Courses

For thousands of years people have been getting ready for the end of the world, giving rise to millenarian movements that have sometimes changed history. More than once, large numbers of people have experienced events such as the Black Death, the Little Ice Age, colonial conquest, and “strategic” bombing that seemed very much like the end of their world. And over the last seventy-five years, governments and international organizations have made major investments in predicting and preparing for catastrophic threats. Efforts to manage or mitigate these dangers have had world-changing consequences, including “preventative” wars, and new forms of global governance. The very idea of the end of the world, in other words, has a long history, with a demonstrable impact, which provides instructive lessons as we contemplate things to come.

This course will explore this history, beginning with eschatology and millenarian movements. In part two, students will learn how different conceptual frameworks can be applied to assessing and managing risk, and understanding how people perceive or misperceive danger. They will learn how they can be applied to identify the most important challenges, drawing insights from different disciplinary approaches. The third and main part of the course will consist of comparative and connected analyses of the age-old apocalyptic threats -- war, pestilence, and famine -- in their modern forms, i.e. nuclear armageddon, pandemics, and ecological collapse. By examining them together, we can compare the magnitude and probability of each danger, and also explore their interconnections. We will see, for instance, how nuclear testing helped give rise to the environmental movement, and how modeling the aftereffects of nuclear exchanges helped advance understanding of climate change. Similarly, scenario exercises have shaped threat perceptions and disaster-preparedness for pandemics and bio-warfare as much as they did for nuclear war and terrorism.  

Readings and discussions will explore how planetary threats are interconnected, and not just in the techniques used to predict and plan for them. Applying nuclear power to the problem of global warming, for instance, could undermine longstanding efforts to stop nuclear proliferation. Climate change and mass migration, on the other hand, create new pandemic threats, as a more crowded and interconnected world becomes a single ecosystem. Yet billions spent on building up defenses have created more capacity and opportunity for bio-terrorism. Who would actually use a nuclear or biological weapon? Perhaps a millenarian group hoping to ride death, the fourth horse of the apocalypse, straight to heaven.