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THE MILLENIAL IMAGINATION by Dr. Bradd Shore January 3, 2000 Now that the Millennial crisis appears behind us and we are safely over the line, maybe we can admit that we feel not only relief but just a little disappointed that it all went off so smoothly. Obviously we didn't want the world to come crashing down on us. No one could wish to see planes falling out of the sky, or to have our water supply suddenly dry up and our electricity evaporate before our eyes. But we had been warned, promised big things, Millennial things, universal computer death and terrorist bombs going off in every backyard. The end of the world as we knew it. "Just hype," we protested. But in its grim way, it all seemed to make sense. This was, after all, the Millennium, the Big One. It's hard to get your mind around the very idea of it: but there it was, just as predicted, the year 2000 just minutes away. And for a moment it seemed right that such an earth-shaking event should, literally, shake the earth just a little. In fact it did, sort of. The sight on television of what seemed to be one big fireworks explosion streaking across the earth, igniting in turn the Pyramids at Geza, The Kremlin, the Eiffel Tower, the Thames, the Washington Monument and for a moment overwhelming the lights of Times Square, was a pretty impressive approximation of universal Armageddon translated into pyrotechnic rapture. But when the televised buzz died down, there was that strange hollow feeling I get every January 1st about fifteen minutes into the new year, when all the cheering stops, the feeling that asks "What just happened?" Like people everywhere, we invent all sorts of conventions for marking time and dividing up the flow of our lives. And like everyone else, we don't like to acknowledge that these rhythms are mostly of our own devising. They should be grounded in something beyond us, in the cycles of nature or in transcendent cosmic processes. Major calendrical rituals like New Years have a dual message. They remind us that we are mortal, our lives bound to the flow of time. But they also suggest in their very forms that we are linked to higher orders of existence, and that our lives are but a small arc of bigger rhythms. That we are not alone. Such is the power of ritual in human life. And there's nothing like a new Millennium to reinforce these yearnings to place our lives in a higher framework than everyday life offers up. After all, this vast drama of the Julian Calendar is grounded in the birth of Christ, an event of cosmic significance to the Christian world, and one which marks for Christians the beginning of time and an intimation of its eventual end. And yet this particular celebration didn't quite deliver that. In the end, this Millennium announced itself as a home-made production, one that left us to own devices. We could not, after all, escape the framework of our own conventions. The real Millenium, we were reminded repeatedly, doesn't begin until next year. And then there were the assurances from some theologians that the Julian Calendar is off by four years anyway in its marking of Christ's birth. Out of synch with even our own sacred calendar, we nonetheless plowed ahead and treated the moment as if it were the real thing, impatient for . . . something. Mainly, I think, we wanted assurances that we are not on our own in the universe. The signs of our anxiety are everywhere. We're fascinated with UFO sightings, with alien encounters and with the possibilities that Bigfoot really lives. These are all ambivalent images, at once scary and welcoming. Even the recent spate of end-of-the-world films, with their images of meteorites showering down upon our towns and floods engulfing our cities had an odd sort of cold mythic comfort in that they proposed a moral universe that&endash; even if catastrophically&endash; responds in kind to human failings. But the real fear I suspect is silence, that we are unaccompanied on spaceship earth and that it is ours to tend, for better or for worse. The best we could do that night on TV was to celebrate the momentary unity of the planet, as the change of centuries sparked its way across the world's time zones. Many of us decided to celebrate the Millennium not in some resort in Fiji, or in the Holy Land, but just at home with family and friends. From everything I have read, the hotel industry misjudged what this Millennium would mean for most of us. The mood was nervous and festive in turn. But mostly it was spiritual, a turning inward to the familiar for the kind of consolation and assurance that the cosmos was not about to provide. Here in Georgia we had a lovely, simple dinner with our daughter and her boyfriend. Our son was celebrating the new century down in Florida, just off Alligator Alley with Phish and 75,000 other fans. The rest of us put out our best china and ate in the dining room, propped up in those straight-backed chairs at the big table reserved for special occasions. We poured champaign for everyone. I raised my glass and turned to my daughter and her friend. "I think I belong to the twentieth century," I said. "This new one is for you. Mom and I will be guests, hopefully for some time. But the twenty-first century is really yours. Look after it." We all hugged and then went off to separate parties. Bradd Shore Bradd Shore is Professor of Anthropology at Emory University and Director of the Emory/Sloan Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life.
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