How will the world end: in a “Bang”, in a “Whimper” — or will “Hope and History (finally) Rhyme”?

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About the session:

This is the way the world ends 
This is the way the world ends 
This is the way the world ends 
Not with a bang but a whimper.

   T. S. Eliot The Hollow Men (1925)

History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave… But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme

 Seamus Heaney The Cure at Troy (1991)

In this speculative exercise in futurology, Roger Griffin will draw on the history of fascism (his specialist area) to sketch out three scenarios for the next century: 1) the collapse of human civilization into nuclear apocalypse, catastrophic war between psychotic superpowers, the rapid disintegration of states under internal and external pressures; 2) a gradual but accelerating slide into the death of the ecosystem  and the mounting impact of rising and warming oceans, floods, droughts, famines, demographic expansion and shrivelling food and water resources; c) a global peripeteia or reawakening in which enough political and economic masters, faced by the imminent reality of the end of humanity, bring about a global human community in time to save a viable percentage of humanity and the biosphere.

About the speakers:

Roger Griffin, Emeritus Professor at Oxford Brookes University, is best known for The Nature of Fascism (1991), Modernism and Fascism (2007); Terrorist’s Creed Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning (2012); Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies (2018), and for co-founding the journal Fascism and COMFAS, theAssociation for the Comparative Fascism Studies. His main research interests are fascism, populism, terrorism, and more generally the way society generates minority movements of extremism and fanaticism under the disorienting impact of secularization and pluralism. However, as a member of the human species he is increasingly concerned (“freaked out”) by the real prospect that he has been born into the last generation of partially civilized humanity).