Apocalypse, Inc.

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But what happens when the bleaker reading finds a friend in the White House? That's what worries liberal journalist Bill Moyers. 'One of the biggest challenges in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal,' he says. 'It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress.'

Doomsday thinking is not limited to conservative Christians. A Tibetan Buddhist classic called the Kalachakra, or 'cycles of time,' foresees a global conflict against barbarian hordes in the year 2424 that leads to a new golden age. Scholars trace most Eastern and Western apocalyptic stories back to Zoroaster, the ancient Iranian whose 3,000-year countdown to world ruin began with his birth around 628 B.C.E. Meanwhile, the Mayans figured an era lasting 5,125 years would expire on the winter solstice in 2012. Like others, they shrewdly made their predictions our problem, not theirs.

The Mayan experience -- they're history -- explains the recent interest in the science of social decay. Since Joseph Tainter wrote The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge, 1988), thinkers like Jared Diamond and Jane Jacobs have begun to study the patterns by which cultures rise and fall. Some have issued our society its two-minute warning, though most secular predictions give us a chance to beat the odds if we put our heads to it.

If doomsday thinking seems more prevalent now, it could partly be a conceit created by the search engine. Every dark thought ever uttered is there to ogle in the cybernetic tabernacle of Google. We are unique in being the first era with the pyrotechnics to really bring the lurid scripts alive. We're also the first to gain the upper hand in our holy war against the rest of nature. With 27,000 species said to be disappearing yearly, one apocalypse already rages beneath our feet. Mixed in the fear of doom that haunts so many today is the nagging thought that maybe we deserve it.

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