Free The Long Descent by John Michael Greer Page B

one example of this sort of secondhand theology. Marxism is another, and most of the more recent myths of apocalypse reworked the Christian narrative along the same lines that Marx did, swapping out the economic concepts Marx imported to the myth for some other set of ideas more appealing to them or more marketable to the public.
    Neoprimitive theorists such as John Zerzan and Daniel Quinn, for example, replace Marxist economics with anthropology. For them, the hunter-gatherer societies of the prehistoric past are Eden, the invention of agriculture is the original sin that led to the Fall, and so on, with the imminent collapse of civilization filling the role of the apocalyptic transformation, after which the righteous remnant enters the New Jerusalem of the hunter-gatherer–lifestyle. In exactly the same way, the reworked liberalism of David Korten’s The Great Turning fills Eden’s role with a set of hypothetical prehistoric matriarchies: the Fall with the emergence of the principle of Empire; and so forth, right up to the “Great Turning” toward a liberal ideology that stands in the place of the Second Coming. In these and many other examples of the same type, ideologies presented as radical new visions turn out on closer inspection to be Christian apocalyptic myth with the serial numbers filed off, with new actors in new costumes filling the same old roles.
    Now I’m no great fan of mainstream Christianity myself. To me, all its myths and symbols put together don’t carry the spiritual impact of one blue heron flying through dawn mists or a single autumn sunset seen through old growth cedars; that’s why I follow a Druid path. Still, it seems to me that if people insist on thinking in terms of Christian myth, they might as well go the rest of the way and embrace Christianity as a whole. That way, at least, they would have the benefit of two millennia worth of Christian philosophy and theology, rather than having to make do with hand-me-downs from Marx, say, or the modern pundits mentioned above.
    They might also be able to learn a few lessons from Christian history, or any other kind of history for that matter, about the problems that follow when people try to immanentize the eschaton. It’s one thing to try to sense the shape of the future in advance, and to make constructive changes in your life to prepare for its rougher possibilities. It’s quite another to become convinced that you know where history is headed, and to insist that the kind of society you like best is also the inevitable result of the historical process. When the course you’ve marked out for history simply projects the trajectory of a too-familiar myth onto the inkblot patterns of the future, immanentizing the eschaton can all too easily become a recipe for self-induced disaster.
    History is littered with the wreckage of movements that convinced themselves that the world was about to be transformed into what they wanted it to be. Not uncommonly, such wreckage includes a tumbled heap of human lives. The trajectory of Marxism — from the bright dreams for a better future of 19th century intellectuals to the 20th century nightmares of Stalin’s purges, the Cultural Revolution, and the killing fields of Cambodia — is a route followed all too often by those who believe they know which way history is headed.
    Myths of Utopia
    Each of the modern ideologies that immanentize the eschaton have recast Christian theology in apparently secular forms, then, but complex transformations shaped the way they manhandled their borrowed myths. In its original form, the Christian narrative of sacred history includes some features close to the myth of progress and others much closer to modern apocalypticism. As sociologist Philip Lamy showed in a useful study, 7 though, the old myth has been shattered into fragmentary versions over the last century or two. Many people nowadays, including many Christians, have