It's not the End of the World

I've been insisting on this point for years now, so it's finally good to see the Mayans argue that 2012 is not the end of the world.

The only thing the Mayan long count calendar suggests is that one period of time is finished and the next begins, somewhat like a new year or an odometer clicking over. As it is based on the position of astral bodies, in particular the alignments of Venus, the metaphor of an odometer clicking over on a galactic scale is really about the closest meaning to what the calendar says.

The Mayans contend that any notion of apocalypses and singularities is a Western construction, perhaps a projection of our values onto another culture's belief and measurement systems. Bear in mind it is only in Western traditions such as Christianity that a teleological endpoint to time and reality are posited, often in terms of the spectacular fiery cataclysms we seem to enjoy or desire. The notion of an apocalypse is only valid in a culture based on belief systems that suggest that there is only linear time, and that only in later times can we find true reality or happiness (ie, in an afterlife). Take the notion of heaven after death and apply it collectively and you get a desire for a collective death. This notion applies to the ancient Norse Ragnarok as a collective means of reaching Valhalla, but does not apply to cycle notions of time, such as in Buddhism or Mayan cosmologies. Why would the world end if the myths played themselves out year after year, eon after eon, in the heavens as well as on Earth?

What strikes me as strange is that, though many people in Western culture no longer treat our foundational myths as real or valid, we still have that understanding of time as linear and endable, and enjoy if not demand such endings. Why do we want the world to end? Why do we want to project our desire for that onto someone else's beliefs, as if we can justify the desire by saying it is prophesied, and therefor not our fault? Whether the Mayans like it or not, 2012 has become a contemporary Western myth of the end of time, and as such says something about how we experience the world we live in. Perhaps we are too scared, too ashamed, of the extent of of the damage Western cultural values have inflicted on the planet, which along with the looming resource crises and potential threat of technological transcendence/annihilation, we can point to the Mayans and say, look it's not our fault, they said it was going to happen first, and how can we change that? What our myth of 2012 does is allow us to evade responsibility for our actions in the world we live in for the world that our children may still inherit. Who needs to worry about the future if no one will be around to experience it?