PAUL A. COHEN

Millennium Review Essay

Time, Culture, and Christian Eschatology:
The Year 2000 in the West and the World

"If you look at the way we measure time," a woman employed at a rock and roll bar in Alpine, Texas, recently observed, "that's all to do with our culture and civilization. Just because the way we measure time hits certain points doesn't mean everything is going to go to hell in a handbasket, there's just no logic in it at all. I think it's kind of arrogant, because we made the calendar."¹ This insight points to a major problem with the year 2000, namely that its potential significance as end time is grounded in a particular method of reckoning the passage of time that does not have equal import for all peoples. It is not that Westerners alone use the Gregorian calendar; it is used today by peoples all over the world. Nor is it that those outside the West who use it do so grudgingly, as a result of its having been foisted on them at some earlier date. The arrogance the woman alluded to concerns the widely held assumption that the Gregorian calendar has essentially the same meanings for people who are not part of the Christian West—and I would include here Jews in New York City and Muslims in London and Paris—as it has for many Western Christians. Her questioning of this assumption is astute and raises important issues that I want to return to later in this essay. 1

     Another problem with the year 2000 is that, ostensibly, it doubles as the turn of a century and the turn of a millennium, and it isn't clear, as the fateful moment approaches, which transition is going to impress itself in a more lasting way on people's minds. Most writers who have touched on the matter appear to believe that "there is more concern about a new millennium than about a new century."² While this may be true for the near term, it is entirely possible that once the hoopla surrounding the millennial shift is over, people sooner or later will forget that they are living in the third millennium but will remain permanently aware of being alive in the twenty-first century. 2

     The truth is, there has been so much market and media-driven hype concerning the advent of the new millennium that it is often difficult to tell how deeply people feel about it. What are we to make, for example, of the spectacularly successful Left Behind series of apocalyptic fiction, co-authored by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins? The series, named after its first volume, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days (1995), had already sold close to 3 million copies as of the fall of 1998. It has generated a companion children's series (Left Behind: The Kids, already in six books as of the spring of 1999), a music CD, and hats and T-shirts inscribed with the slogan "Don't Be Left Behind."³ Obviously, for many in the West, there is a fascination, even preoccupation, with the year 2000, creating a ready audience for its mass marketing. But this is a far cry from believing in and actively preparing for the end of the world. Indeed, it may well be that, for most, it is the apocalypse qua entertainment that is of primary importance. 3

     There is, finally, the much-noted paradox that, despite the media frenzy, the wide-ranging commercial efforts to cash in on the event, elaborate governmental and institutional preparations (among the more ambitious, those of the Chinese and British governments and the Vatican),⁴ and the much-advertised Y2K computer problem, all of which are tied to the premise that the end will come upon our advancing to the year 2000, the fact is, for the true end of the twentieth century and of the second millennium, we will have to wait another 366 days. (2000 is a leap year.)⁵ 4

     These problems are not going to hinder people, especially in the West but also in large urban centers elsewhere, from making what they will of the year 2000. Many will find in this year a pretext for celebrating something exceptionally rare: it is not granted to every generation, after all, to be alive and numerate at the point at which one millennium gives way to another; very few people since the beginning of the human race have consciously borne witness to the turn of a millennium. Others, mostly it would appear from fringe groups, live in dread of some great cataclysm that they believe will accompany the death of the old millennium and the birth of the new.⁶ Still others, including historians and other academics, religious leaders, and, certainly, the men and women of the media, will see in the year 2000 an opportunity for taking stock, for drawing up balance sheets, presumably focusing more on the twentieth century, which can at least be encompassed intellectually, than on the second millennium, which many people will find it hard, if not impossible, to wrap their minds around.⁷ 5

     An example of the stock-taking response is Fin de Siècle: The Meaning of the Twentieth Century, edited by Alex Danchev (1995). The contributors to this book, which grew out of a series of seminars held at Keele University in England from 1992 to 1994, are mainly British specialists from the fields of international relations, history, and politics. Each was asked to touch broadly on three themes: the salient characteristics of the twentieth century; what, if anything, is ending as the century draws to a close; and whether Winston Churchill was right in 1922 to call the twentieth century a disappointing one.⁸ Although there are occasional efforts in the book to view the century in global terms, it is mainly the West's century—or, if we include Ian Nash's chapter on Japan, the "developed world's"—that is brought under scrutiny. This is suggested in Danchev's introduction, which, following the lead of Susan Sontag, defines the twentieth century as the "Sarajevo century" and dates it as beginning in 1914 and ending in 1991. Even in the one chapter that focuses on the non-Western world (apart from that on Japan), Maha Azzam's useful account of the political movement known as Islamism, the emphasis is very much on the part of the Muslim world—the Middle East—with which the West has been centrally concerned, despite the fact that, as Azzam clearly notes, the majority of Muslims in the world today are not Arab and do not live in the Middle East.⁹ 6

     I do not know whether Churchill, who died in 1965, ever moderated his earlier negative judgment on the twentieth century or would have, had he lived for another thirty years.¹⁰ But others, most dramatically Francis Fukuyama, have concluded that by late century the world is clearly moving in a more hopeful direction. Fukuyama's bold announcement in 1989 that the "end of history," by which he meant "the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,"¹¹ might be just around the corner is treated with thoughtful skepticism by Chris Brown in the opening and in some ways least Western-centered chapter of Fin de Siècle. While agreeing that very important changes took place in the world in the late 1980s and that, in response to these changes, Fukuyama was perhaps asking the right sort of question, Brown finds Fukuyama's answer "not defensible" and concludes that "talk of the end of History confuses and obscures more than it illuminates." "Since," he writes, "there are a great many different histories available—associated with different peoples, cultures and societies—to employ any one history in this way is necessarily to make a claim about its priority over the others . . . [I]nstead of the 'end of History' with a capital 'H,' all that the events of the last few years add up to is the end of one particular history, with a small 'h.'"¹² 7

     In the next several chapters of Fin de Siècle, an effort is made to assess the meaning of the twentieth century for each of the leading geo-political units of the developed world: America, Russia, Japan, and Europe. The most successful of these essays is the one on Europe, co-authored by William Wallace and Piers Ludlow. They skillfully trace the stages in the shift from a Europe brimming with self-confidence at the beginning of the century—"Europeans ran the world, secure in the conviction of their own moral, intellectual and racial superiority"—to one that, after two devastating world wars and the postwar decades of American and Soviet domination, has in the 1990s become "just one reasonably prosperous region in a much more genuinely global system."¹³ 8

     The next group of chapters are arranged thematically and attempt to identify the kind of century the twentieth century has been. Strikingly, among the themes covered—the nuclear revolution, economism, nationalism, Islamism, and community—the Holocaust and other instances of ethnic and ideological genocide in this century are almost completely overlooked.¹⁴ The two most compelling chapters in this section are Richard Wyn Jones's on the implications of nuclear technology and Andrew Linklater's on different forms of political community. Both address unblinkingly the dangerous uncertainties of the next century. Jones uses the critical theory of the Frankfurt school to examine the revolutionary impact of nuclear weapons on the conduct of war and on human psychology. He concludes pessimistically that we have avoided nuclear war as a result more of luck than of good judgment and urges concerned citizens in the future not to let governments continue to get away with mythic justifications of the national security state. Linklater's essay does not make easy reading, but it is highly suggestive in what it has to say about the future organization of political communities in general and the role of the nation-state in particular. The nation-state of the twenty-first century, he argues, needs to be less insistent on its own sovereign rights and more accommodating of "the sub-national and transnational loyalties on which future sites of organizational power may come to rest." An obvious point to make, perhaps, but nonetheless vitally important.¹⁵ 9

     Charles Townshend, in the concluding chapter of the book, focuses on fin de siècle as such. He reminds us that the century as a secular unit is a peculiarly "modern vessel of awareness," acquiring its special relationship to time only in the early 1600s. The phrase fin de siècle is even newer, having first been used toward the end of the nineteenth century. Townshend notes the dual quality of fin de siècle, combining hopefulness and anxiety, a "concurrent sense of progress and decadence." Although he quite properly defines fin de siècle as "an attitude of mind, not a chronological moment," he dwells on the mood of writers at specific moments—the end of the nineteenth century and to a lesser extent the end of the twentieth. Like Jones and Linklater, moreover, when he peers into the century that lies ahead, he does not find the prospects very cheering.¹⁶ 10

     The fact that millennia, centuries, and fins de siècle are all arbitrary ways of designating temporal boundaries does not mean that they cannot have an impact on human consciousness. To have such an impact, however, people presumably must at least be aware of their existence. It was not possible for Chinese living in the thirty-seventh year of the reign of the Kangxi Emperor (1698) to experience a fin-de-siècle mood, and it would clearly be out of bounds for Western historians three hundred years later to imagine them having experienced it. We may well ask, by the same logic, whether it is any more valid for historians of Britain to revisit the fins de siècle of that country's past, beginning with the last decade of the fourteenth century, hundreds of years before the British people even knew what a siècle was.¹⁷ Such is the curious task Asa Briggs and Daniel Snowman set for themselves in their edited volume, Fins de Siècle: How Centuries End, 1400–2000 (1996).¹⁸ 11

     Briggs and Snowman argue that the admittedly artificial notion of a fin de siècle eventually "fed back into the consciousness of those adopting it," so that from our perspective today, "it is impossible not to note how frequently a 'sense of ending' seems to have pervaded each of the periods"—the 1390s, 1490s, 1590s, and so on—dealt with in the body of the book. This may indeed be the case. But one wonders, inevitably, whether it is the job of the historian to surrender to such subjective intrusion or to challenge it. The problem with Fins de Siècle, in short, is not, as in the Danchev volume, geo-cultural parochialism—the book does not claim to deal with anything other than the history of Britain. It is its unabashed presentism: the contrived imposition of late twentieth-century consciousness about century endings on earlier eras that did not yet count time in centuries. This is the sort of presentism commonly encountered in media efforts at historical reconstruction, where the need to spark audience interest all too often triumphs over the commitment to a more faithful understanding of the past. It is perhaps significant, in this light, that the Briggs and Snowman volume first took shape as a BBC radio project.¹⁹ 12

     If one closes one's eyes to the flawed intellectual design of Fins de Siècle, it is really quite a splendid book. It is filled with carefully chosen illustrations, many of them in full color. More often than not, the pictures, in addition to being intrinsically interesting, represent a substantive enrichment of the printed text. The individual chapters, moreover, are well written, informative, and wrestle with the artificial conceptual design of the book in enough different ways to caution the reader implicitly against its validity. The least successful chapter in this regard is perhaps Paul Strohm's on the 1390s. Strohm maintains that "even if few [Englishmen] knew of the century's passing, most of them acted as if they did." Yet, for all his efforts to persuade us of this, it is hard to believe that, among people anxiously searching "for signs that the end might be near" (a more or less constant contemporary preoccupation), anything could have rivaled in impact the plague that in mid-century "eliminated between one-third and one-half of the populace in one year."²⁰ 13

     Malcolm Vale, in his chapter on the 1490s, avoids Strohm's problem by not attempting to locate end-of-the-century consciousness in the minds of contemporaries at all. From our late twentieth-century perspective, he observes, "it is easy to see the 1490s as a time in which Christian believers felt that they were living on the eve of some great seismic eruption," but people at the time, the evidence clearly suggests, simply did not view it that way. Indeed, the picture of England in the 1490s that Vale draws is "one of relative prosperity, cultural richness . . . and religious orthodoxy."²¹ Objectively considered, perhaps the British fin de siècle in which there was the keenest contemporary awareness of great change afoot was the end of the eighteenth century. Even in this instance, however, the sense of change appears to have been consciously linked much more to the passing of one epoch and the beginning of another (unconnected to any numerical reckoning) than to the turn of a new century.²² Finally—and ironically—Asa Briggs, in his concluding chapters on the 1890s and 1990s, the two fins de siècle in which the concept of one century ending and another beginning was most deeply etched in contemporary consciousness, seems to resist overstating the unique importance of century endings. Briggs's contributions are among the finest in the book. Also, due perhaps to the growing ambiguity of the boundaries between Britain and the rest of the world, they are the ones least exclusively focused on England.²³ 14

     There are many kinds of temporal endings: the end of a day or a week or a month or a year, the end of a century, the end of a millennium. Since all of these time units, until now at least, have been followed by their succeeding units, when we think of the end of one time unit, we are conscious of the imminent beginning of its successor. Continuity is a staple of our lives, recurrence and renewal a formidable counter to the sense of finality. Most people, I suspect, are content with this formulation of time consciousness and, without contesting their own mortality, resist associating all endings with individual and collective death. The year 2000 becomes just another turn of the calendar. For those of us who teach undergraduates, it has not taken a major effort to get used to having students in the class of '02, and when we get a new driver's license or passport and the expiration date reads 08–23–03, we give the matter barely a thought. 15

     There are those among us, however, who think otherwise. Historian and psychoanalyst Charles B. Strozier, in his introduction to The Year 2000: Essays on the End (1997), co-edited with Michael Flynn, writes: "Consciousness of human endings haunts the psyches of quite ordinary people. The psychological consequences are enormous. If once it took an act of imagination to think about the end time, now it takes an act of imagination, or a numbing, not to think about it. In such a world we all become end timers . . . 2000 reverberates with our deepest psychological dread. It becomes a metaphor for collective death." Strozier makes a special point of the "historically unique" character of the apocalyptic preoccupations of the late twentieth century, in that, for the first time, they occur in the context of "real, scientific possibilities of ultimate destruction."²⁴ 16

     The contributors to The Year 2000 are, with several exceptions, American academics, and they write about a range of literal and metaphoric meanings linked to 2000, mostly in the American and to a much lesser extent the European contexts. Out of twenty-six chapters, only one, Robert Jay Lifton's essay on the Japanese religious group Aum Shinrikyō, deals significantly with Year 2000 themes outside the West. There are a number of chapters on apocalyptic thought and behavior in the past: Richard A. Landes's on millennial fever at the end of the first millennium (Landes takes sharp issue with those who dismiss the year 1000 as a "year like any other"), Norman Cohn's on medieval millenarianism, Catherine Keller's postmodernist rendering of Columbus's encounter with the "New World" (seen by her as an "unambiguously phallic act" inaugurating the modern era but understood by Columbus himself in characteristically apocalyptic terms), and Strozier's account of the apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding the Civil War and, most strikingly, the assassination (on Good Friday) of Abraham Lincoln.²⁵ 17

     Other contributions to The Year 2000 focus on apocalypse-oriented groups and individuals in the present: the Branch Davidians at Waco and the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building (Strozier again), Aum Shinrikyō, the radical environmentalist group Earth First! (Lois Ann Lorentzen), the growing evangelical Christian men's movement known as Promise Keepers (Lee Quinby), paramilitary groups (J. William Gibson), Christian Identity and other white supremacist organizations (Michael Barkun), and cults centered on some form of end-time prophesy (Margaret Thaler Singer).²⁶ One of the most characteristic features of current apocalyptic groups, as of millenarian movements past, is the extremeness and radical intolerance of their visions, the sharpness with which they draw the line between "us" and "them": the good and the pure who will inherit the utopian world of the future, and "the enemy"—the ultimate source of corruption, defilement, and evil—who are marked for total annihilation. Among the paramount enemies targeted by extremist groups in North America today are the federal government, homosexuals, Jews, and blacks; many of the groups dealt with in The Year 2000 are also profoundly misogynist in their fantasized images of the perfect society. 18

     In addition to specifically apocalytic themes, the book also contains essays that explore such death-related concerns in American life as nuclearism, the resistance to accepting limits (exemplified by the unrelenting quest for total wellness in the health care field), apprehensions of "the end" in the art world, and our resilience in the face of our own destructive impulses as seen in the "witnessing imagination" in theater.²⁷ The trouble is, none of these themes is related in a convincing manner to the millennial turn. Although the playwright Karen Malpede, in her sensitively wrought account of the "theater of witness" that has emerged in response to the violence of the twentieth century, attempts to draw links with the year 2000, this theater, by her own evidence, began to appear at mid-century in response to the Holocaust and shows no sign of abating in force as we move toward the new millennium.²⁸ 19

     As I read The Year 2000, I felt myself to be very much in the role of a spectator. I did not identify with any of the extremist groups discussed or know of persons who were members of such groups. The historical accounts of past examples of apocalyptism were fascinating and the discussion of death-related concerns in contemporary America illuminating (albeit not unfamiliar), but I had little sense, on the whole, that what was being talked about had to do with me and my life. The approach to endist concerns adopted by Eugen Weber in Apocalypses: Prophesies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs through the Ages (1999) had a quite different effect. It certainly did not make me into a millenarian. But it left me with an uncomfortable sense that, at least for people living in the West, the phenomenon of endism could not be entirely dismissed as somebody else's problem. 20

     Although Weber, in the first few chapters, takes note of apocalyptic thought in Asia, Africa, and South America and acknowledges the great variety of calendrical systems used in different cultures around the world, the almost exclusive focus of the book is on the evolution of millenarian ideas in Western Christian societies. Apocalypses is densely, sometimes numbingly, detailed, and I searched in vain through the endless parade of examples of Christian endist preoccupations for "the big point." Also, although "deliberate onesidedness" has been hailed by some as "a methodological virtue,"²⁹ the author, in the singlemindedness of his presentation, carried this virtue to excess. In his account of endist concerns through the medieval period, it was entirely appropriate to focus exclusively on such concerns, "dreadful apprehensions of the approaching end" having been "an integral part of medieval minds."³⁰ But in the last chapters of the book, where he deals with the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, when endism was not a ubiquitous feature of Western consciousness, the continued concentration on millenarian and apocalyptic concerns, to the exclusion of all else, made me uneasy. There are billions of insects in the world, but most of us, while quite aware of this, do not think of ourselves as inhabiting a world of insects; we think of ourselves as living in a world that contains many things, including insects. By confining his account of the intellectual climate of the last three centuries entirely to millenarian and apocalyptic ruminations, Weber conveys an exaggerated sense of the import of such ruminations. 21

     Having registered this complaint, I must acknowledge that, building on this strategy, Weber, especially in his concluding chapter, raises some telling, even disturbing, points. One question he asks is whether, in light of the ample evidence of continued concern with endism in Western society, this concern is truly a fringe phenomenon or only apparently so—an illusion of fringeness fostered by the skeptical, rationalistic biases of modern intellectual life. "Discomforted, disconcerted by the lurid violence of its religious message," he observes, "nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars swept the Apocalypse out of Christianity, and out of Judaism too, ignoring historical experience for the sake of intellectual comfort . . . To the extent that traditional eschatology no longer fits world views we now consider rational, it has been marginalized or swept under the carpet."³¹ 22

     Pushing this insight a step further, Weber challenges historians to take the "irrational" as seriously as the "rational" in their work, keeping in mind that what appears irrational to nonbelievers may seem entirely rational to believers and that even beliefs eventually judged false can provide a solid basis for action. He wonders as well whether the track record of "rational" beliefs for accurate prognostication is much better than that of "irrational" ones: "The history of apocalyptics and millenarianisms is littered with prophecies made and missed; but"—and here he notes Seymour Martin Lipset's oft-cited calculation that two-thirds or more of the predictions made by American social scientists between 1945 and 1980 proved mistaken—"so is the history of all inexact sciences." "If scores of eschatologists have proven mistaken," he concludes, "the answer is not that one of them will prove right one day, but that too many of them have proved too influential—destructive, constructive, inspiring, consoling—and that it is foolish for historians to dismiss or, worse, to ignore them."³² 23

Let me now attempt to situate the issues discussed in a wider context. One of the things that has struck me most forcibly in pondering "end time" concerns is how deeply one's response to them is shaped by personal considerations. Although I think I am as preoccupied as most people with the possibilities of global devastation that now beset humankind, as a Jew (albeit a not very observant one), I feel very much outside the Christian understandings of "the millennium" (based on Revelation Chapter 20) that, explicitly or implicitly, figure in many of the contributions in The Year 2000 and in Apocalypses. This sense of outsideness is doubtless reinforced by the circumstance that most of my Christian colleagues in the heavily secular academic setting I inhabit seem equally impervious to Christian millenarian concerns. 24

     As a Jew, I am accustomed to the idea that, in addition to living at the end of the twentieth century, I also live, according to the Hebrew calendar, in the middle third of the fifty-eighth century. The resulting sense of the relative nature of different methods of reckoning the passage of time is, moreover, greatly augmented in my case by the fact that, as a long-time historian of China most of whose research has been in the late Qing period, before official China's adoption of the Gregorian calendar, I am constantly faced with the necessity of converting Chinese lunar dates into the solar dating system used in the West. Thus, although I of course think in terms of centuries all the time and am completely comfortable doing so, my feeling for the arbitrariness—the constructedness—of this (or any other) form of time measurement is perhaps stronger than that of many Americans. 25

     As a student of a society not part of the Christian West, I also cannot help wondering how a Chinese might respond to the books here scrutinized. Like other peoples throughout the world—Vietnamese, Javans, Melanesians, Jews in the time of the Maccabean Revolt, to name only a few—the Chinese are familiar with "millenarianism," broadly defined according to Norman Cohn as any religious movement inspired by a vision of salvation that is collective, terrestrial, imminent, total, and brought about by supernatural agencies.³³ Chinese millenarianism has been no stranger, moreover, to apocalyptic, "end-of-the-world" doctrines,³⁴ and, indeed, during certain periods, such ideas appear to have been adhered to by a sizable segment of the population.³⁵ But the millenarian uprisings that have occurred in Chinese history have, it hardly needs stating, not been tied to the Western calendar or, for that matter, to "millennia" of any sort.³⁶ So, although Chinese might recognize some of the religious phenomena described in books like The Year 2000 and Apocalypses,³⁷ they would be unlikely to associate them, literally or symbolically, with the time reckoning embodied in the Gregorian calendar. 26

     The reason for this needs some elaboration. After all, in China today, as in much of the rest of the world, time, in the public arena, is generally measured by standard Western dating.³⁸ The Gregorian calendar was adopted officially with the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912 (though, ironically, the event that ushered the republic into being is still typically referred to in Chinese by its cyclical lunar year date as the Xinhai [1911] Revolution). The embrace of Western chronology was viewed at the time as a mark of progressiveness. It was a way of differentiating the new era from what had gone before and also a symbolic declaration of China's having become a member of the world community.³⁹ Modern-spirited intellectuals, though well aware of the Gregorian calendar's Christian origins, argued that they were immaterial since all countries used the calendar and, in doing so, disregarded or were completely unconscious of its Christian links.⁴⁰ The Western calendar was a marker for the modern world; for Chinese committed to joining this world, therefore, its appropriation was a matter of no small import. 27

     But to this day, almost a hundred years after the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, in important sectors of Chinese life the lunar calendar still predominates, not only in the diurnal and seasonal cycles of the lives of poorly educated rural folk but as well among highly educated city-dwellers.⁴¹ Almanacs with the lunar calendar continue to be consulted widely for a variety of purposes even in the most "advanced" parts of the Chinese world.⁴² Countless Chinese, in all Chinese cultural locales, still follow the lunar dating in the celebration of their birthdays and the New Year and other holidays. Indeed, in 1999, in ultramodern Hong Kong, after its incorporation as a Special Administrative Region into the People's Republic of China, the birthday of the Buddha (the eighth day of the fourth month of the lunar year) was, for the first time, made a public holiday.⁴³ 28

     In short, many—perhaps most—Chinese, even at the end of the twentieth century, live in "dual time" (to borrow Leo Ou-fan Lee's apt phrase).⁴⁴ Although my focus here is on China, moreover, it seems clear that this insight is equally applicable to many other parts of the world beyond the West,⁴⁵ that, indeed, it is the Christian West that, insofar as it operates according to and is generally conscious of only one calendar, one measure of time,⁴⁶ is in the minority in today's world. In predominantly Muslim societies and in Vietnam, to cite two examples, the Gregorian calendar is widely used in urban and public settings. But Vietnamese also observe major holidays such as the Buddha's birthday and the New Year according to the lunar calendar, and Muslims, in important areas of their lives, follow a linear lunar year beginning with the Hegira in 622, so that, for example, the holy month of Ramadan (the ninth lunar month) occurs at an earlier time in each successive year of the Gregorian calendar. 29

     In certain parts of their lives, mostly the public and official ones, Chinese follow the Gregorian calendar; in other parts, above all, the personal, the social, and the religious, many of them still respond to the rhythms of the old lunar calendar (or, to be exact, the lunisolar calendar). Printed calendars and almanacs in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and to a growing extent on the Chinese mainland (despite the occasional expressions of displeasure from the state) incorporate both dating systems, distinguishing them by color, font, character size, and often the use of arabic numerals for Western dates and Chinese characters for traditional lunar dating.⁴⁷ For numerous Chinese, moving back and forth between the lunar and solar time worlds is a routine activity, involving little effort and generating no special tension or discomfort. 30

     If we think of calendars as repositories of "social memory,"⁴⁸ what are the implications of these circumstances for Chinese responses to the millennial turn? Clearly, it is not a matter of the year 2000 having no significance whatever for Chinese. But the Western calendar is not the only time measure that possesses meaning in Chinese life; moreover, such meaning as it has is quite different, on the whole, from its meaning in the minds of many Westerners. There will be gala celebrations of the advent of the new millennium in Shanghai, Beijing, and other large Chinese cities. Sophisticated, plugged-in urbanites, determined to feel themselves part of the global scene, may be heard prattling knowingly about phenomena like the Falun Gong as signs of the millennial turn.⁴⁹ Educated Chinese who use computers have had, like everyone else, to address the Y2K problem. Publishers all over the country have been quick to capitalize on the cachet of "the year 2000" in new book titles. And in the western section of the Chinese capital, over a thousand workers, spurred on by NATO's May 7 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, have labored day and night to complete the China Century Monument (Zhonghua Shiji Jinianguan), a center for cultural, artistic, and scientific exhibitions "from home and abroad," described by a spokesperson as representing "not only an eternal memory of the turn of the millennium, but . . . most importantly, an inspiration to patriotism."⁵⁰ 31

     At the end of the twentieth century, as at the start, in short, the Western calendar serves as a vehicle, partly practical, partly symbolic, for China's participation in a modern world order. But for the vast majority of Chinese, the Christian eschatological associations embedded in the Gregorian calendar, as understood in the West, are simply not present.⁵¹ For the temporal expression of such deeply personal events as birth and death, of important religious occasions such as the birthdays of the Buddha and of village patron deities, and of cyclical holidays like the New Year, many Chinese still look to the lunar calendar. 32

     In one sense, it is entirely appropriate that each of the four books discussed in this essay is overwhelmingly concerned with the West. Christian millenarianism and understanding time as a continuous flow of centuries and millennia beginning (purportedly) with the birth of Christ are, after all, quintessential attitudes of Western civilization.⁵² What is inappropriate is the sense, conveyed explicitly or implicitly, that these attitudes have more universal currency, that they are global rather than primarily Western Christian. The allusion to Western arrogance made by the woman from Alpine, Texas, quoted at the beginning of this essay, contains an important measure of truth. It is not only Westerners who in today's world are troubled by the new possibilities of human and planetary destruction. (Although, at least in the Chinese case, I sense that the concern is not nearly as prevalent as it is in the West.) But these concerns, to the extent that they exist, are unlikely to be framed in parochially Western terms or to be linked to the particular mode of reckoning time that Westerners often think of as being carved in stone. As Westerners prepare to mark the turn of the new century and of the new millennium, therefore, it would be well for us to recognize that these events will not carry the same force in other parts of the world or, indeed, even in all parts of the West itself. 33

Paul A. Cohen is Edith Stix Wasserman Professor of Asian Studies and History at Wellesley College and an associate of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University. His books include Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (1984) and History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (1997), the latter the winner of the 1997 New England Historical Association Book Award and the AHA's 1997 John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History. Cohen's work has been translated into both Chinese and Japanese. He is currently doing research on the theme of national humilation in twentieth-century China.

Notes

In reworking this review essay, I have benefited greatly from the advice of Elizabeth Sinn, Hue-Tam Ho Tai, and several members of the AHR's Board of Editors. I also want to thank Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Wilfrid Rollman for bringing relevant materials to my notice.
¹ Quoted in Michael Erard, "Millennium, Texas," in Charles B. Strozier and Michael Flynn, eds., The Year 2000: Essays on the End (New York, 1997), 280.
² Asa Briggs and Daniel Snowman, "Introduction," in Briggs and Snowman, eds., Fins de Siècle: How Centuries End, 1400–2000 (New Haven, Conn., 1996), 1. See also Eugen Weber, Apocalypses: Prophesies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs through the Ages (Cambridge, 1999), 26, 237.
³ A fifth volume of the adult series appeared in the spring of 1999, and several more are in the works. The Left Behind series is by no means an isolated example. Publishers and booksellers have been having a field day with apocalyptic fiction. See Laurie Goodstein, "Fast-Selling Thrillers Depict Prophetic View of Final Days," New York Times (October 4, 1998): 1, 30 NE.
⁴ Beijing's plans for the China Century Monument are described later in this essay. The construction of the Millennium Dome in southeast London, under the aegis of the government-owned New Millennium Experience Company, is noted in International Herald Tribune (February 25, 1998): 5. The Vatican's plans for the year-long celebration of the millennial Jubilee—and the logistical nightmare Rome is anticipating—are detailed in Jeff Israely, "Rome Awaits 2000 Warily," Boston Globe (June 26, 1999): A11; see also New York Times (October 3, 1999): 1, 4 NE.
⁵ The question of when centuries terminate was also hotly debated at the end of the nineteenth century in Britain. See Asa Briggs, "The 1890s: Past, Present and Future in Headlines," in Briggs and Snowman, Fins de Siècle, 192–93.
⁶ For a guide to some of the more bizarre of America's "millennial Chicken Littles," see Alex Heard and Peter Klebnikov, "Apocalypse Now. No, Really. Now!" New York Times Magazine (December 27, 1998): 40–43.
⁷ The AHA's newsletter, for example, characterizes the Annual Meeting for the year 2000 as "the perfect opportunity to reflect on the state of the discipline and the profession at the beginning of the 21st century." "Call for Papers: AHA Annual Meeting for the Year 2000," Perspectives (September 1998): 17.
⁸ For Churchill's appraisal, see the epigraph in Alex Danchev, ed., Fin de Siècle: The Meaning of the Twentieth Century (London, 1995), v.
⁹ Maha Azzam, "Islamism," in Danchev, Fin de Siècle, 161.
¹⁰ It appears doubtful. In 1945, World War II drawing to a close, Churchill wrote to his wife: "The misery of the whole world appalls me, and I fear increasingly that new struggles may arise out of those we are successfully ending." Quoted from Mary Soames, ed., Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills (Boston, 1999), in New York Times (March 30, 1999): B8.
¹¹ Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?" The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18, quote p. 4; see also Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992).
¹² Chris Brown, "The End of History?" in Danchev, Fin de Siècle, 2, 9, 16. Fukuyama's ideas are also treated with skepticism by other contributors to the book. See Alex Danchev, "Introduction: The Sarajevo Century," in Danchev, Fin de Siècle, xi–xii; Edward Acton, "Russia," in Danchev, Fin de Siècle, 43–57.
¹³ William Wallace and Piers Ludlow, "Europe," in Danchev, Fin de Siècle, 71–89, quotes pp. 72–73, 87.
¹⁴ Auschwitz and the extermination of European Jewry are recognized by two of the book's contributors as a (or "the") "defining event" of the century but are only dealt with in passing. See Richard Wyn Jones, "The Nuclear Revolution," in Danchev, Fin de Siècle, 95–97; and Charles Townshend, "The Fin de Siècle," in Danchev, Fin de Siècle, 211. In keeping with the heavily Western orientation of Fin de Siècle, the Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot and the more recent mass killings in Rwanda are passed over in silence. There are two brief references to the beginnings of the Armenian genocide in the 1890s, none to its expansion in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century (Townshend, "Fin de Siècle," 211, 214). For a succinct account of the mass killings that have marred the history of the twentieth century, see Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (New York, 1987), 20–25.
¹⁵ Jones, "Nuclear Revolution," 90–109; Andrew Linklater, "Community," in Danchev, Fin de Siècle, 177–97, quote p. 195.
¹⁶ Townshend, "Fin de Siècle," 198–216, quotes pp. 199, 200, 202.
¹⁷ As late as the beginning of the twentieth century, Asa Briggs notes, centuries played no apparent part in the time reckoning of Queen Victoria: "in her diaries and in her letters she made no references to the end of one century and the beginning of a new." Briggs, "The 1890s: Past, Present and Future in Headlines," in Briggs and Snowman, Fins de Siècle, 167.
¹⁸ They are not the first to make the attempt. Hillel Schwartz, in Century's End: A Cultural History of the Fin de Siècle from the 990s through the 1990s (New York, 1990), argues that all of the century ends from the tenth to the twentieth have been characterized by extremes of desperation and exultation, anxiety and relief, death and rebirth.
¹⁹ Briggs and Snowman, "Introduction," 1–5, quotes p. 3.
²⁰ Paul Strohm, "The 1390s: The Empty Time," in Briggs and Snowman, Fins de Siècle, 7–37, quotes pp. 8, 12, 17.
²¹ Malcolm Vale, "The 1490s: Continuities and Contrasts," in Briggs and Snowman, Fins de Siècle, 39–63, quotes pp. 60, 62.
²² Roy Porter, "The 1790s: 'Visions of Unsullied Bliss,'" in Briggs and Snowman, Fins de Siècle, 125–55.
²³ Briggs, "The 1890s," 157–95; and Asa Briggs, "The 1990s: The Final Chapter," in Briggs and Snowman, Fins de Siècle, 197–233.
²⁴ Charles B. Strozier, "Introduction," in Strozier and Flynn, The Year 2000, 5–6.
²⁵ The cited contributions to Strozier and Flynn, The Year 2000, are Richard A. Landes, "The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Millennial Fever and the Origins of the Modern West," 13–29, quote p. 16; Norman Cohn, "Medieval Millenarianism: Its Bearing on the Comparative Study of Millenarian Movements," 30–41; Catherine Keller, "The Breast, the Apocalypse, and the Colonial Journey," 42–58, quote p. 45; Charles B. Strozier, "God, Lincoln, and the Civil War," 59–72.
²⁶ The cited contributions to Strozier and Flynn, The Year 2000, are Charles B. Strozier, "Apocalyptic Violence and the Politics of Waco," 97–111; Robert Jay Lifton, "Reflections on Aum Shinrikyo," 112–20; Lois Ann Lorentzen, "Phallic Millennialism and Radical Environmentalism: The Apocalyptic Vision of Earth First!" 144–53; Lee Quinby, "Coercive Purity: The Dangerous Promise of Apocalyptic Masculinity," 154–65; J. William Gibson, "Is the Apocalypse Coming? Paramilitary Culture after the Cold War," 180–89; Michael Barkun, "Racist Apocalypse: Millennialism on the Far Right," 190–205; Margaret Thaler Singer, "On the Image of 2000 in Contemporary Cults," 133–43.
²⁷ See the following essays in Strozier and Flynn, The Year 2000: Richard Falk, "The Paucity of the Millennial Moment: The Case of Nuclearism," 169–79; Jean Bethke Elshtain, "The Flight from Finitude," 230–36; Peter von Ziegesar, "After Armageddon: Apocalyptic Art since the Seventies: Tactics of Survival in a Postnuclear Planet," 284–98; Karen Malpede, "Theater at 2000: A Witnessing Project," 299–308.
²⁸ The first example of theater of witness Malpede discusses is Nellie Sachs's verse drama Eli, written in 1943 in the middle of the Holocaust. "Theater at 2000," 302.
²⁹ Eviatar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Chicago, 1981), xvi.
³⁰ Weber, Apocalypses, 50.
³¹ Weber, Apocalypses, 232, 234.
³² Weber, Apocalypses, 239.
³³ Cohn, "Medieval Millenarianism," 30; also Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, rev. and expanded edn. (New York, 1970), 15–16.
³⁴ The pioneer American student of Chinese millenarianism is Susan Naquin. See especially her Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (New Haven, Conn., 1976). During the late imperial era of Chinese history (Ming and Qing), millenarianism typically manifested itself in uprisings of the White Lotus sects, mainly of Buddhist inspiration but also containing elements of Manichean and Daoist influence. See Noguchi Tetsurō, "A Genealogy of Millenarian Movements in China," in Ishii Yoneo, ed., Millenarianism in Asian History (Tokyo, 1993), 25–53. On the earlier history of Chinese millenarianism, see David Ownby, "Chinese Millenarian Traditions: The Formative Age," AHR 104 (December 1999): 1513–30.
³⁵ Certainly, this was true of the early medieval period (ca. 200–600 ce), which Ownby characterizes as "an apocalyptic age par excellence." "Chinese Millenarian Traditions," 1515.
³⁶ This was true even of the Christian-influenced Taiping movement, which adopted a calendar that was different from both the traditional Chinese calendar and the Western. Most important for our purposes, Year One for the Taipings was not the year of Jesus' birth (as in the Gregorian calendar) but the first year of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (1851). On the Taiping calendar, see Franz Michael with Chung-li Chang, comps., The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents, Vol. 2: Documents and Comments (Seattle, 1971), 321–23. Buddhist-inspired millenarian uprisings in Chinese history have generally been tied to the transition from one kalpa (a subdivision of time in the Indian tradition) to another. Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in China, 10–14. Although, historically, ample confusion has existed in the Christian West itself with respect to millennial counting, there has been general agreement that the word millennium refers to "a thousand-year period of blessedness," either following the Second Coming of Christ (pre-millennialism) or preceding it (postmillennialism). F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3d edn. (Oxford, 1997), 1086; see also Weber, Apocalypses, 147, 172.
³⁷ Another recent publication that addresses these phenomena is David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium (New York, 1999). In an effort to account for the events at Waco and Oklahoma City, Katz and Popkin trace the roots of Messianic revolution from Joachim of Fiore of the twelfth century to Hal Lindsey in the twentieth. Despite their differences, both men, they note, were driven to ransack the Bible in search of divine clues to the course of history and the time of its prophetic end.
³⁸ A partial exception is the Republic of China on Taiwan, which uses the solar calendar but begins counting years with the republic's first year (Zhonghua minguo yinian or yuannian) (1912).
³⁹ For stimulating commentary on the relationship between calendrical change and community identity, see Eviatar Zerubavel, "Easter and Passover: On Calendars and Group Identity," American Sociological Review 47 (April 1982): 284–89; see also Hidden Rhythms, 70–100.
⁴⁰ See, for example, Qian Xuantong, "Lun Zhongguo dang yong shijie gongli jinian" [China should use the Gregorian calendar to record the years], Xin qingnian [New youth] 6, no. 6 (November 1, 1919): 625–30. By analogy, since the Gregorian calendrical reform, which was sponsored by and named after a pope, took place in 1582, at the height of the Reformation, Protestants initially rejected it as a peculiarly Catholic institution. During the next two centuries, however, in response to the strong trend toward international standardization of temporal reference, Protestant countries adopted the Gregorian calendar one by one, clearly no longer perceiving it as Catholic. On this, as well as the broader trend toward desacralization of the Gregorian calendar and its transformation into a universal instrument of time measurement, see Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms, 98–100.
⁴¹ There are various Chinese ways of recording the passage of time in accordance with the solar-adjusted lunar year. Although, prior to the republic, reign years were commonly used to record year dates, a sexagenary cycle of sixty paired characters was already widely used in the late Shang dynasty (1200–1045 bce) and was gradually extended in subsequent centuries to count months and hours as well as years. The sexagenary (ganzhi) system is still in general use, along with numerical counting (the third day of the fourth month, for example) and the popular twelve-animal cycle for naming years. For an excellent recent summary of Chinese calendars and time-recording systems, see Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual (Cambridge, 1998), 170–98.
⁴² For an informative, up-to-date introduction, see Richard J. Smith, Chinese Almanacs (Hong Kong, 1992).
⁴³ South China Morning Post (May 22, 1999): 5.
⁴⁴ Leo Ou-fan Lee, "Modernity and Secular Time in Chinese History," unpublished paper (cited with author's permission).
⁴⁵ Actually, it is not uncommon for people to be aware of more than two calendars, even though they may abide by only two in their own lives. Some Muslim states, in addition to the lunar Hegira calendar (see below in the text) and the Gregorian calendar, also use a solar Hegira calendar. In Israel, three calendars are widely recognized: the solar Gregorian, the lunisolar Hebrew, and the lunar Muslim. In Egypt, along with the Gregorian and the lunar Hegira calendars, the Coptic calendar (based on the ancient Egyptian solar calendar) is in use among the roughly 10 percent of the population who are Coptic Christians. V. V. Tsybulsky, Calendars of Middle East Countries: Conversion Tables and Explanatory Notes (Moscow, 1979), 7–8, 232, 237, 249. (The information in Tsybulsky's book, although extremely useful, is occasionally in need of updating.)
⁴⁶ A partial exception to this statement is the Easter holiday, which, in order to segregate it temporally from Passover Eve, which always falls on the full moon (Nisan 14), is observed on the Sunday following the full moon, thus tying it irrevocably to the lunar calendar (and ironically to the Jewish one as well) and making it into "a 'movable' festival vis-à-vis the Gregorian calendar year." Zerubavel, "Easter and Passover," 288.
⁴⁷ The new state calendar issued by the fledgling Republic of China in 1912 adopted the Gregorian system and "vigorously denounced the 'superstitious' elements of its predecessor, including the stipulation of lucky and unlucky days." While a succession of Chinese governments in the twentieth century, viewing themselves as apostles of modernity and destroyers of superstition, have fulminated against traditional almanacs and calendars, it has for the most part been a losing battle. Even in the People's Republic, in the 1980s and 1990s, as state pressure on society has moderated, the private printing of such materials has rapidly expanded and a flourishing commerce in imported calendars and almanacs has grown up, especially in the southern areas of the country. Smith, Chinese Almanacs, 18, 57–62. Lee, "Modernity and Secular Time in Chinese History," has an illuminating discussion of calendars, especially during the first half of the twentieth century, as embodiments of dual-time consciousness.
⁴⁸ Everett C. Hughes, Men and Their Work (Glencoe, Ill., 1958), 18. See also Eviatar Zerubavel, Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology (Cambridge, 1997), 97–98. On the embodiment of Jewish social memory of such events as the Exodus and the destruction of the Temple in particular days—Passover and the Ninth of Av—that exist only within the Jewish calendar, and the view of some that such collective memories might be lost forever if this calendar were to be abandoned or reduced to insignificance by growing Jewish use of the Gregorian calendar, see Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms, 74.
⁴⁹ Some Western press reports have asserted that the now outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement, which attracted world notice in late April 1999 when thousands of its adherents demonstrated in the Chinese capital, espouses end-of-the-world notions. The representatives of the movement itself strongly deny this, claiming that such charges are part of a government campaign to discredit Li Hongzhi, the movement's founder. "Clarification of the Facts" (a statement distributed by the New York office of the Falun Dafa [Gong]) (n.d. [Summer 1999]). See also the interview with Li Hongzhi in New York Times Magazine (August 8, 1999): 20.
⁵⁰ Two things are noteworthy about the monument: first, the allusion in its name to the turn of the century, a well-established concept in Chinese (shiji), rather than of the millennium, which until recently many Chinese would have been hard put to come up with a term for, and, second, the spokesperson's explicit emphasis on the monument's patriotic meaning. See Han Yongqing, "Patriotism Speeds Monument Project," China Daily Business Weekly (May 16–22, 1999): 1.
⁵¹ The most important exception to this generalization, I suspect, is the evangelical Christian community in China today.
⁵² It is now widely accepted that Jesus was in fact born several years prior to the beginning of the "Christian era," and therefore his "real" two-thousandth birthday, exact date unknown, has already come and gone.

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