> On Millennial Fever, you might be interested in a short piece I wrote some
> time ago. It's yet to find a home: MILLENNIAL FEVER, Jay Ogilvy, 7/2/88

The year 2000 will mark the turning of the literal millennium in the Christian calendar: the second thousand years will end and the third will begin. The very fact that it is the Christian calendar, one particular calendar as distinct from others like the Moslem calendar which dates from the birth of Mohammed, should be sufficient to show any rational being the arbitrariness of these systems of dating. In the vast span of astrophysical time, one more turn of the earth around the sun has no special significance. But social-psychological time may have no direct relationship to astrophysical, relativistic time. We can be quite sure that the turning of the Christian millennium is going to be a very big deal to a great many people. As irrational as it may sound, millennial fever is almost certain to sweep large parts of the globe as this century and this millennium draw to a close.

Millennial fever is not a new phenomenon. It has happened before so we can look to history to understand its causes and its consequences. But we can be sure that when it occurs-as it is bound to-its form will be slightly different this time around.

The best account of millennial fever in the past is Norman Cohn's classic, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957). Cohn devotes most of his attention to the wave upon wave of millennial cults that cropped up in Europe between the close of the eleventh century and the first part of the sixteenth. During this period of time there were dozens of instances of charismatic leaders mobilizing large crowds of people to abandon their day to day lives, scourge their earthly flesh, and prepare for the coming of Kingdom of God.

Cohn's interest in these cults lies in the parallels he finds with modern totalitarian movements. Millennial fever, he argues, is not a historical curiosity. It is alive and well in the twentieth century. The forces that created millennial movements in Medieval times are forces that still stir social movements, whether or not the language of visionary prophecy is religious or political. Cohn's case is sufficiently persuasive, and the literal millennium sufficiently near, that it may be worth studying some of the parallels he develops to assess the potential for similar movements in the late nineties.

The first of the conditions Cohn identifies as common to millennial movements is not at all surprising:

In each case it occurred under similar circumstances--when population was increasing, industrialization was getting under way, traditional social bonds were being weakened or shattered and the gap between rich and poor was becoming a chasm.

The warning here is old and fairly familiar: armies of unemployed are often ripe for revolution. The ravages of the First World War created the conditions for the Russian Revolution in 1917. The peace of Versailles and the poverty and inflation in Germany between the wars helped to create the conditions for Nazism. It seems unlikely that so many people would be impoverished and disenfranchised in the United States during the nineties. But if one looks at conditions around Mexico City or Sao Paolo or Jakarta, it is not hard to find millions of people in the condition Cohn describes.

Even in the United States it is not hard to find evidence of a linkage between social and economic turbulence and a taste for millennial movements. Observers of the religious right like Kevin Phillips have argued that there is a profound split in the Republican Party between the patrician northeastern wing, represented by George Bush and the Rockefellers, and a populist-fundamentalist wing in the South and Midwest. With his down home folksy manner and cowboy persona, Reagan was able to keep the populists in the fold. If they become alienated from the American political and economic process, however, the populist wing, according to Kevin Phillips, could foment a nasty red-neck revolt.

At the core of millennial thinking is the promise that life will be transformed in a mere instant of history. Both the imagery of Revelations and the language of revolution offer an appealing contrast to evolutionary gradualism. The magic of instantaneous transformation is an easier sell than an invitation to years or decades of pragmatic hard work. A date like the year 2000 is a provocation to the kind of magical thinking that can believe in the second coming or the final solution. The apocalypse is at hand. Just look at the calendar.

The appeal of transformative change extends far beyond exclusively religious or magical thinking, however. Between the poor and the disenfranchised on the one hand, and the established religious and political leaders on the other, Cohn identifies a class of intellectuals whose role was to rationalize the irrational.

Whatever their individual histories, collectively these people formed a recognisable social stratum--a frustrated and rather low-grade intelligentsia. And it was here, in this restless world of declasse intellectuals and semi-intellectuals, that eschatological lore was not only studied and conserved but also edited and elaborated until it was fit to serve as a revolutionary ideology." (p. 318)

Cohn's description strikes uncomfortably close to home. There are those in the community of futurists who talk longingly of sudden transformation, and it is a community that exists on the margins of academe. John Naisbitt, hardly a scholar, would have us reinvent the corporation from the ground up. Alvin Toffler, never a professor, startled the gradualists with the apocalyptic image of Future Shock. Willis Harman, author of several books about the future, has argue for the possibility of a social transformation that could take place "faster than any of us might have imagined." Werner Erhard, a charismatic leader with a very small academic portfolio, consults on "organizational transformation."

These are not madmen. The message they convey has strong academic foundations. Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel prize for his work on bifurcation theory, the mathematics of discontinuous change. Rene Thom, a french mathematical biologist, calls it catastrophe theory in his aptly titled, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis. Harvard Professor Stephen Jay Gould has put forward a theory of "punctuated equilibrium" as a way of explaining the sharp breaks in the fossil record where long periods of ecological stability give way to short periods of turbulence and sudden change. T. S. Kuhn, also at Harvard, wrote one of the most quoted books of the past several decades, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, to show that the course of scientific progress is not always gradual, but is occasionally interrupted by sharp discontinuities he describes as paradigm shifts.

Combine the year 2000 with strong academic support for transformational thinking, and the existence of class of quasi-intellectuals who can translate transformation into appealing social images, and you have several of the ingredients of a millennial movement. But there is more.

The transformation cannot be sudden and irrevocable unless it is total. Transfiguration, transformation, revolution--they change everything. But this is true of Kuhn's paradigm shifts as well: they are not just singular discoveries, but intellectual revolutions that transform the way a people or a culture looks at the whole of life. And we may be in the midst of just such a shift. As Thomas Berry describes our situation:

It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The Old Story---the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it---is not functioning properly, and we have not learned the New Story. The Old Story sustained us for a long period of time. It shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with life purpose, energizing action. It consecrated suffering, integrated knowledge, guided education. We awoke in the morning and knew where we were. We could answer the questions of our children. We could identify crime, punish criminals. Everything was taken care of because the story was there. It did not make men good, it did not take away the pains and stupidities of life, or make for unfailing warmth in human association. But it did provide a context in which life could function in a meaningful manner.

Norman Cohn describes religious eschatology's appeal to unsettled peasants in similar terms:

It explained their suffering, it promised them recompense, it held their anxieties at bay, it gave them an illusion of security--even while it drove them, held together by a common enthusiasm, on a quest which was always vain and often suicidal." (p. 74)

The appeal of a story that explains everything is immense, and it can only grow as life becomes more confusing. Further, the fact of increasing global trade and global interdependence can only enhance the appeal of global solutions to global problems. There is a real need for holistic thinking about big problems like the deterioration of the ecosystem. But where is the line between holistic thinking and totalitarian thinking? With care, the line can be drawn. But the popular mind of mass movements will not approach this distinction with care.

A common feature of both millennial sects and totalitarian movements is the ruthless persecution of those who fall outside of the sacred circle of the transformed whole. The Jews have too often played this role, but it is a role that can be be played by almost any identifiable group.

In the middle of the twelfth century, the Norman abbot Aimo described how bands of believers, well born and peasants alike, would yoke themselves to wagons and drag the building materials across hill and valley to the site of a new church. "Hatreds were lulled to sleep, discord put away, debts forgiven, the union of minds restored. But if anyone refused to obey the priest and to put sin from him, his offering was thrown off the wagon as something unclean and he himself expelled with ignominy from the Holy People." Or, as we might say today, are you on the bus or off the bus?

The mutually implicated demands for inclusivity and exclusivity create the ingredients for paranoia, witchhunts and McCarthyism. Not only the Nazi holocaust, but also Stalin's purges and some of the extremes of the cultural revolution in China reveal the earmarks of paranoid purification. Particularly as more nations and cultures come into more frequent contact with other races and cultures, there is increasing danger of charges of contamination and impurity, and an ever greater temptation to rituals of purification.

These four features of millennial movements--social and economic turbulence, the prospect of a sudden transformation, totalistic thinking, and rituals of purification--will all be present, in varying degrees in different places, during the nineties. It is too soon to know precisely what form millennial movements might take. But the approach of the year 2000, together with the presence of these ingredients, suggests that it is very likely that there will be some form of chilliastic madness. In order to understand and appreciate its significance, however, it will be necessary to see the method in the madness, the apparent rationality behind the irrationality. It would be a mistake to dismiss millennial thinking as an oddity that could crop up only in medieval Europe. Millennial fever is an abiding temptation that will almost certainly tempt many as the second millennium draws to a close.