Frank Furedi on Spiked earlier this year:
From global warming to obesity, bird flu to terrorism: 2007 was the year when the threat of an apocalypse became an everyday, even banal public issue. It was a year of ceaseless alarmist warnings about an ever-expanding number of calamities facing the planet…
One consequence of Western societies’ obsessive preoccupation with the apocalypse-to-come is that less and less creative energy is devoted to confronting the all too important problems that exist in the here and now. Take the global credit crunch unleashed by the sub-prime home loan crisis this year for instance.
Oh, give us a break. You just know that if this article were being written in December 2006 rather than December 2007, the first paragraph would probably have read: “From global warming to obesity, bird flu to looming financial meltdown…”.
