Eschatology & 2012

Over the weekend, as a birthday night out with my wife (on Friday the 13th, no less), I caught the newly minted blockbuster film "2012."

The movie was nothing if not gripping. The special effects were uncanny on the big screen. And the plotline was extremely accessible. In brief, we were blown away. Unlike most cheesy thrillers, we left the theater with much on our minds.

I didn't realize, until today, how typical our reaction was.

According to Reuters, 2012 netted Columbia Pictures a handsome $225 million,world-wide profit in its first weekend out.

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Having seen the film, and having had my mind imbued with nearly a semester's worth of globalization and 'atrocities', it was difficult not to have a pedantic reaction, and look for lessons in the genius of Roland Emmerich

I won't give away any key details, but a major theme of the movie deals with the entitlement of survival, and the decisions implicit in every allocation of resources that society makes.

Simply put, how does a group of people decide collectively or severally who has the right to live? And along with this, how should one respond to one's emminent destruction?

Harkening back to my days as a religion major at Dartmouth, it struck me that the questions above have their origins in the bygone philosophy and theology of eschatology - the study of the end of time.

Today, of course, the field is really more the pet interest of seminarians than your rank-in-file scientist. Yet, there is something fairly universal about the study as borne out in the world-wide fascination surrounding this film.

Given the reaction, I think it fair to conclude that as a species, we humans are inexorably perplexed by the limits of our own mortailty. We are fascinated about the ways in which our terrestrial reality might just fall apart. Cue REM's 'It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine).'

When taken from this perspective, the movie is really just the latest iteration of a practice that has occured at various times, and with varied prevalence since the dawn of time. After all, nearly every civilization has some thesis regarding the end of the world. Columbia Pictures was just more deft at communicating its tale to the masses.

And so the big questions remain.

Knowing, as we must, that our existence is finite, how then do we navigate the arduous vicissitudes of life? When the ledger is settled, assuming it is, what makes for a life well-lived? And most importantly, how does one find meaning in a world that could well be destroyed at any moment?

See the movie - but don't expect answers to any of the above.


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