Tras View of Life 



Dousing Diminutive 

 Dennis's Debate 



(DDDD = 2000) 



by Stephen Jay Gould 



In 1697, on the day appointed for re- 

 penting mistakes in judgment at Salem, 

 Samuel Sewall of Boston stood silently in 

 Old South Church, Boston, while his con- 

 fession of error was read aloud. He alone 

 among judges of the falsely accused (and 

 truly executed) "witches" of Salem had 

 the courage to undergo such public chas- 

 tisement. Four years later, the same 

 Samuel Sewall made a most joyful noise 

 unto the Lord — and at a particularly auspi- 

 cious moment. He hired four trumpeters to 

 herald, as he wrote, the "entrance of the 

 18th century" by sounding a blast on 

 Boston Common at daybreak. He also 

 paid the town crier to read out his "verses 

 upon the New Century." The opening 

 stanzas seem especially poignant today, 

 the first for its relevance (I am writing this 

 essay on a January night in Boston, and 

 the temperature outside is -2° F), and the 

 second for a superannuated paternalism 

 that highlights both the admirable and the 

 reprehensible in our history: 



Once more! Our God vouchsafe to 



shine: 

 Correct the coldness of our clime. 

 Make haste with thy impartial light, 

 and terminate this long dark night. 



Give the Indians eyes to see 

 The fight of life, and set them free. 

 So men shall God in Christ adore. 

 And worship idols vain, no more. 



I do not raise this issue either to embar- 

 rass the good judge for his tragic error or 

 to praise his commendable courage, but 

 for an aspect of the tale that may seem pe- 

 ripheral to Sewall's intent, but that never- 

 theless looms large as we approach the 

 millennium destined to climax our current 

 decade. Sewall hired his trumpeters for 

 January 1, 1701, not January 1, 1700 — 

 and he therefore made an explicit decision 



in a debate that the cusp of his new century 

 had kindled and that has increased might- 

 ily at every similar transition since (see 

 my main source for much of this essay, the 

 marvelously meticulous history of fins de 

 siecles, by Hillel Schwartz — Century's 

 End, Doubleday, 1990). When do cen- 

 turies end? At the termination of years 

 marked '99 (as common sensibility sug- 

 gests) or at the close of years marked '00 

 (as the narrow logic of a peculiar system 

 dictates)? 



The debate is already more intense than 

 ever, six (or is it seven?) years from our 

 own forthcoming transition, and for two 

 obvious reasons. First — O cursed spite — 

 our disjointed times and our burgeoning 

 press provide enhanced opportunity for re- 

 hearsal of such narrishkeit ad nauseam; do 

 we not feast upon tiiviafities to divert at- 

 tention from the truly portentous issues 

 that engulf us? Second, this time around 

 really does count as the ultimate block- 

 buster, for this is the millennium,* the 

 great and indubitable unicum for any 

 human observer (although a few trees and 

 maybe a fungus or two, but not a single an- 

 imal, have been through it before). 



I had originally intended to treat this 

 subject in my last essay of this series — to 

 be written for January 2001. But the cas- 

 cade of preemptive discussion has given 



*In this essay's spirit of dispelling a standard set of con- 

 fusions that have already surrounded the forthcoming 

 millennium, may I at least devote a footnote to the most 

 trivial, but also the most unambiguously resolvable? 

 Millennium has two n's — honest to God, it really does, 

 despite all the misspellings, even in most of the books 

 and product names already dedicated to the event. The 

 adjective millennial also has two, but the alternative 

 millenarian has only one. The etymologies are different. 

 Millennium is from Latin mille, "one thousand," and 

 annus, "year" — hence the two n's. Millenarian is fi:om 

 the Latin millenarius, "containing a thousand (of any- 

 thing)," hence no annus and no two /I's. 



me a strong case of anticipatory seven — or 

 is it six? — year itch. For a man who really 

 does yearn to lead a usefiil life and who 

 glimpses a little strategy for steering fel- 

 low human sufferers away from embit- 

 tered discussion about essentially mean- 

 ingless and formally unresolvable 

 questions, the time can only be now — or 

 never. (How I wish I had better clues about 

 answers to such truly resolvable and des- 

 perately important issues as hunger, 

 poverty, xenophobia, and environmental 

 degradation!) The dominant force of com- 

 mercial culture has already honed in, and 

 scholars can no longer afford the rnceties 

 of delay. 



On December 26, 1993, the New York 

 Times ran a piece to bury the Christmas 

 buying orgy and welcome the new year. 

 This article, on commercial gear-up for the 

 century's end, began by noting: "There is 

 money to be made on the millennium. . .in 

 999 feelings of gloom ran rampant. What 

 the doomsayers may have lacked was an 

 instinct for mass marketing." The com- 

 mercial cascade of this millennium is al- 

 ready in full swing — in journals, date 

 books, the inevitable coffee mugs and T- 

 shirts, and a thousand other products being 

 flogged by a full gamut, from New Age 

 "fruitcakes" of the counterculture to hard- 

 fine apocalyptic visionaries at the Christ- 

 ian fringe to a bunch of ordinary guys out 

 to make an honest buck. The article even 

 tells of a consulting firm expficitiy estab- 

 fished to help others market the millen- 

 nium — so we are already witnessing the 

 fractal recursion that might be called 

 metaprofiteering, or growing clams of ad- 

 vice in the clam beds of your advisee's po- 

 tential profits. 



I am truly sorry that I cannot, in cmrent 

 parlance, "get with the program." I feel 

 compeUed to mention two tiny difficulties 



4 Natural History 4/94 



