58. Barkun, Michael. Disaster and the Millennium. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1974.

Disaster is the cause of millennial movements as a last resort when the known order has failed. Disaster is a necessary but not sufficient cause. There must be: 1) several disasters; 2) traditional millenarian ideas; 3) a charismatic leader adapting these ideas to present circumstances; 4) an isolated and homogenous population in which the disasters occur. Cities are unlikely loci; these are all country movements. The ecstatic behavior common to these movements is "resocialization," not psychosis, and a means to continue "disaster utopia," since disasters are good for some, and frequently lead to a rebuilding of community: disaster "prefigures the millennium."

Contemporary disasters are artificial and enormous in scope, operating on the scale of nations and international economies. There are four large implications of movements: 1) their bearing on revolutions; 2) the continuity of messianic ideology where movements are absent; 3) in the persistence of millennial themes in modern movements; 4) their supposed influence on totalitarianism. Revolution-fundamental change in the order-is distinct from rebellion, which keeps the order but puts new people in power. Revolution is a violent change in continuity, equivalent to millenarian movements in all but terminology, which is elusive anyway. Millenarian movements tend to be called such when they fail early, that is, do not get power and are suppressed.

Where they do succeed, factionalism ensues. Walzer (1965: item 729) says that political activists are like Puritans, that is, they are a disciplined elite, willing to work for the revolution, where agrarian movements consist of undisciplined peasants, who won't do the work necessary. This doesn't hold, because minority movements are also politically adept: examples are the heresy movements that went underground in the Middle Ages and after. Millenarians are indeed adept social innovators, despite their military defeats. For more detailed argument on this point, see also item 596.

Relative deprivation is based on assumptions of limitless wants, of "legitimate expectations" produced likewise by social and cultural organization, and of changes disrupting the latter. Views of relative deprivation are subjective, and millenarian movements are particularly likely when means of fulfilling expectations are seen to diminish ("decremental deprivation"). Dissatisfaction increases as (statistically measured) means of improvement become more available. This is common in industrializing societies, where some people are forced to the margins. [Is any of this explanatory or only descriptive? We would hardly expect those content with their lot to invest much energy in imagining, let alone inventing, a new order for the world.] This relationship-newly marginal groups and millennial movements-may be coincidental, since few areas outside the Atlantic ecumene have escaped colonialism. But in the west itself, members of such movements are frequently recruited from the marginal members of society. This theory fails in predictivity and fails to account for the "bizarre" behavior that often categorizes these movements. Relative deprivation then is a necessary but not a sufficient precondition. It is universal while movements are not, at least not to the same extent.

General problems include: comparison of cultures, a problem in assigning categories; the difficulty of social science in addressing problems of relative disorder, which it isn't geared up to do; diffusionism vs. independent invention: culture contact favors the former, seeing millennial movements as Christian by-products. There is no available test case, describing in detail a movement without western influence. There are difficulties with the record, which is rarely written, and then usually by adversaries. Ecstatic behavior is usually called pathological from an ethnocentric point of view. The political/religious classification is an artefact of scholarly divisions of labor; movements are not in fact clearly distinguished in these terms. Disaster is a precondition.

Barkun critiques Wallace (1956-'70: see items 711 ff.) and his notion of stress, because it is inherently ambiguous: some people find at least a degree of stress desirable. Wallace switches levels, from somatic homeostasis to social; he also offers no account of the nature of the stress involved, nor how long it must last, nor how many must be involved. Both views are used in the "culture contact" scheme, though that is not inherent to either.

Wallace sees personal disintegration as a necessary step. There are difficulties in cross-cultural psychiatric research, but consider the findings: they suggest that mental illness follows cultural patterns and that westernized members of other societies show less recognizable illness than do Westerners. What changes is the conception of illness as much as its incidence. Social change may in fact reduce psychological disorder [by imposing real challenges to preoccupy the ill-taught mind?] Some see millenarism as therapeutic in effect.

Murphy (1961) suggests that only threats to the "true society" [the group of significant others] can induce illness. This is like Wallace's mazeway theory, wherein the personal sense of social placedness is disturbed. Threats to this order are what Barkun means by disaster: "a severe, relatively sudden, and frequently unexpected disruption of normal structural arrangements within a social system … resulting from a force … over which the system has no firm 'control'" (p. 51). These are particularly likely to be disruptive and to have ill psychological effects [thus Barkun also depends upon psychopathology]. When this disarray is of community scope, it cannot deal with its members' stresses, and "aggravated individual cases of deprivation are now on the way toward becoming a social phenomenon" (p. 52) especially as the problem is seen to be common. In "disaster syndrome" long-term disorientation is prevalent: passivity, withdrawal [this leads to joining new groups?] and suggestibility. People try to behave according to their old patterns of predictability; this failing their behavior becomes "nonrational and reflexive." Psychosomatic effects are "almost universal." One third of the affected population may have the syndrome. This is all based on small-community studies.

In large-scale disasters the effects are more enduring and less amenable to outside help. This is not a true mental illness but the result of predictability's violation. There are both sensory deprivation and overstimulation in these situations, and both are likely to increase suggestibility, increasing the likelihood of adopting new beliefs. [This is accountable in terms of a new pattern of necessary predictability replacing a spectacularly failed one.] Disaster, then, is the necessary precondition. Relative deprivation must affect the social core of selfhood to be effective as a cause of millennial movements. Millennial beliefs provide the new order and promise it will come easily. Disaster victims are "brainwashed by circumstances." Millenarianism is not "collective pathology" but much like it.

Unpredictability is inherent to disaster; preparation for it preserves elements of the familiar structure. Nonspecific predictions can feed millennialism as self-fulfilling prophecies, a process the media will aid. Movements are not likely to emerge where disaster is less than total, where damage is soon repaired, where disaster lingers on, and where the cosmology predicts no change. In the last case, people revise downward their expectations. [But why don't these movements arise when the disaster is fresh: see Barkun's discussion of the silting of Bruges harbor; presumably that was so slow as not to constitute a disaster at all?]

Urbanity insulates; movements are prototypically folk events. "Groups under stress must rigorously control communication between themselves and the threatening environment" (p. 70). These movements are nearly always local in scope, since they are fed by local conditions, even where these conditions are widespread. The multiform Ghost Dances and Cargo Cults are examples of this phenomenon. [However, this is over-simple. While each of the movements within the constellation of similars was locally circumscribed, Barkun overlooks the fact that in their respective culture areas there were a great many local movements to be found, some of which overlapped geographically and some at least did have the effect of uniting previously disparate if not actually hostile groups. Might this effect be a result of the inherently interpersonal nature of charisma, at least in the absence of mass media?]

The types of explanation, following Dynes & Yutzy (1965) are as follows. The process of change is like Kuhn's structure: you need anomalies and alternative explanations both. Insignificant but catalytic events (e.g., the Haymarket riot) bring into sudden focus continuing changes. Millennialism and utopianism both reject an old order. There is need for traditional ideas of change or ideas like the lost golden age theme as it appears in societies lacking concrete ideas of change.

Why do prophets arise? Disaster may destroy leadership. Wallace notes that stress may produce creativity, in some at least. Prophets are not essentially different from paranoid schizophrenics. [This is open to serious question, at least in our society. Anyone who has worked with psychotics will observe that they are not capable of organizing much beyond a trip to the bathroom let alone a full-scale movement.] Prophets are most likely to appear where tradition supports them. [Perhaps through a process akin to "role suction," which occurs in a group feeling the lack of some person to fill a role the group thinks it needs-perhaps a scapegoat or a leader. In such circumstances the group will, without any conscious agenda, nominate someone for the job and work hard to keep him or her in it, whether or not the person is appropriate to the task.]

Conversion demands a nearly ultimate seriousness of purpose. [This is also open to question. It appears that people may join movements for any number of reasons, including the most trivial; see item 687.] Political conversion is not different from religious [in part because religion is not separate from politics.] Conversion demands the absence of "a critical frame of reference" by which to judge new beliefs. I.e., a collapse in cosmology. [This implicitly assumes that all novel beliefs are somehow substandard. If we had all our wits about us, we wouldn't fall for them.] Ecstasy is abreactive purging of the guilt of conversion. [It is of course possible that one might feel guilty following conversion, but it hardly follows that one must, as this implies.]

59. ---. "The Awakening Cycle Controversy." Sociological Analysis 46, 1985a: 443-52.

Argues that revivalism is a poor diagnosis of "awakenings." Comparison with other models of cyclical processes suggest that millennialism is a better indicator.

60. ---. Crucible of the Millennium: the Burned-Over District of New York in the 1840s. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1986.

According to C.J. Bourg's (1988) review Barkun emphasizes artificial disaster as conducive to millenarism, and he stresses the pre- and post-millenial distinction. According to M.W. Cuneo (1989) there is little new in Barkun's book, which is empirically unconvincing about disasters preceding millennial movements.

61. ---. "'The Wind Sweeping Over the Country': John Humphrey Noyes and the Rise of Millerism." In The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century edited by Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987: 153-72.

Noyes was preoccupied with Millerism and wrote several polemics against it, calling it a "delusion" and suggesting that it showed a "deep craving among the mass of simple minded people" (p. 153). Noyes seems to have objected most strongly to Miller's supernatural materialism, relying instead on intangible forces like mesmerism to account for social anomalies. This view was widespread at the time, but there was no agreement on how these forces might be perceived, let alone manipulated. Miller offered competition to Noyes's perfectionist movement, of course, as he had to the abolitionists. He also attacked a central part of Noyes's theology in dating the second coming. Barkun attributes the final cause of Noyes's defensiveness to his psychology but also offers more accessible reasons. For example, Noyes firmly believed that the second coming had already occurred, in 70 CE at the destruction of the Temple, as a spiritual, not a visible, event. In that case the signs of the times had been the failure of the Jewish revolt against Rome. He accounted for the obvious corruption of Christianity after the event in terms of a separation between the spiritual and worldly churches at the rapture.

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