Every age has its cadre of doom-sayers, partly because every age has its own brand of crisis that might look like the End of Days has come.  The current recession (or proto-Depression, if you will), is prompting a lot of concern and rightly so.  There are a lot of people out there who are losing jobs, losing their savings, facing health care crises without insurance and to them it no doubt feels like the end or something close to it.

If you are willing to indulge me, take a look at the chart below which compares the job losses in the current recession versus others since the end of World War II:

If this chart doesn’t scare you, check your pulse or look at it again after the booze/weed/oxycontin wears off.  It is not all that difficult to look at a chart like this and imagine that, as one commentator has put it (speaking of the economy in general, not just the current recession), the next twenty years are going to be completely unlike the last twenty years.

So now we are starting to see a growing interest in survivalism, which in the past has been the studied application of how to make your home a sort of island in a sea of economic, pandemic, or post-nuclear chaos.  Guns figure prominently and stereotypically, which I have always assumed would be pried from the cold, dead hands of survivalists by other survivalists with more or larger guns.  The web is now awash in adds by all stripes of opportunists and outright hucksters purporting to offer the magic means to make it through or even prosper in the coming bad times.

Putting aside my sarcasm for a moment, I am also seeing some bits of common sense.  It is very encouraging, for instance, to see people suggesting that a good way to prepare for hard times is to get to know your neighbors.   Another–one that has long been part of both the survivalist and more hippy-ish lifestyles–is to acquire skills in growing your own food, doing your own repairs at home, learning to use tools, and so on.  Even without a growing economic crisis, I applaud the revival of the DIY spirit.

However, I believe that thinking in terms of “survival” is short-sighted.  This may seem a strange criticism of those who are far-sighted enough to prepare for a suboptimal tomorrow.  But if you are going to weather the apocalypse, reconstruction, not survival, is the goal.  The origins of apocalyptic thinking in the West go back to the late Intertestamental Period and the influences of Zoroastrian cosmic dualism on late Judaism and eventually, early Christianity.  The state of the world was such that these religions adapted some form of the idea that good and evil would eventually duke it out in some final combat.  It also led to the notion that the world must be changed, radically, and for the better.  This, along with the Hebrew prophetic tradition advocating social justice exerted a powerful influence on Christian eschatology and teleology.

Of course with religious eschatology, the messy aftermath is theoretically taken care of, literally, by deus ex machina. Lesser catastrophes, like the kind of titanomachia we appear to be inflicting on ourselves, leaves the rebuilding to us.

So let’s be clear: it’s not about survival per se, it’s about the reconstruction, the remaking of the world.  Let’s assume that we get the grand bull moose catastrophe that reduces the United States to something like a third-world country.  Who is going to do the best, besides the super-rich who never seem to be touched by such things?

It’s not going to be the people with the most guns, it’s going to be the ones with the best organizational and political skills.  The ones who know how to turn loose bodies of people into cohesive communities.  The future will also belong to those who are sufficiently conversational with technology that they can bend existing (or surviving) technology to meet the needs of the new reality, and employ new tech in ways that look forward and acknowledge consequences and trade-offs.  Disaster hurts, and the current economic crisis is going to hurt like hell.  I am not persuaded that the Obama administration has the right people or the right thinking to correct this, even without the conservative intellectual bankuptcy that led to all this.   But I am hopeful that the future does belong to the imaginative, the inventive, the flexible, the persistent, the visionaries, and the community-builders.