The end of the world as we know it (and we’ll be fine)

Update: A commenter below sent along this totally great link to a website that compiles end-of-the-earth trivia.

Turns out there’s a lot more end-times stuff out there than I realized. What’s next, an End of the World Network? All Armageddon all the Time?

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There’s something peculiar about the American psyche: We’re optimists by nature, so ebullient at times that it drives people crazy.

When I lived in Germany as a young man one of my teachers lectured me in front of a class about our national penchant for saying hello to strangers.

“You say things like, ‘It’s great to see you,’ when you don’t mean it,” he muttered. “You wave to each other like you’re in a parade.”

But Americans also love the idea that absolute mayhem is just around the corner.

One of our earliest philosophers — before the pragmatists, before the free-market boosters — was Jonathan Edwards, a puritan who liked to remind his flock that they were sinners in the hands of an angry god.

I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family where the Apocalypse was a matter of dinner-table conversation, in all its lurid, Book of Revelations glory.

That kind of doomsday thinking colored my childhood, as the arms race with the Soviet Union threatened to turn the planet to a cinder.

And it still permeates American culture. Check out the trailer for the new Hollywood blockbuster “2012.”

The movie claims to offer “the truth” about an ancient Mayan end-time prophecy, which apparently includes a Noah-like flood overwhelming the Himalayas.

High culture mavens dig this stuff, too.

Cormac McCarthy’s brilliant 2006 novel “The Road” (coming soon to a cineplex near you) tells the story of a father and son living in post-Armageddon America.

Political activists of all stripes have embraced the vocabulary of meltdown.

On the left, some green activists predict the imminent unraveling of the planet’s ecosystems. They suggest that America’s political institutions are so corrupted by corporate influence as to be nearly meaningless.

On the right, many conservatives are convinced that President Barack Obama is a foreign manchurian candidate, bent on destroying capitalism, subverting democracy and leaving us all vulnerable to Islamic terrorists.

Both sides agree — at least in some of their more heated rhetoric — that America is a fallen nation, its promise unfulfilled, its economy nearly terminal.

(See Slate’s new essay about how America is “going to end“)

I know my German teacher would sigh and shake his head, but I’m convinced that all the gloomy talk is, at best, a kind of self-titillation and, at worst, a deliberate act of manipulation.

Some also embrace this kind of hysteria as an excuse to do nothing.

The truth is, America’s democratic institutions are more transparent and fair than ever before.

In the golden age of a century ago, blacks and women couldn’t vote; US Senators were chosen by party bosses behind closed doors; and whole cities were run by political gangsters.

America’s economy, for all its hiccups, is larger and more robust and more inclusive by orders of magnitude than it was when I was a child.

We don’t just have a black President. We have a black middle class. A generation ago, both were pipe dreams.

And the environment? Thirty years ago, rivers were bursting into flames. PCBs were being dumped in school yards. DDT was thrown around like confetti.

Global terrorism? Scary, yes — but not half so scary as the fear that the United States and the Soviet Union might sterilize the face of the planet with atomic bombs.

None of this is to say that there aren’t real concerns out there.

From carbon loading to political corruption to the recession to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the genocide in Sudan, Americans face huge challenges.

But our experience as a nation demonstrates two things.

First, in our society everything is always changing fast, thanks in large measure to a ton of hard work and a generous amount of risk-taking and ingenuity.

And second, most of that change produces a clumsy but measurable kind of progress.

So unless those Mayans got it right and fireballs start raining out of the sky (or maybe it’ll be aliens or zombies or a planet-wide plague or a giant comet…) we’re stuck with what we’ve got.

That is: A pretty great world and some problems that we have an obligation to try to fix.