"What we are beginning to wake up to today, as if from a long drugged sleep, is that we have for millennia structured our social institutions and our systems of values precisely in ways that serve to block, distort, and pervert our enormous human yearning for loving connections. We see this all too hideously in the carnage of our world, unrelenting, and unremitting now for almost five thousand years."
— Riane Eisler, Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995)
A thousand years ago, according to some versions of popular history, Europe braced for the coming of the new millennium. Fear was in the air. Would the year 1000 not only flip the calendar page but trigger the advent of a long-foretold divine reckoning? Would humanity stand accountable at last before the celestial tribunal of an all-powerful — and highly critical — God?
Not surprisingly, considering the way human beings had been treating each other, fears of eternal damnation ran high. The apocalyptic fever thus gave rise to a flurry of repentance, forgiveness, and general good-deed doing. When the momentous year 1000 was finally upon them, Europeans took a collective breath and braced for the inevitable.
And then, nothing happened.
Unfortunately, the dawn of the second millennium was in actuality not nearly so neat and tidy an exercise in dramatic weirdness. According to Mark Kingwell, author of Dreams of Millennium: Reports From a Culture on the Brink, the Christian calendar at what we now consider the year 999 A.D. was at the time far from the widely accepted standard. For one thing, the Arabic zero was not yet a part of Western mathematics. For another, the matter of when a day or a week really began was a subject for debate. In any case, Christianity still was a rather "fragile plant" in Europe, as religious historian Karen Armstrong notes. Thus, for most inhabitants of the globe, the year 1000 simply . . . was not. (see sidebar "What Millennium?")
So millennial fever, such as it was, actually played itself out over the course of many, sometimes messy, decades. And the apocalypse averted at century’s dawn allowed the apocalypse realized of century’s end, in the form of slaughtered Jewish and Islamic victims of the First Christian Crusade.
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Today our world is about to enter a new millennium, at least according to the Western calendar. If it is worth anything at all, other than the inevitable marketing moment it is destined to be, perhaps the coming of the millennium offers an opportunity to take stock of our collective place, to reflect on our lives, and to consider where we as a society are heading, or should be heading.
This time around the apocalyptic specter is largely focused on the technological problem of how to reset the dates on the world’s computers. No doubt it is an issue to ponder. Yet the "Year 2000" problem appears somehow modernly mundane next to the fated and fiery visions of old. It is true that predictions of an economy pockmarked by breakdowns and computer chaos may eventually prove prescient. But it also seems reasonable to argue that any epidemic of technological glitches will eventually and most likely be fixed.
Whatever the course of events, the technological tangle at issue is appropriately symptomatic of a world reshaping itself at an accelerated — and unsteadying — pace. From automobiles to airplanes, electricity to email, our lives and the ways we live them are profoundly shaped and influenced by the culture of technology. No wonder then that popular ideas about the future often represent simply an extension of the technological vision.
If you’ve lived in this country, you know that vision by heart: human beings master galactic space travel only to find themselves careening through a futuristic Star Wars universe of battle and conflict. Then, after exhausting 10-hour days vanquishing evil and/or out-of-control asteroids, come relaxing evenings lounging around computerized dream houses that leave little room for anything except constant techno-dazzled awe.
Of course, the lounging never gets too boring, as the good guys (and it is invariably a guy kind of future) reap the rewards of the heroic life in the dessert-images of beautiful women who — thank God some things never change! — continue to adorn the world as tasteful backdrop to the things that matter.
A "Women’s Movie" of a Future?
Is it possible to imagine a different kind of future, one in which human relationships transcend the "eternal" power struggles, violence, and sexuality as male conquest so common to the mainstream imagination? It is not a question asked much in popular entertainment media. But as we come to the close of a century whose stunning technological progress is dwarfed only by the extent to which that technology has also been used to expand the depths of human suffering, it is a question worth asking.
To envision social relationships as essentially peaceful and loving, creative and visionary — a milieu in which human beings have actually worked out what has systematically divided them — is largely viewed in our media conglomerate culture as the ultimate brush with boredom, one long, so to speak, "women’s movie" of a future.
It’s more entertaining to imagine the life to come as a kind of MTV video, alive with interactive special effects, though in the end it offers little more than what media critic Sut Jhally calls the "male fantasy dream world" in which women are objects and happiness is the acquisition of objects — and where power is ultimately defined through violence and control over others.
Of course, life does change, always. Not so long ago, slavery was considered morally justified, women could not vote or open a bank account, and psychologists advised parents not to hug or kiss their babies too much. Under feudalism, it was considered dishonorable for noblemen to buy land. The "manly" thing to do was to just take your neighbor’s land, and kill him if he didn’t like it. The capitalist idea of free enterprise originally offered a kind of civilizing antidote to this mentality.
Today, corporations don’t steal people’s livelihood by outright force, they just "downsize" employees out of jobs when it suits short-term profits, if not human needs. The fiefdoms of feudal privilege have given way to the facades of choreographed elections in which two white guys in blue suits (usually) pretend to be enemies, instead of the "evil of two lessers" filmmaker Michael Moore describes. The illiteracy that marked the Middle Ages has evolved into a news media culture whose modus operandi is stupefying sensationalism and conformity.
"God Doesn’t Let Children Starve"
Unlike the common beliefs of a thousand years ago, however, there is today at least greater awareness that much of what confronts us is a challenge we can meet. We recognize our hand in the state of affairs, as Alfonso Monturori and Isabella Conti note in From Power to Partnership: Creating the Future of Love, Work, and Community. Writer Marianne Williamson drives the point home with her usual succinctness: "God doesn’t let children starve, people let children starve."
Still, we let it happen. The world’s leading democracy can justify economic sanctions against a third world country that leads to the deaths of 500,000 plus children, representing a six-fold increase in the mortality rate of children under age five, according to the World Health Organization. And the ambassador of that democracy, Madeline Albright, can tell 60 Minutes reporter Leslie Stahl that the consequences for these children, whose only apparent crime was being born under a bad (Iraqi) leader, are definitely "worth the price."
Closer to home, co-authors Jack Canfield and Jacqueline Miller report in their book Heart At Work, on a contemporary economy charged with tension, with stress-related illness epidemic and "wretchedly soulless work" rampant. "For those of us who choose to see," they write, "we find insecurity, fear, despair, resignation, and cynicism are at an all-time high. Catastrophic social changes are upon us and all of our systems seem to be on self-destruct. The message is‘profits before people,’ and as a result, the dreams of a better life have become the nightmares of disappointment for far too many people."
The Consciousness of Limitation
What all the conflict and division and wasted lives are about is what Manuel Castells, director of the Center for Western European Studies at the University of California, Berkely, describes as the extraordinary gap between our "technological overdevelopment" and our "social underdevelopment." Social institutions remain enmeshed in values or levels of consciousness, says Castells, that "limit collective creativity, confiscate the harvest of information technology, and deviate our energy into self-destructive confrontation."
The result is a paradox: world rich in a veritable banquet of modern achievements, technological progress, and growing wealth, yet so far incapable of satiating its appetite for violence and hatred, greed and divisiveness. Thus, advances in technology serve human needs only too often as money-making afterthoughts to the ever-expanding science of militarism or the private agendas of business elites. Democracy runs no deeper than powerful moneyed interests allow. And prosperity remains the birthright of a fortunate few as a "have-not" economy wraps growing millions in its discouraging embrace.
This litany of troubles is profoundly global in nature. The third millennium is unfolding against the backdrop of an emerging global economy in which fewer than 400 people control more wealth than 40 percent of the world’s poorest people. And while technology writers glow over the brave and convenient new world of the internet consumer, half the world’s households remain too poor to own a telephone.
Indeed, globalization is driven by twin engines of both promise and peril. The ties that bind the world economy create vast new possibilities to build a truly global and prosperous human village. But that prosperity has so far been limited. Meanwhile, there is growing peril in what Castells describes in his book End of Millennium as the "black holes of social exclusion" spreading precipitously across the planet.
This "new geography" of exclusionism, says Castells, represents a largely forgotten world of "millions of homeless, incarcerated, prostituted, criminalized, brutalized, stigmatized, sick, and illiterate persons," populating not only impoverished rural Africa, Latin America, and Asia, but literally every country and every city in the world. And their ranks are growing.
The "Calculus of Soul Over Gold"
Interestingly, the original concept of millennium referred not just to any old thousand-year period, but to the future thousand-year reign of Christ on earth. It was to be a reign inaugurated in the apocalyptic destruction of the established order and ending in the Last Judgment of all who have lived. If the "Great Gettin’ Up Morning" has been slow in coming, however, the apocalyptic vision has nonetheless endured. And for good reason.
"Apocalypticism," writes the popular scientist Stephen Jay Gould in Questioning the Millennium, "is the province of the wretched, the downtrodden, the dispossessed, the political radical, the theological revolutionary, and the self-proclaimed savior."
To the oppressed Christian under the heel of the Roman Empire, the Anabaptist peasant of the 16th century, the modern marcher for civil rights, there is a sustaining vision to the belief that the bullies and tyrants are, in fact, operating on borrowed time. The belief in a divine and imminent judgment also gives force to ethical choices favoring, as Gould remarks, the "calculus of soul over gold."
Today we hold that whatever judgment awaits us will be primarily of our own making. The ideas of equality and democracy, of free speech and representative government, that three hundred years ago seemed radical and unproven are now taken for granted. Will future generations one day look back in wonder at our age, how for so long we put up with so much pain and cruelty, war and divisiveness, such glaring contrasts of poverty and wealth? Or will they see, in our history, the sparks that inaugurated enlightenment? This is the millennial challenge.
Visionaries, activists, and just plain determined people have already begun to meet that challenge. When Margaret Sanger opened her first birth control clinic in 1916, only to have it raided within days by the New York City vice squad, she was inaugurating in her quest for reproductive rights a revolution in consciousness. When Albert Schweitzer dropped his career in classical music to open a hospital in Africa, he was not just changing careers but also broadening the definition of achievement. When you volunteer at that food pantry, or that environmental action committee, or that literacy campaign, you are helping to change the spirit of our culture.
This innate spirit for life and love, for human dignity and freedom, stands as a powerful antitode to any sort of consuming pessimism. If social systems are bordering on self-destruct, Canfield and Miller remind us, there is growing thirst for spiritual awareness and personal development. "More people want to make a difference, not just a living," they conclude.
Not everyone is a Margaret Sanger or an Albert Schweitzer or a Martin Luther King, Jr. or a . . . wait a minute, this list could go on and on! The world is indeed rich in both known and unsung heroes, individuals who in their own personal ways, honor the spirit of love, caring, and connection. In this context, perhaps the idea of millenium — the urge to take stock and evaluate our lives — will mark the advent of an era of newly awakened social consciousness. Perhaps human beings, in their majority, will wake up from what cultural historian Riane Eisler describes as the trance of a centuries-long detour into endemic social violence and cruelty.
In this awakening will come the potential to create a new society, one in which the everyday wisdom of life is built on the recognition that war, sexual conflict, and social oppression are neither biologically nor divinely ordained. And where the personal or religious ethic of love no longer strains against the dysfunction of economics or politics, but becomes their guiding spirit.
We can hope.