>From: "Peter McWilliams" <peter@mcwilliams.com>
>Subject: Pagans at Princeton!
>Date: Thu, 30 Dec 1999 03:58:17 -0800
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>
>NEw York Times Op-Ed
>
>December 30, 1999
>
>
>The Calendar's New Clothes
>By JOYCE CAROL OATES
>RINCETON, N.J. -- How lonely, how isolated, how un-American and
>uncontemporary one is made to feel, unable to comprehend either the literal
>or "symbolic" significance of The Millennium, and wholly impervious to
>millennium fever. My cautious answer to millennium questions I've been asked
>("What will be the fate of the novel in the 21st century?" "What will be the
>fate of the printed word in the 21st century?" "What will be the fate of
>feminism in the 21st century?" etc.) has been, "Things will probably
>continue more or less as before, with some differences."
>Is my anemic response due to a genetic deficiency, like colorblindness or
>tone-deafness? Is it a perversity of character, like preferring Scrooge to
>others of the cast of "A Christmas Carol"? Is it, more fundamentally, a
>philosophical predilection, a profound skepticism regarding any universal
>significance attached to the numeral 2000?
>
>The more we know of the incalculable complexities of history, or what
>historians define as history, the less faith we have in vast, nugatory
>entities like the "20th century" and the less symbolic significance we can
>attach to artificial distinctions of the calendar derived from religious and
>political (and therefore humanly time-bound) sources. Homo sapiens is the
>species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then
>forgets that symbols are inventions.
>
>(In any case, the spoilsports point out that the millennium per se won't
>begin until the eve of 2001, which leaves all this media coverage
>embarrassingly premature.)
>
>An anthropologist from another planet might wonder at our American obsession
>with a magic numeral, 2000, as the "end" of something (precisely what?) and
>the "beginning" of something else. Assuming that angels (in which, according
>to opinion polls, most Americans believe) will rescue us from a computer
>apocalypse, why all the concern?
>
>If intellectuals egregiously failed in past decades to predict toxic waste
>and the collapse of the Berlin Wall and world Communism, why are they asked
>to predict the fate of the printed word, the Internet, cloning or politics
>in the 21st century? Mindful of the ludicrous "futuristic" visions of the
>50's, which look to sophisticated contemporary eyes like science-fiction
>movie sets designed by young adolescent boys, we should all be cautious,
>even modest, in our speculations. For nothing is ever what you expect it
>will be, nor is it quite like anything else.
>
>Since the calendar numeral 2000 (A.D.) has little intrinsic meaning to the
>majority of the world's people, many of whose traditions predate the
>Christian era, this elevation of the Western/Christian/Caucasian millennium
>is embarrassingly chauvinistic; nor can it have any meaning in nonhuman
>terms, in nature or in the legendary galaxies; or, if it does, it's roughly
>as significant as the abstruse parking signs posted on Manhattan streets, of
>keen interest to local residents but hardly to anyone else.
>
>Millenarian fantasies -- the belief, the crazed hope, that the end is at
>hand -- spring from what we might call the Fallacy of the Round Number. You
>understand that nothing much can happen in A.D. 999 or A.D. 1999, but a
>frenzy comes over you to believe that something must happen in A.D. 1000
>(but, what did?) and in A.D. 2000.
>
>Millenarian Christian belief, which has experienced a populist recrudescence
>in the United States in the past decade, has a long, fevered tradition
>dating back to the first century A.D., when the most passionate Christians
>believed that the Second Coming (of Christ) was immediately at hand, and
>that martyrdom at the hands of their Roman oppressors, often in terrifying
>circumstances, was to be welcomed, even courted. For their Savior seemed to
>have promised, "He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth
>his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal" (St. John 12:25). A
>close reading of the Gospels of the Christian Bible can justify belief in
>the imminent, not the merely ultimate, end of the world, and it's
>understandable that early Christians were drawn to the ecstatic actions of
>faith rather than to the cooler disciplines of logic and analysis.
>
>When prophecies regarding the Second Coming proved disappointing, in the
>practical sense that the world seemed not to end but only just to go on, and
>on, with no obeisance to the calendar, the faithful did as the faithful
>invariably do: they reinterpreted and readjusted the terms of prophecy. The
>Second Coming -- the Apocalypse -- the Rapture -- Armageddon -- are still
>imminent but not just yet.
>
>In the meantime, "sacred" celebrations like Christmas (the birth of Jesus
>Christ) and Easter (Christ's resurrection after crucifixion) were attached
>to dates on the calendar, so that the faithful could observe them annually
>as if celebrating historic events. A dazzling two millenniums later, Dec. 25
>is America's most "sacred" date, the excited focus of capitalists and
>consumers alike. (The Scrooge factor here is that Dec. 25 is an
>opportunistic date adopted by early Christians since it was already a pagan
>holiday, the Day of the Sun, marking the winter solstice as celebrated in
>Rome in a sun-god populist religion called Mithraism, and the symbolic
>significance of the day was too powerful to overcome.)
>
>Our "classless" American democracy has been a fecund breeding ground for any
>number of millenarian sects and cults, most of which are Protestant
>Christian in spirit, derived from selected passages in the Gospels and in
>the phantasmagoric Book of Revelation of St. John the Divine, which
>concludes the Christian Bible.
>
>In the latter we learn that Satan has been "bound" for 1,000 years, at the
>end of which time he will be "loosed" to usher in Armageddon, "the battle of
>that great day of God Almighty" (Revelation 16:14), which will end in the
>triumph of good over evil, God over Satan, and a "new heaven and earth" 
--
>for believers. (Others go directly to hell.)
>
>In biblical times the word "thousand" meant simply a vast period of time.
>How natural then to surmise, if one is Christian and primed for the drama of
>salvation, that a profound significance accrues to any 1,000-year unit and
>that the fin de siècle is likely to be a time of perceived turbulence. Many
>fundamentalist Christian Americans believe in the imminent Rapture, which
>may well usher in the 21st century, and which strikes alarmed nonbelievers
>as quite a scorching revenge upon them for their nonbelief. But to believe
>in the magical properties of "2000" is in itself quintessentially American
>and wholly contemporary.
>
>All this is to explain, not excuse, my personal failure to respond to The
>Millennium with the zeal and imagination with which others are responding.
>
>Though I lack a vision of the 21st century, however, I have been granted a
>vision of the idyllic 31st century, where all the men are beautiful, all the
>women are strong, and all the children are clones of media celebrities and
>favorite pets. But no one has yet asked me about the 31st century.
>
>