Millennium Pandemonium

WASHINGTON — Let no one underestimate the millennial wave that will sweep the West over the next three years. Our coming psycho-voyage to the year 2000 stands to be among the world’s most important cultural, economic and political phenomena.

Plans for jet-setter parties on supersonic aircraft following the New Year from time zone to time zone, or to catch the first glimpse of the sun from Mount Hakepa in the Pacific just west of the International Date Line are only the superficial glitz. And the heavy-metal lyrics and art exhibits already symbolizing the millennium with images of imminent apocalypse are more gloomy than rational. But there is a real significance in psychological attention to the year 2000 already apparent. Precedents suggest that this is a mood in which crises, wars, panics and revolutions could all intensify.

Since at least the 1490s, the ends of centuries have been times of speeded-up history, events and consciousness in the West, and the added religious and cultural importance of the millennium to Christianity should treble or quadruple the impact in the years just ahead. Belief in a millennial experience that will bring Christ to reign again on Earth, based on the Bible’s Book of Revelations, has recurred in Christianity since the early days, with particular importance in the religious revivals of the English-speaking world. The Catholic Church, in turn, has made 2000 a jubilee year, and the Adventists and several other conservative, evangelical bodies take the occasion even more seriously.

But the larger impact will be in the variable mix of optimism, pessimism, guilt and hedonism that constitutes popular culture. When Dec. 31, 1999 gives way to midnight, Iceland plans to light bonfires, Britain to have a nationwide pealing of bells and New York to turn Times Square into an extravaganza of TV screens showing festivities in all 24 time zones. The psychological countdown has already begun not just in the giant digital clock that the Irish have sunk in Dublin’s River Liffrey, to set off a giant fireworks display three years hence, but in Western minds and moods.

It stands to reason that January, 1997 not January 1996, would be the jumping-off point, especially in the world’s communications nerve-center, the United States. This country, at least, had to get past its quadrennial preoccupation with choosing a president. And anticipation of a millennium was incompatible with serious discussion of whether Bob Dole or Lamar Alexander would come in second in New Hampshire or whether Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) had a national future. Now President Bill Clinton is riding a limited wave of national optimism--which makes for a perfect transition into the potential importance of the 21st century and the 3rd millennium.

Too much emphasis on the religious side of the event can smack of crackpotism. As the year 1000 rolled around, the bishops and religious leaders who led their flocks to mountaintops or seasides to await some expected development were disappointed. Presumably, this will also be the fate of preachers and cult leaders who take followers into the Idaho mountains or to the California beaches for the day of judgment three years hence.

What can be predicted, with considerable precedent, is the intensifying recurrence in the next three years of the end-of-the-century pandemonium that has been present on so many dimensions in past “nineties”--from the 1490s down to the 1890s--and which we can already see in our own hurtling decade.

Societies of the ‘90s become anticipatory--sometimes happily, sometimes not. Countries that have been the dominant global force in the century coming to a close--Spain in the 1590s, Holland in the 1690s, France in the 1790s and Britain in the 1890s--often dwell on the negative, analyzing the social or economic decay apparent and the potential for the next century to bring tougher times. Worried Britons of the 1890s saw their leadership in danger of slipping away, as many Americans do now. From Paris to Vienna, Europe made the term “fin de siecle” a synonym for 1890s disillusionment.

Conversely, societies about to shine in the next century begin to taste and anticipate those glories in the ‘90s. Spain certainly did in the 1490s, when Ferdinand and Isabella completed the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors even as they commissioned Christopher Columbus to explore a new empire in the Western Hemisphere. The United States was in a similar mood of excitement in 1893, when the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a sort of world’s fair, produced an extraordinary surge of national energy, crystallizing Americans’ belief that the next century would be an American century--as it was.

This accelerating interplay of ambitions and jitters has a record of stimulating wars--two of the biggest conflicts began in the 1690s and the 1790s--and revolutions. The French Revolution began in 1789, and by 1800 had turned into the Napoleonic wars. The countdown to the wars and revolutions of the early 20th century, from St. Petersburg and Constantinople to Vienna and Berlin, began in the tumult and terrorism of the 1890s.

Financial chaos often rides along. Back at the turn of this century, the United States was just coming out of one major financial panic, that of 1893, and heading into another big one, in 1906. Instead of signaling an end to business and economic cycles, the “mega-’90s,” with their rare millennial overlay, could easily see an unexpectedly significant upheaval.

The extent to which American culture, too, may now be on the cusp of millennializing--of courting and speeding up economic, cultural and political change--is only an “x factor” rather than a clear map. But it does suggest certain possibilities. A surprise reaffirmation of America’s 21st century vitality is one; but so is the painful emergence of developments that may cloud its future.

One could be the emergence of a war from one of the global hot-spots--the Middle East, Balkans or Far East--that have a long history of bloodshed. Such a imbroglio could strain U.S. finances and preparedness--just as the 30 Years War did to 17th-century Spain, and the two world wars to 20th-century Britain. A financial crisis is a second possibility. Any replay of the panics of 1893 or 1906 would create a third panic--in the executive suites of mutual funds worried about the trampling effect of a public stampede.

Still another possibility is that the United States is heading into an era of political upheaval and reform. The 1790s and 1890s both began as conservative periods of government fealty to business and finance. But both concluded amid very different currents: the empowerment of Jeffersonian Democracy in the presidential election of 1800; and the populist-progressive era that followed the late 19th-century Gilded Age.

Few currently see any such era on the U.S. horizon, but circumstances in the other English-speaking countries lend support to the idea of a broader pressure. Potential upheaval is everywhere. Canada could break up over independence for Quebec. Australia has been having an off-and-on discussion of shedding the British monarchy and becoming a republic. Even the British have growing doubts about the monarchy and could change it--with talk of abolishing the House of Lords in favor of an elected Senate or requiring a nationwide, popular referendum as the vehicle for any such sweeping change.

Could anything like this happen in the United States? Not without a multiple crisis of confidence--in the nation’s political leadership, its ethics and the current system of elections. But elements of that crisis are already recurrent news headlines.

If we were simply in the final decade of another century, the chances for the acceleration-of-change consciousness and upheaval over the next several years would be significant enough. But with the added millennial ingredient, the ticking digital clock of history is certain to bring a lot more fireworks than anybody has yet imagined.