A philosophy professor from New Zealand recalls the Y2K apocalypticism at the dawn of the last decade:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/opinion/01dutton.html "'The Y2K Nightmare' caught the sensationalist tone, claiming that 'folly, greed and denial' had 'muffled two decades of warnings from technology experts.'" "Denial" - how useful that word is for the faux rationalists! ... "KNOWING our computers is difficult enough. Harder still is to know ourselves, including our inner demons. From today's perspective, the Y2K fiasco seems to be less about technology than about a morbid fascination with end-of-the-world scenarios. This ought to strike us as strange." ... "Apocalyptic scenarios are a diversion from real problems poverty, terrorism, broken financial systems needing intelligent attention. Even something as down-to-earth as the swine-flu scare has seemed at moments to be less about testing our health care system and its emergency readiness than about the fate of a diseased civilization drowning in its own fluids. We wallow in the idea that one day everything might change in, as St. Paul put it, the "twinkling of an eye" that a calamity might prove to be the longed- for transformation. But turning practical problems into cosmic cataclysms takes us further away from actual solutions. This applies, in my view, to the towering seas, storms, droughts and mass extinctions of popular climate catastrophism. Such entertaining visions owe less to scientific climatology than to eschatology, and that familiar sense that modernity and its wasteful comforts are bringing us closer to a biblical day of judgment. As that headline put it for Y2K, predictions of the end of the world are often intertwined with condemnations of human "folly, greed and denial." Repent and recycle!"
