Draft of address, Millennium Conference,
Pocantico Hills, 22 Feb 1996

I. Introduction: Ends and Beginnings

It's the end of a century. It's the end of the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain, the Cold War, the Soviet Union, South African apartheid, the world in black-and-white. It may even be, as some say, the end of history, the end of nature, the end of meaning.

Such larger claims arise because it is also the calendar end of a millennium. The 1990s lead up to a year 2000 which has been heralded for five hundred years, anxiously anticipated for one hundred.

As a cultural historian who has examined the patterns of anxiety and anticipation at the ends of each of the last ten centuries, since the turn of the first millennium A.D., I have been asked to address this question:

Can we avail ourselves of the circumstances of our century's end and the turn of this second millennium so as to start making those changes crucial to sustainable life on earth?

Yes, we can. In fact, the very nature and momentum of the ends of centuries impels us toward the making of those changes.

Arithmetically, a century's end may be a set of years like any other; personally, socially, it is a significant threshold.

II. The Personal Impact of a Century's End

Each fin de siecle since the 1290s has evoked in people a sharp ambivalence about themselves, their families, their careers, and their times. If we are taught to fear turning 40, to demand great things upon turning 21, and to make life-changing resolutions at the New Year, we have also learned to fear the '90s, meditate upon the '00, and demand great things of the '01.

For eight centuries at least -- longer in Jewish and Islamic contexts -- people have despaired about their world during the final years of a century, but they have also ached to do something of enduring importance for the new century beyond.

Let me illustrate the deeply personal effects of fin de siecle sentiments of gloom and presentiments of glory with the life of a German artist whose images still shape our visions.

In 1498, the same year that he completed his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Albrecht Durer painted another in the series of self-portraits he had begun in 1492. Here, in 1498, is Albrecht as a youth of twenty-six, his glance sidewise, the lines of his blouse irregular, his cap playful, his chest vulnerable, his demeanor casual but suspicious, the hands folded but not relaxed. He scarcely insists upon his presence. His inscription is almost abashed, and his now-celebrated monogram A.D. is rather inconspicuous than boastful.

Two years later, Durer painted yet another self-portrait.

Now he is twenty-eight, the climacteric age which, according to contemporary physicians, marked his accession to adulthood. And now he faces us straight on, centered and challenging, his right hand in a gesture of spiritual authority drawn from Byzantine portraits of Jesus as Christ the King. Durer is ready to assume the mantle of maturity: his dress is heavier, more serious; his demeanor less vulnerable.

The second self-portrait urges upon us the extraordinary coincidence of Durer's accession to personal and artistic maturity in the year A.D. (Anno Domini, or Albrecht Durer?) 1500. The A.D. monogram itself is bolder, and the language of the inscription is now Renaissance Latin rather than High Medieval German. In 1500, an adult, Durer was consciously reclaiming the Golden Age That Was Rome and proclaiming a New Golden Age as his generation came into its own.

Durer's particular emphasis upon the tight, meaningful convergence of

generational change,
world-historical age,
and calendar page

must be kept in mind as we approach our own century's end.

The centurial moment brings front and center the most difficult of sums: the problem of generations. Each of us is confronted with highly-charged calculations of continuity: Will my generation make it across the centurial divide? What am I handing on to my children's children -- inevitable disappointment? irremediable blight? insufficient bounty?

III. Tendencies at Centuries' Ends

For planning boards from Nigeria to New Zealand to New York, this century's end has come and gone. Economists and ecologists are hard at work imagining 2020 or 2045. For political hopefuls, however, as for admen and corporate spokeswomen, gloom and glory are still keyed to the year 2000.

Without an understanding of the tensions historically inherent in these Nineties, we risk mistaking our own ambitions and misreading the actions of others. Ignoring our calendar times, we may lose our collective place.

Best, therefore, to be aware of-and come to terms with-our historical pattern of responses to the fin de siecle. The more we appreciate the pattern, the more we can make of this unusually rich moment, the end of a century and the turn of a millennium.

Of the many tendencies notable at centuries' ends, the following seven are most exaggerated at this millennial divide:

1. Compulsively Counting Down.
Centuries' ends encourage the reduction of all things to numbers, and of all numbers to common denominators or points of origin, "strange attractors"; amidst the chaos -- or black holes. The reckoning occurs in insurance tables, risk analyses, genetic matrices; it is reflected in our fascination with DNA codes (Mendel's matrices were rediscovered in 1900; the Human Genome Project may be completed, some say, by 2001). The numbers that count down to century's end add up, literally, to one's identity.

2. Trying to Keep Up with the Times.
Centuries' ends convince people that everything is speeding up. The 20th century has been most jittery about the acceleration of time. Only this century have we been at pains to label each decade. Only this century have we perfected the gear to hear and see instantly the tremors and tragedies that disfigure each week and year. Indeed, in the wake of 1984, escaped from Orwell's Big Brother, we have been witness to world events in which famine and freedom, stock market crashes and sectarian clashes have affirmed on video the sudden, sometimes devastating end of an epoch.

3. Feeling Distraught and Depleted.
Centuries' ends are taken to heart as ends of the line. To live at century's end is often to feel as if one were living in an exhausted era, during which traditional careers and identities, like certain birds or nations, vanish. When humanity itself seems threatened with the loss of its natural resources, people regularly lose their natural reserve or adopt an unnatural reserve. Suicide is viewed with enormous seriousness, for the ending of one's own life is too resonant of larger ends: toxic pollution, mass extinctions, a dead planet.

4. Getting Confused about Conclusions.
Centuries' ends seem interminable; the end has been held in sight for so long that it seems to take forever for anything decisive to happen. The desire for things to come to a head soon leads people to be jumpy: to jump to conclusions, to reverse themselves, to suppress the logic behind major decisions lest their motives seem too emotional or too mystical.

5. Searching for Signs and Synchronicity.
Centuries' ends so condense events that no coincidence can be free of hidden meaning. People are obsessed with conjunctions (astrological or economic), correlations (poetic or politic), convergences (historic or harmonic). With mixed emotions, they record all signs of degeneration, then seek out signs of new life. Surely, if one sifts through the rubble, one should be able to piece together clues to the next, and new, and improved age. So arise images of lost tribes or lost continents that must be found before we can make a confident transit into another era. Exploration takes on a unique urgency, for how can one put paid to an old world without having at the ready a new world -- out there, or down under, or up above?

6. Going For Broke.
At centuries' ends people believe that events and inventions are spinning out of control. Some, melancholic, explain this away as illusion: their generation is aging, civilization is in decline, Nature is losing its vitality, as the universe proceeds apace, oblivious. So arise demands for conservation; a politics of scarcity challenges any presumption of abundance. Our world is broken; we must fix it, now or never.

Others, aglow, explain our loss of control as the necessary hop-skip-&-jump into an illustrious future. Some things must be broken or die away for other things, more glorious, to emerge.

From either angle, the critical factor is energy. People fantasize new sources of energy which can keep humanity humming. There is no more seductive image at a century's tired end and awkward turn than the image of unlimited energy and worldwide rejuvenation. Hoping now to cross a steep millennial divide, we are most desperate to unlock new sources of energy (which explains in part the ruckus over cold fusion and the drumbeating for batteries that keep going and going and going).

7. Thinking Globally.
Each century's end the world itself becomes rounder, subject to an ethos which begs or demands that humanity be made whole and encompassable. Calls to thinking globally are as central to this epoch as calls for global communications; both insist that self-interest presumes a wider interest in the human predicament. Acts of retrospect at ends of centuries, and particularly at this turn of a millennium, persuade people to consider themselves in the largest contexts, as part of a continent, a hemisphere, a species, a WorldWeb, a populated globe, a solar system. Our new-found ability to scan Planet Earth from orbit amplifies those internationalist and environmental concerns that typically arise during a fin de siecle. We look for "universal" languages or technologies to unite the world. We are inclined toward short-term prophecies of -- and speedy therapies for -- personal, familial, social, and ultimately global transformation.

IV. This Century's End and Millennium's Turn

Used worldwide for commerce, diplomacy, communications, and scientific exchange, the Anno Domini or Common Era calendar now leads all people, for the first time in history, to a common millennial divide -- a divide which has drawn attention as not simply the conclusion of a millennium (a thousand years) but as the start of a Millennium, a sabbatical era of universal peace.

In consequence, one faith and one fear common at each fin de siecle are especially pervasive now.

The faith:
That whatever happens around the year 2000 can -- and perhaps must -- happen abruptly.

In fields ranging from mathematical topology to political science, evolutionary biology to econometrics, linguistics to neurology, theories of change have become theories of swift, cascading change. This century's end, more than any other, abounds with lay and learnŽd convictions of rapid transformation.

The fear:
That, individually or collectively, we are becoming obsolete.
What we really want, now, is the millennial insurance of a perpetual motion machine, something from which to draw the energy and the vision to persevere and the assurance that perseverance furthers -- that we are not, already, out of time.

V. How To Make Something of this Millennial Moment

Fearful or faithful, we are gifted with a radiant moment, something like a nova, when people look in all directions for guiding lights and recastings of purpose.

At this turn of a millennium, people are more likely to welcome and work toward significant longterm change. Why?

Because we feel the urgency of reaching goals set long before. Because the year 2000 is understood as a moratorium. Because we are increasingly certain that rapid transformations -- driven by small changes in initial conditions -- are natural and integral to life. Because we want out of those political traps and spiritual quagmires which seem suddenly to be antiquated, or which make us feel personally outmoded.

How, specifically, can we avail ourselves of this centurial and millennial opportunity to move people everywhere to act on behalf of the generations of the 21st century?

I shall make seven suggestions, drawn from and keyed to the seven centurial tendencies I have sketched out.

Action 1: Compulsively Counting Down.
Given that the year 2000 figures so prominently in our cultural arithmetic, let us encourage people of all ages to tell the stories of their lives in this century and what it will mean to them to cross over into a new century. Let us circulate these stories as a means of counting across the millennial divide.

Let us use these stories to bring together the old and the young, so that we, one by one, make our ages and numbers add up to an empowering Millennial Moment.

Action 2: Trying to Keep Up with the Times.
Given our fin de siecle anxieties about a world moving too fast, let us make available to people everywhere the means by which to take time out (a day, a fortnight, a month) during the year 2000 to do something with and for their community -- something that assures them of their own timeliness, that they shall not be overlooked. We would do well here to create and distribute a Book of Ideas for rites of passage through the Millennial Moment.

Action 3: Feeling Distraught and Depleted.
Given fin de siecle worries about resources spent or wasted, let us link environmental concerns to the qualities of foresight, innovation, and resourcefulness. The problem with ecological campaigns that arise so often at centuries' ends is that they are seen as nobly retroactive (and therefore lost) causes, as merely preservationist or aesthetic, or as atonement for malfeasance. None of this impresses people with the import of life on a well-tended earth, where beauty is no luxury but a principle of being critical to the Millennial Moment.

Action 4: Getting Confused About Conclusions.
Given the exasperation with a never-ending end and frustrations with endings that whimper, let us make it clear and public that we are already in the Millennial Moment, that what happens now is not a matter of waiting but of our bringing matters to a head. Here, a Millennium Alliance has a central role. An alliance would show that people around the globe are already working to implement changes for the year 2000. An alliance would also demonstrate the considerable logic and stamina behind the many concurrent efforts to insure a sustainable future.

Action 5: Searching for Signs and Synchronicity.
Given the search for meaning in our "postmodernity," why leave the symbolism of 2000 to the advertisers of consumer goods, fond memorialists, prophets of Armageddon, planners of New Year's Eve parties, and a few self-congratulatory futurists enamored of technological progress? Let us work to make clear and public that the Millennial Moment is a time for reflection and then concerted action. Let us collectively issue a Millennium Call to make people aware of what needs doing immediately; the Call and the responses will give meaning to our lives in this Moment.

Action 6: Going for Broke.
Given the contrary feelings of detachment and excitement at centuries' ends, let us make the year 2000 the year in which, individually and collectively, we establish the sureties and bonds for the next millennium. Let us initiate bequests and formal promises to the people of our future. So doing, we will energize ourselves, uncover our own richness as human beings.

Action 7: Thinking Globally.
Given the centurial urge toward ecumenical conferences and universal communications, we could help plan millennial-year colloquies of world leaders or local activists, as the Millennium Institute is doing together with the Icelandic government and in collaboration with the Parliament of the World's Religions. However, in order to move ordinary folk, faced with daily problems, to consider themselves an integral part of a global Millennial Moment, we must seize every opportunity to insist upon the convergence of generational change, world-historical age, and the turn of the calendar page. That is, we need to make clear and public that, at this Millennial Moment, personal stocktaking is virtually inseparable from the social, the political, the economic, and the environmental. To think globally is not merely to think that all people share a planetary grid of latitude and longitude; it is to realize that our apprehensions and ambitions, our dilemmas and solutions are completely intertwined.

VI. Conclusion

There may be no single earth shattering cataclysm in 1999, no avatar to lead us through 2000, no glowing revelation in 2001, but it would be tragic indeed were we to let these years, so full of centuries of longing, pass like any others.

While Albrecht Durer's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride more furiously than ever across all our electronic media, what is that we, with thoughtful audacity, can warrant beyond 2001?

Copyright © by Hillel Schwartz, 1996
7 March 1996

The Turn

The End

The Start

The Idea

The Spirit

The Year

The Meaning of the Year 2000

How do we get beyond the Y2K Computer Crisis? Is millennial fever and techno-phobia distracting the church at the advent of the third millennium? How must the church change in order to be relevant to the 21st century? Let your views be heard on our bulletin-board. Enter the Magi Forum...