Free The Long Descent by John Michael Greer

enough to bring industrial society down overnight, just as ordinary technological progress isn’t enough to get industrial society out of the mess it’s made for itself. Without some extraordinary event, our civilization is headed down the well-trodden path of decline. If there’s a point in planning for the future at all, it makes sense to plan for the one we’re most likely to get.
    Both the myth of progress and the myth of apocalypse, on the other hand, have a great deal of emotional power; that’s why they’re popular. Faith in perpetual progress comforts those people who have made their peace with society as it is and want to believe that the frustrations and compromises of their lives are part of a process that will eventually lead to better things. Faith in imminent apocalypse comforts those people who cannot accept society as it is; they long for a catastrophe massive enough to topple the proud towers of a civilization they loathe. Still, the fact that a belief is emotionally powerful and comforting doesn’t make it true.
    Secondhand Theologies
    The central theme of both these myths, the narrative of progress just as much as the narrative of apocalypse, is a process the philosopher Eric Voegelin called “immanentizing the eschaton.” 4 This process underlies a remarkable amount of popular thought these days, and it’s worth taking the time to understand what it means and how it works.
    The word “eschaton” comes from an old Greek word for “end” or “border.” In Christian theological jargon it refers to the process by which the fallen world we experience today will someday give way to the eternal blessedness of the Kingdom of God. An entire branch of theology, called eschatology — literally, the science of the end — evolved over the last two thousand years or so in an attempt to piece together a coherent vision of the future out of the hints and visions provided by scripture and tradition. It’s a lively field full of fierce disputes, and no consensus about the End Times has yet found general acceptance among Christian theologians or ordinary believers. Central to nearly all Christian accounts of the eschaton, however, is the idea that it’s something completely outside the realm of history as we know it. When the trumpet sounds, the sky tears open and something wholly other comes through.
    There’s a long and complicated history behind this belief, reaching back half a dozen centuries before the Common Era, when religions across much of the Old World started offering believers the promise of a way out of the cycles of time and the world of suffering — and a way into an eternal realm of perfection. For the most part, the escape hatch from time was sized only for individuals; the Buddhist pursuit of Nirvana and the Gnostic quest to return to the aeonic world of light are good examples of the theme. In a handful of traditions, though, this mutated into the idea that the whole world would enter eternity at a specific point in the future: ordinary history would stop and be replaced by something wholly other. The Jewish vision of the coming Messianic Age is among the oldest of these. Adapted by Christianity, it became the prophecy of the Second Coming, and in this latter form it remains a potent myth through much of the Western world.
    In theologian’s language the quality of “otherness” that pervades visions of the Second Coming and its equivalents is called transcendence. Its opposite is immanence. One of the great quarrels in theology is whether God or the gods are transcendent — that is, outside nature and free of its limitations — or immanent — that is, part of nature and subject to its laws. Like most such divisions, this one admits of several kinds of middle ground, but the basic distinction is relevant. People who have mystical experiences — which are, after all, common among human beings