THE UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN’S MAIN CAMPUS IS SITUATED ON TREATY 6 TERRITORY AND THE HOMELAND OF THE MÉTIS.
THE UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN’S MAIN CAMPUS IS SITUATED ON TREATY 6 TERRITORY AND THE HOMELAND OF THE MÉTIS.
AMANDA SHENDRUK
The Fulcrum (University of Ottawa)
OTTAWA (CUP) — When he was 16 years old, Dylan Aucoin was worried about the end of the world.
In particular, the high school student from Nova Scotia feared the ill-defined disaster predicted to befall humanity on Dec. 21, 2012. It is on this day that the Mayan calendar is reported to end, triggering an Earth-altering, cataclysmic event. Or so some believe.
The predictions often spell the end of humanity — super volcanoes, tidal waves, deadly solar flares, the collision of the Earth with a mysterious Planet X — while others suggest events of a more transformative nature, like a global consciousness shift.
“I lacked critical-thinking skills completely,” said Aucoin, who is now 20 and a filmmaker. “I was a 16-year-old, impressionable, small-town Canadian kid. My critical-thinking faculties had not been harnessed whatsoever, so of course I grew a little bit concerned about it.”
The 2012 phenomenon and its accompanying apocalyptic forecasts have been completely rejected by mainstream academia.
“The entire movement stems from the idea that the Mayans used millenniums-old calendar technology to predict something, usually the end of the world, centuries into the future,” explained Pat Roach, one of the founders of the Ottawa Skeptics Society in an email. “There is no scientific basis for such a belief. Dec. 21, 2012 is simply the end of a cycle for the Mayan calendar — not unlike Dec. 31 on the Gregorian calendar.”
Aucoin’s concern led him to contact Anthony Aveni, a professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University in New York. The two exchanged correspondence for many years, during which they read and dissected 2012 books, texts, Internet sites and movies.
“There’s such a proliferation of these things on Google,” explained Aucoin of the 2012 prophecies. “You know, when you’re 16 years old you immediately think anything that’s on Wikipedia is true.”
The relationship eventually inspired Aveni to write a book, and in 2009 he published the myth-dispelling The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012.
For Aucoin, fear of 2012 and doomsday prophecies sparked academic friendships he still holds dear today. For many, however, these apocalyptic predictions inspire fear and discomfort. But why do so many people subscribe so strongly to 2012 doomsday scenarios and the end of the world in general?
“The human desire to live in a meaningful space — to live in a world that has meaning and purpose to it — is incredibly strong, and stronger than any kind of push to necessarily always use reason or acquire the best of the evidence for things,” explained Lorne Dawson, a professor in the department of sociology and legal studies at the University of Waterloo. In a world filled with risk and uncertainty, people will look for stability wherever it can be found.
“These prophecies come along and they just seem to suggest to people that, contrary to what we may initially think, there really is a deeper order and pattern to things,” said Dawson. “Even though we live in a more advanced, stable, healthier society and we have more education than past generations, the irony is that heightened awareness, knowledge and heightened access to science and technology, it actually increases in many respects our awareness of how easy everything could go to hell in short order.”
Shelley Rabinovitch, a religious studies professor at the University of Ottawa, says many of her students are curious about 2012 and will often approach her to discuss the prophecies.
“I think it’s probably one of the most deep-seated human fears that something entirely out of our control will happen and injure or kill us and/or the people we love ”¦ it’s one of the oldest fears humanity has,” explained Rabinovitch, who emphasizes that people are just looking for “control over an uncontrollable universe.”
“Human beings hate a random universe. We entirely hate it,” she said.
Through his extensive reading and his correspondences with Aveni, the former 2012 “believer” Aucoin has developed ideas of his own as to why society is so captivated by doomsday scenarios.
“I think it’s laziness, because when you hear something as extreme as a doomsday scenario ”¦ it sounds cool, it sounds big, it sounds dramatic, and it’s so much easier to latch on to something like that than it is to actually pick up a book and read the actual scientific explanation as to why these things happen.
“Everyday life can be very boring for some people and they want to get themselves closer to science fiction or action-adventure, but I think it’s very sad to see this ignorance towards archeology, anthropology and pure science because the real science, real anthropology [and] the real archeology [are] so much more interesting than any science fiction scenario I can think of.”
The Internet and social media have played a significant role in the proliferation of the ideas and prophecies of the 2012 movement.
“It is absolutely like the Wild West out there,” said Rabinovitch of the unregulated information on the Internet and referring to the mind-boggling number of 2012 doomsday websites. Unfortunately, she explains, society is continually blurring the line between information and entertainment.
“Most people aren’t intelligent enough or concerned enough about the reality to actually go research it. More people than not are passive consumers of information and entertainment.”
And there’s no doubt that doomsday scenarios and apocalyptic prophecies are incredibly captivating.
“It’s fun, it’s enjoyable, it gives titillation and sensation to your life,” said Dawson.
“We do like going to scary movies. We do like to be scared, horrified and frightened, and again find it meaningful. [We] find the intense sensation is worth the price of actually experiencing the negative elements of it.”
Dawson noted that mass media are guilty of proliferating many of the false beliefs surrounding 2012 in the pursuit of entertainment and competition.
“There is a long-standing tendency for the media to sensationalize things and to look for these kinds of stories.”
But the 2012 movement is only one of many apocalyptic prophecies.
“Once you start to become attuned to it, you find these kinds of”¦ doomsday prophecies everywhere. Absolutely everywhere,” said Dawson, who noted that he has accumulated over 75 academic historical and sociological case studies of groups that have made apocalyptic predictions.
If there are so many prophecies out there, why are the 2012 prophecies so captivating and appealing to society?
“I think the Mayan 2012 thing may be the first kind of non-Christian apocalyptic prophecy to catch on, and it’s kind of an indicator that people have expanded their horizons,” said Dawson, noting that a significant segment of the population has drifted away from religion, but is not entirely secularized. This “quest culture,” as he calls it, is looking to explore new ways of thinking about, understanding and experiencing the world.
“We live in more plural, globalistic societies now that are post-Christian, and yet people still want the kind of meaning they used to get [from their Christian upbringing]. In a way, it’s our first global prophecy, and the Mayans are just sufficiently intriguing, obscure and mysterious to feed it all.”
Rabinovitch points out that the 2012 movement hasn’t necessarily received more attention than others — it’s just the most current prophecy. Remember Y2K?
“We forget how terrified people were [in 1999] that airplanes were going to fall out of the sky, anything that was run with a computer was going to stop working”¦ people were building underground bunkers to hide through Jan. 1, 2000,” said Rabinovitch.
And when nothing happens on Dec. 21, 2012? Dawson notes that belief in the 2012 prophecies is not limited to a tightly organized group; it’s a diffuse movement. In fact, he says, for many people it’s a business. It’s mostly the authors and the survival supply websites that will be affected when the world doesn’t end.
“What will happen is that the failure of the 2012 prophecy will barely even be noticed,” said Dawson, who references studies that have been done with UFO enthusiasts who react the same way when a planned sighting doesn’t pan out.
“It will be a hiccup and then the people who are into 2012 will just drop it as quickly as they picked it up, but they will turn their attention immediately to the next thing.
“Which means if you’re one of the guys who writes those books you should be looking for the next thing to market!”
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image: viitamaki
