Age of Anxiety

…Our sense of panic is only inflated by books such as Our Final Century, by Royal Society president Martin Rees, who lists bio-engineered viruses, asteroids, nanotechnology and nuclear war as among the many dangers we face. Tomes on peak oil theory such as Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over and The Long Emergency by James Kunstler take moral panic to pragmatic levels.

Perhaps this propensity for doom mongering is something of a cultural peccadillo, an impulse rooted in our Christian heritage and its prophecies of end-times and the Judgement Day to come. On the other hand, doomsday movies and books — say, for example, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or Stephen King’s The Stand, or, my favourite, George Stewart’s Earth Abides, a 1949 novel in which most of the human race falls victim to an airborne pandemic — may provide a cathartic release from the undercurrent of anxiety that, in the words of British sociologist Phil Hubbard, “saturates the social space of everyday life.”

Psychologists and sociologists have linked our inclination for moral panic to the rapidity of social, political and technological change. Shifts in long-established social traditions and moral standards — the waning of traditional marriage and the emergence of same-sex marriage, for example — are psychically unsettling, they say. Too much change too fast leaves people disoriented and uprooted, which fosters an anxiety-inducing feeling that the world is increasingly senseless and, therefore, meaningless.

Ottawa Citizen