With 2012 Over, Is the Apocalypse Dead?

Say what you will about 2012 apocalypse predictions, they've been a cultural touchstone for five decades. Whenever Hollywood needed a bogeyman, 2012 was there.  If conspiracy theorists were pressed for specifics, they could point to 2012.  Doomsday prophesies have even provided some welcome chuckles during the fiscal cliff negotiations.  

So now that the Mayan myth is busted, will pronouncements of doom disappear? 

First, let's hit the rewind button:

The 2012 myth was born in 1966 when anthropologist Michael Coe speculated the end of the Mayan calendar could be a prophesy for the end of the world.  The idea took off in fiction, including books (Robert Heinlein's Future History; Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol), songs (Incubus' A Certain Shade of Green; Britney Spears' "'Til the World Ends,"), TV shows (X-Files' "The Truth") and movies (2012, Deep Impact, Armageddon).  The meme moved deeper into the mainstream through the 2000s with The History Channel and The Discovery Channel airing specials like "Last Days on Earth" and "2012 Apocalypse." The mainstream media followed.  More than 250,000 stories appear in Google news if you search "apocalypse."

In their must-read book, "The Last Myth: What the Rise of Apocalyptic Thinking Tells Us About America," Mathew Barrett Gross and Mel Gilles explain that, as unwelcome as the end of the world would be, the idea actually provides comfort to many.  People want bad events to have some kind of redemptive meaning. This desire increases when they experience situations that are unusual and frequent.  That's an apt description of a decade characterized by 9/11, a war on terror that was often couched in terms of "good versus evil," the 2004 tsunami, 2005's Katrina, 2006's Inconvenient Truth, peak oil concerns in 2008, the 2008 financial crisis and Fukushima in 2011.  At one point in 2006, 40% of Americans believed that the end-times process had begun.  Considering that the century started with Y2K (what the authors call an "archetypal event" that created a template for future disaster responses), it's no wonder people were primed to see these events through a "last days" lens.  The authors further state that the idea of a single cataclysmic event appeals to both religious and secular people who see doom on the horizon, but whose warnings are ignored.  

As much as we hope life will be different in 2013, we'll likely see more bad things happen to more good people. Our brains, wired to look for patterns, will continue to search for hidden meanings.  But maybe now that the red letter dates of 2000 and 2012 behind us, we can learn from the patterns that were revealed as false and confront the threats that are actually washing up on our shores.