Millennium Matters: Y-2-Fuss, Historically, Over Y2K (12/31/99)

Millennium Matters: Y-2-Fuss, Historically, Over Y2K

By Nathan Bierma
December 31, 1999

I tried to fight millennium madness, by pointing out that as of tomorrow we are only 1999 years past the point we're counting from, that 2000 actually ends, not begins, a century (for the same simple reason years beginning with 19 make up the 20th Century), that Christ was actually born 2005 years ago, that the Twentieth Century as an era made a mockery of our neat one-hundred year bookends by beginning unmistakably with World War I and ending definitively with the fall of the Soviet Union to last 75 years, and that by various calendars around the world the year is is now 5761, 1421, 2390, or 4698.

Well, call me a Y2K lemming, but I'm going to get excited after all about all those zeroes in the year that starts at midnight. Symbolic and useless as it may be, this is a milestone that comes along only several dozen generations.

And as skewed as our calendar may be, it is, after all, the one we operate by the rest of the time. Nobody, not even the pedants currently pushing for the millennium to begin in 2001, bothers measure the 1920's as ending with 1930, or to go back and correct the fact that Kennedy was technically shot in the year of our Lord, 1967.

It's a screwy system, but it's always been, so why bring it up now? While apocalyptic frenzy may be nonsense, nor is this time to deflate the historical significance of the coming midnight.

Its function should be to jostle ourselves from the blinders we put on in order to operate near-sightedly in every day life. We ordinarily are largely oblivious to history and the larger scope of our world, occupying ourselves instead with a things-to-do list composed of items with such gravitas as this or that lunch appointment or a run to the cleaners.

And granted, it takes an Aristotle, loitering and wandering, pondering the absolutes, to daily avoid a life unexamined. (Give Aristotle a mini-van and a pee-wee soccer team, though, and see if he can maintain such portentous pondering).

But the danger of the daily rat race is that its importance swells as grotesquely and irrationally as a Macy's Thanksgiving balloon. We lose sight of the rest of the parade.

So this holiday is occasion to zoom out.

A look at history rewards us. At the end of this millennium we live within the parameters of democracy as a norm and Western civilization as the flagship of the human race. Not only are these realities very recent to develop, as The Economist points out in its fascinating millennium edition, but they appeared unlikely the last time the millennium turned.

At the beginning -- and through the first half -- of this millennium, Eastern empires balanced Western counterparts. Both featured systems in which a staggering majority of the world's people were completely disconnected from the forces that governed them. Only recently have we seen the West become the zeitgeber for the planet, and have people won the right to representative government and freedom from oppression.

The Economist wonders, chillingly, if these trends, given their relatively recent formation, might prove feeble and short-lived by the time Y3K rolls around.

A larger picture clarifies the smaller ones. We simply cannot take our parameters for granted. We do not live in a vacuum, but rather a world whose complex natural, political, cultural, and technological norms are in constant upheaval. Affixing our blinders, blocking out these broad backdrops, is an act of self-deprivation.

The turning of the millennium, however symbolic, is no less an intriguing landmark. Just as scientists are marking this deay by re-establishing the exact location of the South Pole (since the old marker slid away, piggy-back on a shifting icecap), at midnight we re-calibrate our greatest dimensions. The rat race will continue, the blinders will be put back on, but if we cannot appreciate the historical and global gravity of what occurs over the next 24 hours, we do not deserve to be running the rat race at all. It may just be a number, but the year 2000 is no less than a floodlight that illumines us to larger realities.

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