Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Forget your computer -- worry about the wacko down the street.
May 18, 1999 | There are two millennium bugs lurking in our future -- one in our computers and the other in our culture. The calendar glitches in our machines will cause more than their share of mischief. But the culture bug will have vastly greater impact on our lives -- and unlike our computer headaches, the culture bug can't be patched with a few lines of code. The good news is that the culture bug may also be a feature: Along with the problems it delivers, it will also yield some unexpected benefits.
This cultural Y2K bug stems from our human fascination with boundaries. We trace figures in the clouds, draw borders on the landscape -- and slice time's continuum into arbitrary chunks as small as seconds and as large as millennia. Thus, the temptation to invest our greatest hopes -- and deepest fears-- into the moment the old year rolls into the new is all but irresistible. And zeros amplify this inclination: The greater the number of zeros in a year to come, the sooner we get nervous and the longer it lasts. Decades make us twitch, and century-ends can change the trajectory of popular culture -- as happened 100 years ago, when centennial-struck citizens in Europe and America spent the better part of the 1890s contemplating what was to come. The moment survives in our vocabulary, with fin de sihcle being synonymous with a mood of sophistication, world-weariness and fashionable despair.
Now, like cherries on some cosmic slot machine, the three zeros of the new millennium are rolling into view -- and if history is any guide, their impact could be felt in some unexpected ways. While computer nerds race to fix the machines, the approach of New Year's Day 2000 will serve up no end of larger surprises affecting global society. Here are a few to contemplate in the months ahead.
An apocalyptic mania?
The last time we crossed a millennium, a horde of apocalypse-struck European peasants disrupted a century of social history. Despite the entreaties of Pope Sylvester II and the religious intelligentsia, the common folk experienced a steadily rising fear in the 990s, taking it on faith that the judgment day, the "nightfall of the universe," was at hand. Visits to Jerusalem in the year 999 soared to record highs as pilgrims descended on that city like an invading army. Of course, that is exactly what the peasants later did, launching the Crusades in hopes of recovering the Holy Land from the unbelievers in anticipation of the second coming of Christ.
At first blush, this sort of calendar-induced social upheaval could never happen today. But scratch the surface of our sophisticated global culture and you will discover a current of millennial fatalism worthy of the most ignorant of medieval peasants. The bestseller of the 1970s was Hal Lindsey's "The Late Great Planet Earth," a biblically based tale of the coming end. It was but the first in what has become a burgeoning industry of authors and TV preachers pandering to millennial anxieties and superstitions.
The millennium has emerged as a steady sub-theme of Christian belief in this decade. In 1990 for example, that religious superstar, the Rev. Billy Graham, joined other ministers in noting the similarities of the Gulf War with apocalyptic biblical prophecy. More recently, pollsters found that fully one-quarter of Americans think that the apocalypse might be upon us.
So far, at least, publics at large have treated the millennium with only passing interest, but individuals and smaller communities have taken more drastic steps. This decade has seen a steady stream of millennial cults pop up around the world, eagerly awaiting the imminent arrival of the end. So far at least, they remain on the fringe, but any number of unexpected events could move the fringe into an unwelcome mainstream. The most troubling scenario is that otherwise-minor Y2K computer glitches could be the catalyst that gives these fears focus and forward momentum. Already in the United States, the prospect of the Y2K bug has been seized upon by some Christian fundamentalists as one more proof of the coming end, a reason to abandon cities for a survivalist lifestyle in remote rural areas.
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