresight: Unfinished?
King Solomon once wrote that ‘where there is no vision the people perish’. [1] It is arguable that vision is a strong and necessary foundation in the building up of society, its members and the projects of civilisation. From this viewpoint it is not unreasonable to say that the vision or future envisioned differentiates the citizen, community or society from its peers. Different visions modify emotion, intellect, politics, vocation, ethics and behaviour in different ways. To act as an ombudsperson of these processes of modification — to ensure an expansion of options rather than an artificial narrowing — is an ambitious task. It is prudent then to expect generalisations of many kinds collecting around ‘vision’ and ‘future’ where critical and reflexive thinking of the kind described in previous chapters is not utilised. For example, statements of the nature below gather much attention in newspapers, radio broadcasts and publications.
Critical Foresight: New Ways
Hugh Mackay in Turning Point: Australians Choosing Their Future (1999) writes that ‘Attitudes are the symptoms of a society’s state of mind. They reveal our responses to the things that have happened to us and, occasionally, they offer a glimpse of the kind of future we are hoping for’.[2] Using a selection of personal interviews and group discussions which form the 1994 edition of The Mackay Report as representations of these ‘attitudes’ and interests of society, Mackay explores the notion that contemporary Australians are participants within a radical form of culture shift, one that ‘amounts to the discovery of a new way of thinking about Australia’.[3] Mackay’s identification and use of contradiction within these collective beliefs and evaluations of Australian citizens develops the theme of a ‘turning point’, that the dissonance existing between our value judgements about Australian socialisation articulates an emergent cultural identification with resolution or ‘turning point’. Such a ‘turning point’ is enacted by active citizenship: ‘This is the time’, Mackay writes in an inspirational tone, ‘for setting our goals and directions, but there’s no short cut to depth and maturity. We are still, in cultural terms, in our adolescence … [But] what’s wrong with being young? Why not relish the chance to shape our future; to create this Australia in our own image?’. [4]
Critical Foresight: Alt. Styles
Through this investigation of contemporary futurestext I argue that fragmentation of Australia’s future perspective along apocalyptic fault lines is most visible during the last decade of the twentieth century. Indeed, apocalyptic subjects exercise a strong influence over Australia’s internal styles of thinking about the future towards the close of the 1990s. During this period, many religious organisations through their publishing arms provided an intellectual justification and articulated account of their apocalyptic and endist positions that usually always opposed dominant cultural values of progress. The default view is to regard their accounts as positioned on the margins of society. Yet their styles of futures-thinking — which suggested a form of apocalyptic anticipation towards the times ahead — were produced and expressed within a specific historical, cultural and symbolic conjuncture of late twentieth century globalisation, postmodernism and pre-millennial apocalyptic expectation inclusive of society.
Critical Foresight: Anodyne Futures
To make a closer study of how uses of texts about the future are implicated in the construction of futures knowledges and subjectivities, a metalanguage is needed to provide an analysis of futures-thinking beyond the ‘insightful interpretation’ phase, a theorisation that brings ‘Australian studies’, ‘text’ and ‘future’ into new relations with each other under the field of AFS.
Critical Foresight: What is Time?
During the second half of the twentieth century, it was commonly accepted that ‘we can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present’. [2] But if, as Stambaugh asserts, ‘temporality is … the occurrence, the taking place of thinking’, where thoughts and actions in time are contextualised by a taxonomy of tense, then any meaning, significance and value ascribed to the epochal moment like say the ‘turning of the millennium’ is a mere linguistic and imagined projection of our current prejudices, interests and concerns, and is in no way attached in any real sense to the advent itself. [3] In the words of metaphysical philosopher J R Lucas, ‘whereas the present and past are real, the future, as long as it is still future, is not’. [4] On this view, it may be reasonable to ask why it was fashionable during the late 1990s in Australia to gather futures around the number 2000?
Armageddon Incorporated
Certainly, in this post-enlightenment age, the average affluent urbanised individual is more inclined to stigmatise forms of thinking that seem religious or which are not easily tabulated or appreciated in a predictive or instrumentalist way. Often, this takes the form of quantifiable (bean-counting) types of knowledge speaking loudly over the top of qualitative (personal) belief systems and not necessarily in a respectable manner. I’m reminded of a recent exchange between renowned evolutionist Richard Dawkins and an American student who asked simply, ‘What if you’re wrong?’ A fair enough question in my view — I mean, why can’t we question the findings of researchers no matter how much popular credos they have and for that fact question our own assumptions in a self-reflexive manner — but one that was not answered with equal fairness. (This is an issue I’ll take up in another later posting about the popularisation of ridicule as a normal response to non-secular belief systems — something that I like to call religious phobic fascism).
Voices from the End of the World
It is the late 1980s, a slightly more innocent time — if it can be thought of in that way — before Australian airports became obsessed with ethnicised ‘stranger danger’. A man named ‘George’, in his late forties, is distributing throughout Brisbane’s international airport a poor photostatted, slightly crumpled, typed a4-sized leaflet labelled simply Antichrist. With dramatic zeal and oratory passion, George proclaims to passersby that every ‘reasonable person’, duly perplexed at the world’s tribulations, should exhort themselves with full knowledge of the conspiratorial ‘realities’ exposed by his research. ‘The times are showing’, he announces, reading from his tract, that ‘the antichrist is coming soon. Along with the antichrist will come the 666 system’. These are ripe conditions, George maintains, for the ‘devil-possessed’ antichrist to reveal himself to the world and ‘turn us into evil’. He warns, ‘the antichrist, my fellow brother and sister of god, is a person who in a few years will be in power as a world leader. The antichrist will wipe out and destroy all people who are associated with Christianity. This will be true in a few years from now’.
Scalping the Apocalypse Ticket
If the world was to end at the turn of the millennium, as some did believe, many took comfort that Australia was seen as the best place to be during the outworking of an apocalyptic scenario. One Australian doomsday enthusiast, a regular contributor to the Canadian-based bible prophecy discussion list created in 1996, extended a warm invitation in late 1999 to all Christians worldwide who at the time perceived something ominous on the Y2K horizon: ‘I’m not saying Australia will completely escape whatever disasters befall us on or after 1 January 2000, but you will all be somewhat safer here from Christian persecution — we have plenty of “bush” to hide in’.
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