“We are far too wise to fall for any utopian dreaming, but instead we have fallen prey to any number of dystopian nightmares,” James Heartfield writes in his Winter 2011 Jacobin essay “The End of the World.” He worries we have succumbed to delusions of devastation, and that we are “slaves to histrionic fears”. He reels of a list of our supposed mass neuroses: peak oil, genetically modified food scares, the collapse of capitalism in the wake of the Great Recession — and global warming. Most of Heartfield’s examples, save the last, are good examples of exaggerated terrors that periodically grip certain segments of the population. But his overall concern is baseless: Apocalyptic rhetoric is not the defining characteristic of our age, and if Heartfield wants a utopian political project he should check in with the movement to combat climate change.

Today’s policymakers, advocacy groups, and media figures are no more inclined to indulge in disaster divining than their historical precursors, and we are not markedly more susceptible to their efforts than previous generations were. It isn’t as though we are being seduced en masse into Armageddon worshipping death cults, or something. (Somebody email me if death cult membership does rise dramatically. I bet I could score a Pulitzer off that story.)

Heartfield trots out a series of straw men to support his theory. But how many people are really kept up at night worrying about peak oil? Beyond the back-to-nature crowd, where is the large and politically relevant constituency unnerved by genetically modified foodstuffs? Only a wistful core of old Marxists thought the Great Recession marked the collapse of capitalism. With some major exceptions (Glenn Beck’s, diminished, but still disturbingly vast, audience springs to mind) most people recognize that these aren’t the end times. Unfortunately, in an example I’ll return to later, when regarding one instance where apocalypse-mongering is justified — global warming — our generation is not reacting with the urgency the moment requires.