TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101592/1015991.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 10.9 KB | 217 lines

                                                                                SPECIAL ISSUE: MILLENNIUM -- BEYOND THE YEAR 2000 

THE GREAT EVENT, Page 6

A Cosmic Moment


The Millennium represents the ritual death and rebirth of
history, one thousand-year epoch yielding to another

BY LANCE MORROW


    The millennium is the comet that crosses the calendar every
thousand years. It throws off metaphysical sparks. It promises
a new age, or an apocalypse. It is a magic trick that time
performs, extracting a millisecond from its eternal flatness and
then, poised on that transitional instant, projecting a sort of
hologram that teems with the summarized life of the thousand
years just passed and with visions of the thousand now to come.

    The approaching millennium year 2000 is counted from the
birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem of Judea, in the year (so
the Bible says) when Caesar Augustus decreed that a census of
the world be taken. A millennial year has thus occurred only
once before: fifty generations ago, in the year 1000, on what
was a very different, more primitive planet earth. So this one
has a strange, cosmic prestige, a quality of the almost
unprecedented. The world approaches it in states of giddiness,
expectation and, consciously or unconsciously, a certain
anxiety. The millennium looms as civilization's most spectacular
birthday, but, as it approaches, the occasion also sends out
nagging threats of comeuppance.

    The millennial date is an arbitrary mark on the calendar,
decreed around the year 525 by the calculations of an obscure
monk. The celebrated 2000, a triple tumbling of naughts, gets
some of its status from humanity's fascination with zeroes --
the so-called tyranny of tens that makes a neat, right-angle
architecture of accumulating years, time sawed into stackable
solidities, like children's blocks. And it is true, of course,
that the moment may signify little to non-Christians.

    Nonetheless, the millennium is freighted with immense
historical symbolism and psychological power. It does not
depend on objective calculation, but entirely on what people
bring to it -- their hopes, their anxieties, the metaphysical
focus of their attention. The millennium is essentially an event
of the imagination.

    Thousand-year blocks of time enforce a chastening standard
of weight and scale. The millennium has a gravitational pull
that draws in the largest meanings, if only because its frame of
reference is so enormous. The millennial drama represents
nothing less than the ritual death and rebirth of history, one
thousand-year epoch yielding to another. Such imponderable
masses of time overwhelm and humble the individual life-span,
reducing human tragedies and accomplishments to windblown
powder.

    The year 2000 has long been a fixed point in the distance, a
temporal horizon line. In recent years the young have begun to
calculate how old they will be at the turn of the millennium.
Older people have wondered if they would live to see it. The
millennium has also served as a projected launch platform for
humankind's most ambitious, far-reaching projects. The year
2000 would be the Year One of a better age, the decisive border
at which the Future would start. Now that the destination of
2000 is approaching with a kind of dopplered urgency, people
are bound to wonder what the future will look like after that.
What will be the new frontier beyond 2000?

    The passage into a new millennium will occur this time in
the global electronic village. It will be the first (obviously,
given the state of technology in the year 1000) to be observed
simultaneously worldwide, with one rotation of the planet.
Almost every human intelligence will be focused for an instant
in a solidarity of collective wonder and vulnerability --
Mystery in the Age of Information.

    The millennium is almost by definition a moment of extreme
possibilities, arousing fantasies that veer wildly between
earthly paradise and annihilation. "The human mind abhors a
vacuum," says Michael Barkun, a political scientist at the
University of Syracuse. "Where certainties are absent, we make
do with probabilities, and where probabilities are beyond our
power to calculate, we seek refuge from insupportable ignorance
in a future of our own imagining."

    Dark meanings still reverberate like distant thunder from
the last millennial passage. There was no widespread panic at
the approach of the year 1000, as some writers have claimed, but
an inescapable note of Armageddon was in the air. Men pondered
over the text of the last days in the book of Revelation: "And
I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the
first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea"
(Revelation 21:1).

    In the year 1000, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse --
War, Plague, Famine and Death -- were riding unimpeded. To be
sure, the apocalyptic Four have a sort of chronic credibility:
They have been prominent in every century. The world would be
paradise indeed if they visited only at each turning of a
thousand years. But in the centuries since the first
millennium, zealous, punitive preachers have endlessly invoked
the Four, backing up their threats of doom with Revelation.

    Millennial expectations at the beginning of this century
brightened, however, and for a while shone with optimism and
self-confidence. The 1939 World's Fair (just before Hitler
marched into Poland) was organized around the sleek theme,
"Building the World of Tomorrow." In 1965 (just before the
Vietnam War began in earnest), the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences brought together its "Commission on the Year 2000."
The chairman, sociologist Daniel Bell, declared, "The problem
of the future consists in defining one's priorities and making
the necessary commitments." In other words, as Barkun observes,
"We get the future we are prepared for."

    But in the past quarter-century millennial visions have
grown darker, lurid as a Brueghel. The best-selling nonfiction
book of the 1970s in America was Christian author Hal Lindsey's
jeremiad, The Late Great Planet Earth. Among many other things,
Lindsey predicted that the Soviet Union would invade Israel and
that, after millions of the righteous were gathered up in the
eschatological event known as the "rapture," Jesus would
descend from the heavens to preside over the real New World
Order. In his 1974 book Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East
Crisis, John F. Walvoord projected his vision: "Destruction on
a formerly incomprehensible scale is clearly predicted for the
end time in the book of Revelation and may be the result of
nuclear war." Evangelist Pat Robertson has said that in the
millennial age the saved will be empowered to control geologic
faults spiritually and thereby prevent earthquakes.

    Where science and technology once seemed to offer a
redemptive promise, they have grown more problematic. As the
second millennium approaches, they often appear to be agents of
either nuclear destruction or materialistic overconsumption and
earth poisoning. The naively shining Cities of Tomorrow have
deteriorated into a vision of Blade Runner, wherein a sinister
polyglot brainlessness reigns, a sort of neofeudal brutality in
the air. An Italian engineer, Roberto Vacca, warned in The
Coming Dark Age, "Our great technological systems of human
organization and association are continuously outgrowing
ordered control [and] are now reaching critical dimensions of
instability." The Club of Rome described The Limits of Growth in
neo-Malthusian terms, reaching the dismal conclusion that the
earth's resources likely could not support the rates of
economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100.
(Later researchers questioned the computer models on which the
project was based.)

    Yet the report had an effect upon global morale. Like oil
spills and acid rain, it seemed to be part of the evidence of a
planetary trend. In this volatile, uncertain atmosphere, the
traditional antagonists, religion and science, edged toward the
idea of a truce based on a concern and reverence for the
endangered life of the planet. Nature ceased to be either a
savage force to be conquered (science) or a lower temporal
form, inferior to heaven (religion). Instead the earth came to
seem an innocent and fragile victim of human excess.

    The pressures of such anxieties have encouraged in some
quarters an ethic of millenarian asceticism, a New Age impulse
to withdraw from the older promises of the consumer society and
its plenitude. Barkun predicts that the approaching millennium
will bring an increasingly skeptical attitude toward gratuitous
technology and a renewed attraction to life in small,
self-sufficient rural communities. People will tend to
cultivate spiritual and aesthetic values in opposition to
material gratification. And the emotional view of the future
will swing sharply back and forth, from exultant hope to bitter
despair. The millennium will be the best of times. Or else it
will be the worst of times. An age of unprecedented wonders will
begin. Or else all the planetary debts will come simultaneously
and cataclysmically due. Either/Or.

    The year 1991 brought the disintegration of the Soviet Union
and with it the effective end -- for the moment -- of the
world's nuclear nightmares. But still it seemed that the
slower-working apocalypses of vanishing ozone and
overpopulation and world hunger and AIDS were menacingly
clustered around the end of the millennium. Perhaps the world's
imagination needs an agenda of dooms, if only to make it focus
upon its New Millennium resolutions. So all Four Horsemen seem
to be up and riding again, joined possibly by the environmental
Fifth. And if 1991 was just another year, what astonishments
will arrive in 2000?

    We like to say that time will tell. But time is elastic and
mysterious and, in its wild, undifferentiated state,
uninhabitable by humans. Life needs its days and nights, its
waking and sleeping, its seasons, its routines, its appointment
books. People organize their lives by drawing lines, segmenting
time, measuring their progress -- clocking themselves. Time is
the organizing principle of conscious human effort. It may be
difficult to understand sometimes, but it is what we have, all
we have, the medium in which we swim.

    In that lies the meaning of the millennium. Delineated time
is history's narrative framework -- the way to make sense out
of beginnings, middles and ends. Everyone is born, and dies, in
the middle of history's larger story. The millennium is a chance
(the rarest) to see, or to imagine that we see, the greater
human story, filed in the file drawer with a click of
completeness. Envisioning the end of one era and the beginning
of another somehow infuses life with narrative meaning. And
surviving the millennial passage, for those who do, may even
have about it a wistful savor of the afterlife.