Word: millenarian
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...oscillated between two images, the streamline and the breadline -- the former promising relief from the latter. And in the maxim of the 1939 New York World's Fair, "See tomorrow -- now!," lay the siren syllables of undeferred gratification that would abolish the constraints of Puritan America while preserving its millenarian fantasies...
Some scholars think that this kind of writing may be a reflection, rather than a cause, of the preoccupation with disaster. Roy Peter Clark, an English professor at Auburn University, links the spread of millenarian fever with the approaching end of a true millenium-the year 2000. Says he: "We must prepare ourselves for the mass psychological hysteria, the conscious or unconscious sense of terror that may build to a climax." Others, like Psychoanalyst Eric Fromm, say that love of calamity shows a sense of alienation and powerlessness that seeks release through images of destruction...
...historians would care to push the analogy with the chaos and disintegration of the Middle Ages too far. Nonetheless, a few tantalizing similarities exist between then and now, among them the revival of millenarian sects and predictions about the world's end. Psychics and E.S.P. fanciers, for instance, have dusted off the 1934 predictions of Edgar Cayce: he forecast upheavals at the poles, the sinking of most of Japan into the sea, and the destruction of Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. In his recent book We Are the Earthquake Generation, Jeffrey Goodman explains that the latterday mystics...
...might say that the essential subject matter of the International Style was the end of history. Its "functionalism," which correctly saw that mass production was destroying handcraft and, with it, ornament, was always colored by this millenarian fantasy. Johnson, whose relationship to Mies van der Rohe is complicated and Oedipal, argues that "Mies believed in the ultimate truth of architecture, especially of his architecture: that it was closer to the truth than anyone else's because it was simpler and could be learned. He felt it could be adapted on and on into the centuries, until architecture bloomed into...
...ethnic differences that separate the mass of immigrants who fueled industrial development). Northern working class people escaped into privatism and a waxing standard of living; white Southerners, living in a perpetually underdeveloped region, had no such luxury--aside from racist rage, they escaped into tradition and religion. Fundamentals millenarian cults and hysterical revival meetings in one way, opened outlets for the frustration of feeling dumb and oppressed...