Both Sun and Moon had forsaken the sky and the empire of night knew no borders. Crops failed, livestock perished. Across much of Europe and North America, tens of thousands of people died in unspeakable suffering, from thirst, disease or starvation. Thousands more in the distant Dutch East Indies, had they voice to speak, might have counted themselves lucky to have been swept away, as they were, in a merciful instant, by flood or fire and brimstone.
Historians would come to call 1816 “the year without summer”. At the time, the unavoidable conclusion for many was that humankind was witnessing the cataclysmic countdown to the day of judgment envisioned in the sacred texts of the world’s great religions.
And you thought 2016 was going badly? From as early as July this year, social media and even some supposedly grown-up news organisations have been awash with speculation that 2016 might already qualify as having been “one of the worst years in history”.
Of course, for many individuals 2016 will indeed have been the worst year in history, because personal tragedy will always eclipse all other events. If you and your family are trapped in Aleppo or Mosul, or have been forced to join the flood of refugees seeking understanding and refuge in Europe, finding instead only suspicion and rejection, then certainly this is a year that will always darken your dreams.
Such perspective, however, has failed to inform the cartoonish attempts to crown 2016 as the worst year the world has ever known. In July one usually serious newspaper, the UK’s Daily Telegraph, cited in evidence the fact that “in France alone, nearly 250 people have been killed by terrorists over the last year and a half”. In this stunning example of western-centric thinking there was no factoring into the equation the 629 civilians who, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq, had been killed in that troubled country in July alone, to say nothing of the 3,364 who had died since January.
And what to make of the paper’s observation, echoing similar nonsense across the internet, that “the funereal tone for the year was set … by the global shock at David Bowie’s death in January, swiftly followed by the loss of an equally unexpected series of household names, in strangely quick succession”? Unexpected? Strange? Perhaps the digital omnipresence of Kardashian has convinced a generation that celebrities are, or at least ought to be, immortal.
In terms of the mass of humanity, yes, there have been some troubling times this year, from the Zika virus and continuing terror attacks to earthquakes and the seismic shocks of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as the next US president. But, 2016 the worst year in history? In the words of liberal US comedian Bill Maher, “if you think you have it tough, read history books”.
It is hard to know where to begin in dismantling this ludicrous canard, though History Today magazine gave it a shot back in August, when it felt obliged to respond to the already rampant doom-mongering. How about 1347, “a strong contender for the title”, it suggested, when the Black Death arrived in Europe and set about slaughtering a third of the population? Or 1845 and the famine that created the Irish diaspora? Or the world wars? “Despite the efforts of ISIL,” noted Paul Lay, the editor, “we are a long way from such industrial-scale slaughter.”
Rewind 200 years to 1816 when, in the absence of Twitter or Facebook, it was left to artists to capture the doom and gloom of the moment, which Byron did in suitably post-apocalyptic fashion in the poem Darkness. “I had a dream, which was not all a dream,” it began. “The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space, rayless” (opening lines which, as it happens, would have made the Twitter cut with two characters to spare).
Although no one knew it at the time, the calamitous events of 1816 had been caused not by the supernatural intervention of a vengeful God but by the entirely natural eruption the previous year of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. Some 10,000 died on the spot, but it was the vast amount of debris thrown up by the volcano that literally cast a deadly chilling pall over the entire world.
Then as now, few had heard of Mount Tambora, whereas the eruption over 70 years later of Krakatoa, though much less powerful and deadly, is far more widely known. The reason, according to geologist Robert Evans, writing in the Smithsonian Magazine in 2002, was “partly because it erupted in 1883, after the invention of the telegraph, which spread the news quickly”.
The internet, the telegraph of our times, spreads news and a lot more besides instantly. We don’t need a Byron to whip us into a fear of impending doom on the slightest pretext – that’s what the fatuous idiocracy of social media is for. The global connectivity that was supposed to unite us in collaborative celebration of the best of human genius has instead created a wired confederacy of dunces.
This week even Facebook was moved to concede that its Newsfeed algorithm had disseminated masses of misinformation in the run-up to the US election. This matters: close to half of all adults in the US now get their news from Facebook, a “vast, personalised sewer system”, in the words of New York magazine, “clogged with toxic fatbergs”.
As a species we have always been drawn to doom, gloom and conspiracy – it’s what we do, say psychologists, because for millennia it was a useful evolutionary tool for survival. “The end is always nigh in the human mind,” as New Scientist magazine put it in 2011, when evangelical Christian radio host Harold Camping made the latest in a series of failed predictions of impending apocalypse. Fear the worst, rather than hope for the best, and if the worst turns out to be a sabre-toothed tiger seeking lunch you stand a better chance of staying off the menu.
But for the countless millions whose lives are lived in comfortable mediocrity, as so many are today, there is another, sadder psychological rationale behind the cultural hunger for films and television programmes about post-apocalyptic survival. How much simpler and exciting life might be, as one psychiatrist explained it in Scientific American in 2012, if all I had do today was shoot some zombies.
This mindset speaks to a need among the impotent to feel significant and to be recognised as right, albeit as a prophet of impending doom. Anyone who doubts this need only visit Pinterest and search for “prepper” to witness the vast amount of energy being poured into arrangements for the end of the world as we know it.
Those of us not busy packing bugout bags or building doomsday bunkers could nevertheless take a leaf from the playbook of those citizens of Planet Internet who appear to be yearning for some form of apocalypse.
After all, the Part II of apocalyptic theology that non-believers often overlook is that renewal is scheduled to follow the fall – a psychological get-out clause that can also usefully be applied to fears about 2016, 1816, or any other one year. Hold your breath until midnight on December 31, in other words, and all will be well – we can start the new year with a clean slate.
Of course, if you accept that time is a continuum, and the concept of months and years nothing more than a convenient method of visualising the otherwise unmanageable linearity of existence, then you will see also that staring wide-eyed and yet myopically at the events of a single 12-month period offers no greater insight than comparing one day’s stock price with the next. The media screams frequently about billions being wiped from this or that stock market, while the reality is that over time the value of shares goes generally upwards.
Likewise, the quality of life on Earth, despite the shrill despondency of the idiocracy, follows a similarly positive trajectory. As the Swedish historian Johan Norberg argues in his new book, Progress, we’ve never had it so good. “Every day we’re bludgeoned by news of how bad everything is – Brexit, financial collapse, unemployment, environmental disasters, disease, hunger, war,” he writes.
The reality is that “by almost any index you care to identify, things are markedly better now than they have ever been for almost everyone alive”.
So, no, 2016 is not the worst year so far – “our ignorance of history”, as the 19th-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert had it, “causes us to slander our own times”.
It remains to be seen, however, what history will make of an era when humankind allowed its collective outlook, already primed for bleakness by evolution, to be increasingly clouded by social media, our new disastrously enabling worst friend.
Jonathan Gornall is a regular contributor to The National