Millennium madness

Like it or loathe it, you can’t ignore it - the new millennium is almost upon us. Caroline Deacon examines what all the fuss is about.

It seems as if the world has gone mad. Saturday April10th, thousands of couples were madly trying to conceive the first New Millennium baby. Other people are still trying, at grossly inflated prices, to buy flights to New Zealand - one of the first place on earth to see the sun rise on January 1st 2000. Our press is bickering about the most expensive tent ever, the Millennium Dome. There are nasty rumours that champagne is selling out, and if you were hoping to get a baby-sitter on 31st December 1999...... forget it.

A commentator said recently that millennium fever was pointless. We are “preparing to celebrate a mere number, entirely devoid of meaning with a dome entirely devoid of content.” 

While we might agree with his opinion of the Dome, it would seem that he is otherwise missing the point. The madness now gripping the country results partly from our fascination with numbers and our deep seated urge to organise our lives accordingly. Round numbers have special symbolic power  - why otherwise would we endow our 40th, our 60th birthday, with particular significance?

Of course the Millennium is arbitrary in the sense that evolving a counting system based on the number ten is arbitrary. Base twelve would be far easier - it divides more neatly for instance. Binary counting makes sense too - nature is full of such divisions; day/night, male/female etc. For a computer, which counts in binary, the Year 2000 would be ‘1111101000’ - not terribly interesting, just a bit of a mouthful. Scholars believe the decimal system evolved from counting on our ten fingers. The Mayan civilisation’s numbering system was based on twenty (fingers and toes?). If they had continued in greatness, we might only now be celebrating the first millennium.

Incidentally,  the majority of people inhabiting Britain during the last millennium managed to miss out the fuss. The “man in the field’s” concept of the passing of time was more cyclical; only the priests and scribes were marking the passage of time in a linear fashion. Given the amount of hype this time round, this lack of awareness might make the last millennium seem a more attractive time to be alive. Our ancestors from that period were a fairly healthy bunch. They grew to the same height as us, they knew hunger but rarely famine. They lived in a nice, quiet, sparsely populated, rural environment (total population was under one million). However, life was shorter - most people died in their forties.
 
If you think about it, it is only relatively recently that the whole population has been able to mark the passing of time according to the number of revolutions of the earth around the sun. This takes 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45.96768 seconds. Very difficult to record - impossible to experience practically. It would be much easier (for us in the temperate regions that is) to focus on the passing of solstices and equinoxes, or even lunations (revolutions of moon around the earth).

Another irony about the millennium is that it seems the bigger the party, the more secular the group. Yet without Jesus Christ, there would be no party. The original meaning of the word “Millennium” was the end of time,  referring to a span of  1,000 years between the first and second coming of Christ, the latter occasion culminating in the final battle.

The majority of people in Britain today probably spend little, if any, time wondering when the Second Coming is due. Yet subconsciously we have been absorbing several apocalyptic messages this year. The most popular horsemen at present  are the greenhouse effect, nuclear/chemical/biological weapons, genetically modified foods and, of course appropriately enough, the millennium bug.

This is predicted to shut down hospital life support systems, water and electricity supplies, traffic lights, banks, nuclear reactors, not to mention detonating nuclear bombs. Russia have apparently told us not to worry - their computers are too old to be affected by the millennium bug! Comforting thought. It seems we don't need God to bring about an apocalyptic ending, we can manage perfectly well ourselves. Our only problem is, who are The Just who will be Saved? Computer programmers apparently - some have already fled into the wilderness of Arizona to sit out Armageddon,  according to Wired magazine.

However we might intellectualise away the 1st January 2000, what we really need to see is that this is a universal rite of passage - a birthday for the world. This is the only truly world-wide event since 1945. It will have a profound meaning for people everywhere.

We are about to cross an invisible but immovable barrier. As Freud said in 1900, “the one thing we all know for sure about the new century is that we shall all die in it.” For older people, the millennium will have strong associations with mortality. For those born in the sixties and seventies, there will be a feeling of a line being drawn across the middle of our lives. Where will it occur in your life - marking the middle? Heralding the end? Or as a teenager - marking the beginning of your adult life? For my youngest child, she may barely remember it, being under four. Whatever, it is the end of a particularly awful century. Lets hope the year 2000 will bring better things for all of us.

Countdown to the Millennium

• Forget the pre-Xmas shopping rush - think big time. Start now, and don’t stop.
• Spend, spend, spend - your bank’s computer is going to lose your savings anyway
• Buy: fireworks, candles, tinned food, generator, your own island
• Stock up on champagne or sleeping pills, depending on your point of view
• Dig your own well
• Move house - well away from flight paths, major road junctions - all civilisation in fact
• On the 31st December: find your matches, candles and bottle opener - don your asbestos suit, and wait...

If you are not yet sick of the millennium, here are some good reads:-

Questioning the Millennium by Stephen Jay Could
The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger
And of course there is always:
John’s Revelation

© Caroline Deacon
article first appeared in Home and Country Dec 99