Article: 11291 of fa.future-culture Path: nntp.uio.no!ifi.uio.no!internet-mailinglist From: Kristina Lerman Newsgroups: fa.future-culture Subject: Flash: Cultists' suicide a case of millenial fever? Date: 6 Oct 1994 20:25:33 +0100 Organization: Internet mailing list Lines: 71 Message-ID: <371ivd$cit@ifi.uio.no> Reply-To: Future Culture NNTP-Posting-Host: ifi.uio.no Return-Path: Original-Date: Thu, 6 Oct 1994 11:12:23 -0700 Comments: To: futurec@madhatter.ucsb.edu To: Multiple recipients of list FUTUREC Original-Message-ID: <"alfie.uib..260:06.09.94.19.25.10"@uib.no> Yesterday's mass suicide by the cultists in Switzerland and Canada has struck a chord in me.I don't want to be sensationalist and connect it to the millenial fever (expectation of something spectacular, be it Apocalypse or Revelation happening in a few years), but there is something in that connection to feed the imagination. While every generation has a sense of impending doom, fed by doomsayers, who are always much more in vogue than the optimists, and there is a steady trickle of mass suicides, I think we are likely to see many more in the coming years. There is something about the three fat zeros that fills people with dread. The dead people belonged to the cult started by a Belgian-born doctor who later had to flee Canada to Switzerland b/c his followers tried to buy automatic weapons with silencers (arming is another alarming trait of cultists). His modern version of the Apocalypse was a huge environmental catastrophe. The 2 groups he started were called Temple of the Sun and The Rose and The Cross. That probably makes you think of the Templars and the Rosicrucians, the medieval occult groups who, among other things, were preoccupied with the symbolism of numbers. In the year 1000 people all over Europe ran about expecting the Second Coming. The year 2000 promises no less spectacular social fireworks. The fringe occult groups might increase their activity, but I hope millenial fever affects all social strata. If history is any guide, the last fin-de-siecle was a period of great cultural ferment. It was characterized by revolutions in all spheres of thinking due to the contributions of Marx, Darwin, Freud, quantum physicists. Of course, these revolutions were started long before the magical 2 zeros appeared on the calendar and continued well afterwards, but it was a decade before and a decade after that they were filtering into popular consciousness and permanently changing the way we view ourselves and the world. Those times were also characterized by intellectual cross-fertilization: in Vienna, writers like Hugo von Hoffmanstahl were popularizing Freud's views of human nature, and attending lectures by physicist/philosopher Ernest Mach, who deeply affected Einstein's thinking. He, in turn, helped to lay the foundation of quantum mechanics (incidentally, a much more profound revision of thinking with far-reaching cultural implications than the theory of relativity). Many of the fashionable intelligentsia were also ardent Marxists. Although Marx's and Engel's theory was laid down about 50 years before, the heavy industrialization of the late 1800's made it all the more urgent. Those were exciting times to live in. I want to expect at least as much from the coming fin-de-siecle. I am constantly looking around for signs of "intellectual ferment." Here are some of the things I see and don't see going on. On the political front, the civil rights, feminist and environmental movements have lost steam after making some gains. Actually, worse than that. The idealogy that demonizes these movements is much stronger in pop culture than the movements themselves. More ominously, I fear that nationalism will define political interactions in the years to come. (Hmm, perhaps the world _is_ coming to an end). So, I don't see anything exciting and sweeping happening politically. On the brighter side, there have been developments in science that have already revolutionized the way scientists think, like chaos theory, and the science of complexity and emergent phenomena, promises to have a profound intellectual effect. The one area where society has made a huge leap in perception and thinking is computer communication and network technologies. I don't have to preach the members of this list about that. Still, I am on a lookout for more cultural changes. Surely the feeling that something will happen is a self-fulfilling prophesy. And that feeling is in the air. I know people who feel that the world is changing. Best-seller lists feature more and more titles on spiritual themes. It is hard to have futurevision, but I would like to hear what developments others on this list anticipate will have huge social impacts. Kristina Article: 11303 of fa.future-culture Path: nntp.uio.no!ifi.uio.no!internet-mailinglist From: Alan Sondheim Newsgroups: fa.future-culture Subject: Re: Flash: Cultists' suicide a case of millenial fever? Date: 6 Oct 1994 23:23:24 +0100 Organization: Internet mailing list Lines: 62 Message-ID: <371tcs$ik6@ifi.uio.no> Reply-To: Future Culture NNTP-Posting-Host: ifi.uio.no Return-Path: Original-Date: Thu, 6 Oct 1994 17:00:37 -0400 Comments: To: Future Culture Comments: cc: Multiple recipients of list FUTUREC To: Multiple recipients of list FUTUREC In-Reply-To: <199410061920.AA16446@panix.com> Original-Message-ID: <"alfie.uib..169:06.09.94.22.23.08"@uib.no> In response to Kristina's post - look at us! We're on the verge of nano-technology. We finally have to come to terms with the population explosion. Virtual reality and cyberspace promise for the first time a cultural shake-up of ontology itself. Within the next few years, the human genome will be completely mapped out, recreating our species as the first formally self-reflexive organism. Neural networking, computer life, and wetware artificial intelligence promise a revolution in thought and knowledge themselves. We are at least beginning to understand the complexity and open-endedness of grand unified theories. The universe is turning out to be much more complex in types of objects, including strings and dark matter, than ever thought before. We are setting the stage for extra-terrestial contact, if anyone is out there, as well as beginning serious planetary exploration. Fundamental particle physics is advancing at a rapid rate, well beyond Einstein. Molecular chemistry is beginning to achieve results on the quantum-mechanical level. In art, we're past a great hiatus, the end of modernism, as a result of the conceptual art strategies of the 60s-70s; leaving a gap in culture, the future can only be tremendously interesting, at least in terms of cultural historiography. New forms are exploding everywhere, thanks to the CD-ROM, camcorder technology and experimental video, and digital media. In geography, an extremely important area thanks to current ecological injury to the planet, GIS (geographic information systems) create the first real possibility of multi-parameter mappings tracing the complex eco- and geological systems of the earth. The GPS satellite system allows an individual to pinpoint her location anywhere on earth. Culturally, for the first time perhaps in human history, gay rights and feminist issues, native rights and issues, are on the forefront of culture; it was only a century ago that the Tasmanians were extinguished without a trace, without outcry. Globally, we have the power to destroy all life on earth, and thermonuclear energy will probably be achieved within the next century or so (slightly longer than originally thought). We have just discovered sulfer-based life near the deep-sea vents, and there are even more intriguing accounts of life in rock-strata around the globe whose biomass exceeds that of all the ocean-based or land-based life. Self-replication of non-carbon designed molecules is becoming a reality, and may perhaps lead to entirely new forms. The planet, for all the television, is more literate than ever, connected by telephone, fax, internet, shortwave, longwave, radar bouncing off the moon. Much as we might deplore actions in Rwanda, Cambodia, etc. for the first time we are aware of them, beginning to sense the sphericity of the globe, and all of this since television networking began seriously only forty-eight years ago. In other words, everything is changing, even the foundations of science admitting catastrophes, crises, fractals, and chaos into its midst. Not only are paradigms (if such in fact exist) shifting, but paradigms themselves are no longer paradigmatic. No longer is gender, as another example, considered an essence, but it's now developing as something mutable, constructible, genetically related and genetically modifiable. We are at work upon ourselves, for better or for worse. And all of these changes are for better or for worse, but what a better time to be alive, when they're increasing at an exponential rate? We're the future managers or victims of the planet, one way or another. We're on the precipice, and not even sure a landscape is out there - but at least we're balanced, temporarily, at the edge. It's not too early to start thinking about the fourth millennium... Alan