Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown
By Stephen Jay Gould
Vintage, 1998
190 pp., $17.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
This may be the only occasion in the history of Green Left Weekly when the following gets said, but John Howard is right. The year 2000 is the last year of the 20th century, not the first year of the next millennium.
All the celebrations on new year's eve 1999 will not be seeing in the beginning of the next 1000-year chunk of human history, because the sixth century monk who reset the western calendar from Jesus' birth started counting from year 1 instead of year 0. So we are a year ahead of ourselves, and the new millennium won't begin until the year 2001.
Our prime minister's wisdom, however, is unlikely to dampen the revelries at the end of this year, which, as Stephen Jay Gould argues in his book on the millennium, will be driven by the "common sensical" view that 2000 is such a neat number that it ought to inaugurate the end of one lot of a thousand years and the beginning of the next.
Historical awareness of monkish errors and fealty to the mathematical concept of zero won't get much of a look in, except amongst what Gould calls the "high culture" of the intelligentsia and people in power (such as John Howard, who is clearly above the common herd and their propensity to party at the slightest excuse).
Gould presents a rationalist guide to the controversy. The millennium was originally a belief in apocalypse by the Palestinian Jews of antiquity. These people included the sect of Christians who believed that one particular faith-healer and preacher was the son of God, who would stage a second coming, wipe out the unrighteous (the heavy-taxing Romans and their Jewish collaborators) in a purging apocalypse and rule for 1000 years of bliss (the millennium) on earth.
This expectation had to be revised once Christianity was transformed from a persecuted and radical sect to a secular power and official ideology under the Roman Empire: "Prophetic doctrines and mass movements for the cataclysmic end of the earthly order", says Gould, were a threat to the now institutional church and its state partner.
Although revolts based on explicitly Christian millenarian inspiration continued to recur through subsequent eras (including the revolt of the Sioux Indians in 1890, which was ended by the massacre of 160 Sioux at the Battle of Wounded Knee), the millennium as a calendar unit of 1000 years, rather than rebellion, took official hold in Christianity.
The problem of when to start the count was determined by the ecclesiastical timekeeper Dionysius Exiguus, the sixth century monk who was instructed by the pope to set an official Christian chronology. Here lies the source of all our woes about what year begins the millennium. For not only did Exiguus start counting at year 1 rather than year 0 (no fault of his — western mathematics at that time had no concept of zero), but he was out by four years on the death of Herod, so, to make Jesus overlap with Herod (rather crucial if the nativity bits of the Gospels are to stand), Jesus' birth date has had to be pushed back to 4 BC.
So, the 2000th year since the birth of Jesus actually occurred in 1996 (if you count, like Exiguus, without a zero), or 1997 (if you slip the missing zero back in). Either way, it's already happened.
Gould, despite knowing better than to recognise 2000 over 2001 as the landmark year, or either over 1996 or 1997, and despite his unwillingness to "get with the program" as the marketing opportunity of the year 2000 hits its stride, nevertheless intends to celebrate the year 2000 as an act of sympathy with popular rather than high culture.
In all this we can agree with Gould, who as far as humour and humanist principles go would knock John Howard into a cocked hat. But the big question missing in the whole millennium debate is "What, exactly, do the 2000 years signify?".
The time elapsed since the birth of Christ, of course. And that, for socialists and atheists, undermines the significance of the whole millennium business, because Jesus (whose historical existence is lost in the mists of legend, making a further mockery of the exact year of the millennium) is not the son of God because there is no God.
Rather than recognising a year based on the mystical beliefs and superstitions of a prescientific age, and institutionalised in a church which so often collaborated with the ruling class, we could take our cue from the French Revolution, which reset its calendar to year zero in 1792, the most radical, democratic and plebeian year of a revolution which has inspired (and offered cautionary tales) to later generations of socialists. That would make the year 2000 merely the year 208.
Let us then celebrate the year 208 and the socialist tradition of revolution and reason, something that John Howard would surely not have in mind.