Not the End of the World
07/12/12 05:28
I am not a follower of the Mayan calendar. I have a calendar app on my smart phone with all of my dates. Theoretically it is synced with my computer and with the church’s calendar on the cloud, but the system is a bit glitch and it is not at all uncommon for there to be duplicate appointments on my cell phone calendar. It is a bit annoying, but hardly the end of the world. It is my understanding that the Mayan calendar is a somewhat older method of marking the passage of time, which although nice because it doesn’t need to have its batteries recharged, is incompatible with Google Calendar on the web.
I recently heard an interview with Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She was recalling that in the late 1970’s before the advent of personal computers, when the “home computer” was first being imagined, a conference of scientists gathered at MIT. They discussed possible uses of computers in home settings. Among the topics discussed was keeping an appointment calendar. The scientists rejected that as a possible use of home computers because there was no problem with a simple notebook computer. If you used a pencil it was easily erased, individual dates could be easily kept. Why use a machine to do something that is so elegantly and efficiently done with a simple pencil and paper? They were certain that calendars on computers would never achieve popular use. OK. They were wrong, but it is hardly the end of the world.
I do understand, however, that for those who do follow the Mayan calendar there is a conclusion of some sort with the end of the 13-baktun cycle at the winter solstice this year. Let’s see, if you don’t know what a Baktun is, you’re not alone. I had to look it up. It is 20 katun cycles of the ancient Maya Long Count Calendar. That makes a baktun 144,000 days or just over 394 years. Again, I’m no expert on the Mayan calendar, but it is my understanding that the end of the 13th Baktun is also the beginning of the 14th Baktun. Then a mere 394 more years and the 15th Baktun will begin. J. Eric S. Thompson claims that there is an error in the Mayan Calendar that goes all the way back to the 9th Baktun, so there is the possibility that the years don’t quite line up the way that they were originally imagined. It is all very confusing and I’m not sure I fully understand it, but it is hardly the end of the world.
Some New Age followers say that the end of the 13th Baktun is all about spiritual awakening. They have found something about the winter solstice that corresponds to a scientific understanding of the current location of the Sun in the Milky Way. Other New Age followers have read something about the alignment of the predictions of Nostradamus and the Mayan calendar. I’m not a New Age follower, and I sometimes have trouble understanding even what is “new” about New Age ideas. They often seem like watered-down versions of spiritual practices and concepts that have been practiced for generations. I don’t really get New Age beliefs, but it is hardly the end of the world.
At the church, we are used to one calendar ending and another beginning. It happens every year for us – in July. I know you are thinking that we ought to get ourselves aligned with the regular calendar, but the secular New Year’s Day comes in the middle of Christmas and we need to have planning that projects a longer distance, so we use 18-month planning calendars that start with the month of July. This allows us to always have a few months into the future and to make our calendar change during the season of Pentecost, which in the church is also known as “ordinary” time because it involves fewer festivals. Theoretically the pace of our work slows down in the summer and we are able to do more planning at that time of the year. It is an imperfect system, but it works pretty well for us. We don’t panic when December 31 comes, because our planning calendars still have a full year of days left and we know we’ll get a new calendar with 18months (and six months of overlap) in July.
But there are still more than a few people who are predicting that the world is going to end. It is my understanding that this belief is more popular among non-Mayans than among the Maya themselves. I only know a few Maya persons myself. I have a cousin whose daughter married a native of Belize who has some Mayan ancestry. They have three children, all adopted, who also have Mayan heritage. They aren’t prepping for the end of the world. Last time I checked they were using calendars that were given away by various merchants in the towns in Montana near where they farm.
I guess you could say that for many Mayans the end of the world has already come. The population is estimated to have been about 22 million at the height of the civilization. Only about 7 million Mayans are alive today, mostly living in Central America. There are lots of theories about the decline of Mayan civilization and population. It is impressive to me that Mayan people continue to survive and thrive after several attempts at genocide.
There seems to never be a shortage of people predicting the end of the world, either. We were supposed to face doom in 2000 and again in 2003 and then again in 2006. There was some preacher predicting that 2011 was going to be the end of the world. When his first date didn’t bring the end, the revised his calculations and predicted a second date for the end of the world a few months later. But when one cycle ends, another begins.
Sir Isaac Newton is said to have famously commented, “I see no reason why the world would end before 2060.” If the world doesn’t end this month, there could always be new predictions surrounding 2060 or some other year.
It is all very fascinating, but it is hardly the end of the world.