September 21 2022
THE END?
The past week was an emotional one, dominated by the late Queen Elizabeth II. It reminded me of another queen, Victoria, who on January 22 1901, died at the age of 81. She passed away at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, including the future King, Edward VII and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.
Then teletyped telegrams whirled throughout the world announcing the death of the British Empress, a heyday for the multiple newspapers throughout the globe. Then, as now, wars, royal weddings and the funerals of royalty were, and still are, the most spectacular sources of news.
Queen Victoria had lost her husband, Prince Albert, at a young age, and for years she had withdrawn from the public scene in an endlessly extended period of mourning. Then too, a war raged: the Boers in South Africa, fought for independence.
Its funeral procession featured the German Kaiser on his proud horse, as well as the Russian Czar, also a relative of the deceased. That same Kaiser would die in exile in 1941, in Doorn, the Netherlands, banned there after Germany’s defeat in 1918. In that same year the Czar and his immediate family were brutally murdered.
That year 1901, also was the start of the CARBON era.
The historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his book, The Age of Extremes, noted that TEN percent of humans, alive on January 1 1900, died an unnatural death in the next 50 years, due to TWO World Wars and ONE horrendous epidemic.
Today, 121 years later, it’s Queen Elizabeth’s turn to end an era. She too mourned the death of her husband. Her grieving too, hastened her death, but, unlike her Great-grandmother, Victoria, she remained engaged almost till the very day she died.
The late queen represented continuity, security, certainty. But Britain today, and the world at large, faces a cost-of-living crisis, faces soaring national debts, faces a looming recession and a chronic productivity problem, faces Global Heating, and untold other problems. We are at the threshold of a new era, unprecedented, with a population, pampered and unprepared.
A look back.
For 2,000 years we have counted ‘progress’, by the number of people living. It had taken the world at large till the year 1,800 to reach the One Billion Count. When Queen Elizabeth was born in 1926, thanks to our Carbon-based life, that number had doubled in 125 years, but during her 70 years reign it grew to Eight Billion, an impossible number.
A new book, An Inconvenient Apocalypse, by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen, tells us that in today’s depleted state, the earth can support no more than TWO Billion. They write, “No existing ideology or culture is going to provide us with a template for dealing with what lies ahead, a world of fewer people consuming less energy.”
That means that the Carbon Age has ended: a New Era dawns.
I believe that the death of this queen, who reigned from 1952 to 2022, 70 years, signals the end of an era.
It was the age of carbon; it was the age of material welfare; it was the age of spiritual decline; it was the age of untold increase in human numbers; it was the age of Big Government: it is no longer sustainable.
At the Queen’s two church services, viewed by 4 billion people, something miraculous happened. The prophecy of Matthew 24: 14 came true: “The Gospel of the Kingdom was preached to the whole world”, signaling the end of an era!
Already each day brings on new disasters. Each day another ‘earth’ event makes headlines. Each day another food item rises in price, some of them going to absolutely ridiculous levels, as floods and droughts foster famines in multiple places.
Our world is changing, without warnings, in wild and un-wielding ways.
The thousands who lined the paths in London to see the Queen’s coffin, and the billions who followed the proceedings on TV, sensed that they lived in a time period that will never return. The slow-motion, many-hours-queue to bid farewell to their queen, suggested to me that people were reluctant to accept that the Age of Abundance had died with her. Gone now is this short, oh so short, era of erotica, as it were, of effortless extravagance, of luxury at the switch of a finger.
And yet…..
How beautifully timely was the final reading at her funeral service, from Revelation 21, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.”
Not only the end of an era: the old world as we know it, has passed away.