From global warming to obesity, bird flu to terrorism: 2007 was the year when the threat of an apocalypse became an everyday, even banal public issue. It was a year of ceaseless alarmist warnings about an ever-expanding number of calamities facing the planet.In a piece fitting for the beginning of a new year, Frank Furedi over at Spiked laments the "politics of apocalypse" and "worst-case thinking" that marked mass-culture over the last year.
Furedi isn't dismissing problems like climate change and avian flu, but he is asking us to put them in perspective.
We should start worrying more, but not exclusively, about disasters that immediately affect humanity's well-being (the global credit crunch, for example), he says, rather than computer-generated scenarios, the details of which may still develop with new research.
More than that, however, we should try to recover "a sense of purpose in what it means to be human." That doesn't mean ignoring problems in the here-and-now, but it might mean facing them with a renewed sense of confidence.
After all, Furedi says, "We are far better placed to deal with the outbreak of new diseases or unexpected weather incidents than we were even 20 or 30 years ago."
Indeed. To a new sense of purpose in what it means to human.
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