End Times & Christian Cultures
Note: To explore general “Cultural Conceptions of Time,” visit page 733 of the Appendix.
Loads of people cite the rise of artificial general intelligence or global warming and predict the end of civilization. Heck, even we predict the end of civilization at the beginning of this book.
Something we should always keep in mind is that at no period since the life of Jesus has there not been a huge chunk of Christians or secular Christian descendants who believed that they were currently living in “The End Times.” This is doubly true of U.S. Christian cultures and their derivatives.
Studies of the “historical Jesus” (see: The Quest of the Historical Jesus by Albert Schweitzer) often go so far as to argue that Christianity was founded as an apocalyptic Jewish sect—or, at the very least, that Jesus was preaching his own doctrine of “apocalyptic eschatology” derived from post-exilic Jewish teachings. Specifically, this line of logic argues that Jesus was actually telling people the world would end within his lifetime and that his claims were only later amended when it did not.
End Times thinking is a core aspect of Christian-derived cultures—and recently, (likely due to cultural intermixing with Christians) of Jewish-derived cultivars. Christians, descendants of Christian heritage, and anyone hailing from a cultural movement packed with people of Christian cultural heritage must remember to account for this bias when modeling the future.
Accounting for this bias would be quite helpful within groups like the effective altruist community (which keeps predicting the singularity, the rise of AGI, and other end-time-like events) as well as among many progressive cohorts, given their predictions around climate catastrophe. We, your gentle authors, also must acknowledge our end-times bias when modeling the effects of population collapse. The presence of an end-times bias does not mean that a group’s predicted catastrophes will not come to pass; it simply signals that we should be extra suspicious of such predictions. It’s like there is an invisible “finger on the scale” of the logical processing of any group associated with one of these cultivars that needs to be accounted for in predictions about the future.
If you do not believe that apocalyptic biases are partly motivated by cultural heritage, contrast how frequently end-times scenarios are discussed in communities derived from Christian groups versus those derived from Chinese individuals or Indians. When we spend time with our South and East Asian friends, we almost never hear talk of apocalyptic scenarios. Yet, we scarcely leave a party with Christians and Jews in which the topic does not come up (whether it’s an AI apocalypse, political systems collapse, or climate catastrophe).
It is important to understand why apocalypticism is such a viral meme and so hard for a community to resist. If you have a group of ten people and eight of them think something is real but not a huge issue, while two think it will cause the end of the world in 20 years, the two apocalypticists will always end up dominating the opinion on that topic (they are, after all, far more motivated to champion their cause—doing so is literally life or death). Worse, the two apocalypticists will have a moral mandate to expunge anyone from the group who impedes their ability to spread their apocalyptic ideology. As the group becomes more and more focused on apocalypticism, those individuals who genuinely believe the world will end in a few years due to some issue the group is working to address will also be the most active group members by a considerable margin.
But it’s worse than just that: “Total end” apocalypticism is a nearly impossible memetic package to stymie once a group is infected with it. This is a unique form of apocalypticism in which the group preaches total destruction of the species, making any action unrelated to the issue totally irrelevant. (While issues like population collapse and most sane forms of climate change concern are not “total end” apocalypticism, most forms of AI Apocalypticism are.)
“Total end” apocalypticism is uniquely appealing because it means that those warning against it need not actually invest in anything other than proselytization (and drawing attention to oneself is far more fun than making personal sacrifices to battle a complex but addressable problem). This also leads these groups to outcompete others: A cause area that can spend almost 100% of any capital raised on proselytization will always have a competitive advantage over causes that are “taxed” with having to spend a portion of funds raised actually doing something.
It’s not just that apocalypticists are freed from an obligation to expend capital to fix real-world problems; they also enjoy the ability to appear virtuous despite making very little personal sacrifice. “Total end” apocalypticism grants group leaders the leeway to engage in “ethical hedonism” because nothing they do will matter. Let’s put it this way: The leader of a group afraid of population collapse must adopt a more difficult lifestyle to signal genuine dedication to the cause (it takes significant personal sacrifice to have many children and raise them well). On the other hand, the leader of a group afraid of AI apocalypticism has every right to do nothing but preach the message and garner as much attention as possible without being seen as unethical. Which leader would you prefer to be? If you were already running a large group of thinkers without a large family and both of these memetic sets were beginning to grow, which would you be subconsciously motivated to signal boost?
Note: We are not arguing that causes related to AI apocalypticism or climate apocalypticism are irrational (we actually take them quite seriously—see this book’s chapter on AI apocalypticism on page 640*). We are merely obligated to put a proverbial finger on the other side of the scale when thinking about them, especially as we hail from Christian and Jewish cultural traditions, which makes us uniquely susceptible to drawing conclusions that are not logically justified when a cause area has an “end times” aesthetic attached to it.*