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Stop that millennial moping, America
A PROPOSAL FOR A FRESH START
By David M. Shribman
Millennium. Big word. Big idea. Big event. But this is a tired country. After Monica and O.J. and the media exploding in all directions and elections too numerous to mention and the ennui of it all, bone tired. Tired, too, of being tired. You probably noticed.
And so maybe this celebration, this burst of introspection, this toting up of where we have been and this speculation about where we are going, maybe all of this is coming at precisely the wrong time. This kind of event requires leisure. Attention.
Yet maybe, just maybe, there is a grand design to all of this. Maybe, just maybe, we are just alienated enough, just distracted enough -- yes, just tired enough -- to need the millennium. Maybe there's a divine poetry to the calendar, maybe there's an order to the universe, maybe this moment, coming as it has been for a thousand years, is arriving at just the right time.
Maybe it is coming just when we need a new beginning the most.
Look at what we have just been through. At its best American civic life has been concerned with questions like the extension of freedom, the acceptance of responsibility, the role of a democracy in a world inhabited by dictators. But for a year the country's civic life was bogged down in questions about sexual fidelity, DNA evidence, recordings of gossipy conversations.
For more than a year the country was divided over the scandal growing out of President Clinton's relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky. But the split that mattered wasn't between those who thought the president should have been impeached and convicted and those who did not. The split that counted was over those who followed the scandal and the trial carefully and those who did not.
Predicting history's course may be a fool's hobby, but it's possible that the things scholars will remember the Clinton scandal for won't be the blue dress or the definition of the word ''is,'' or the distinction between oral sex and other sex, or even the public disaffection from it all. It is possible that the Clinton scandal will be remembered as the end-of-century episode that placed all the major themes of modern life into the political arena.
In the end -- and, of course, this is the seed of the new beginning -- the Clinton scandal was about concerns that were at once modern and ancient: Values. Truth. Loyalty. Responsibility. Love. Sex. Duty. Honor.
So many of these questions are unresolved -- have been, now that you mention it, for a millennium -- that their very presence in print and on the airwaves is a signal of how much we need a sense of renewal.
A hundred years ago, in 1899, the fin de siecle was an event of immense spiritual and symbolic meaning, rippling through politics, religion, fashion, business, and the economy. And a second after midnight on December 31, 1899, a new century, a new era, began. But at that moment, when the 19th century -- the century of the railway, the steamship, nationalism, Beethoven, Dickens, and Lincoln, the end of slavery in America and the eclipse of serfdom in Russia -- gave way to the 20th century, only three digits changed.
This December 31, when the end is tolled for the 20th century -- the century of the motorcar, the airplane, space travel, collective security, Stravinsky, Hemingway, and Roosevelt, the flowering of the civil-rights movement and Soviet collective farms -- four digits will change. In all of recorded history, that has never happened before.
Life the next morning -- January 1, 2000 -- will feel and look a lot like it had the day before, barring, of course, some Y2K catastrophe, a threat that had no equivalent on January 1, 1900.
Indeed, much will be the same, and there will be some comforting similarities even with the 19th century. Liberal individualism, a hallmark of New England in both the 19th and 20th centuries, almost certainly will survive into the 21st century. The notion of reform, a strong American impulse with deep New England roots, will almost certainly be a familiar guidepost of the 21st century as well. American spirituality, planted in New England, cultivated in every century of life in this region, is likely to continue to flourish. And science, which was in its primitive stages during the 18th century here, moved into its controversial adolescence in the 19th, and its sturdy maturity in the 20th, will remain a staple of New England culture, along with its familiar mix of threat and possibility. The family, which has been weathering storms since the dawn of the industrial age, will continue to remain central, in the nation's mythology if not in its reality, honored more in theory than in practice, as it always has been.
But things will change, day by day.
In an extraordinary commencement address at Milton Academy in May 1926, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then only 44 years old and not yet governor of New York nor president, spoke of the breathless pace of change in his own lifetime. A man born 40 or 50 years earlier, he told the graduates, had been ''brought up in a Victorian atmosphere of gloomy religion, of copy-book sentiment, of life by precept [and] had lived essentially as his fathers before him.'' Then Roosevelt added, three-quarters of a century ago: ''[T]he lives of the great majority of people are more different from the lives of 1875 than were our grandfathers' lives from those of the year 1500.''
That was nothing, as compared with the rate of change today.
Just as transcendentalism and Social Darwinism now seem to be quaint relics of the 19th century, Nazism and Soviet communism increasingly will seem to be relics of the 20th century, ever more distant with each day's sunset. Mass culture, which came of age in the 20th century, may fade as a force as information and entertainment, centralized in our own century, increasingly are decentralized by the liberating potential of the Internet.
Beyond that, it is impossible to see too far through the scratchy window of the future. Though historians and social critics now routinely offer confident explanations of why the 20th century turned out the way it did, hardly anyone on the eve of the new century could have predicted the advent of mass war, genocide, and terrorism, three of the mainstays of our century. The preconditions of Nazism and the Great Depression may have been present in 1900, but they weren't recognized as such.
These words were unknown: television, e-mail, fax, modem. These phrases were unknown: designated hitter, space shuttle, CAT scan, wine cooler, wind chill. These words had different meanings: gay, holocaust, cable, digital, air bag, aids. The word microwave was not conceived as an adjective for the word oven, and the word cell was never considered an adjective for the word phone. At the beginning of the century no one could identify these sets of letters: VCR, CBS, NHL, VHF, CIA, JFK, CPU, IRS, TVA, and TWA. The letters USSR have come and gone, along with the USFL. In one century the word blitz has been transformed from something the Nazis did to something the Patriots do, at least on their sharpest Sundays.
At the very least the advent of a new century and a new millennium should infuse us with a sense of possibility, and a sense of the long view. That may sound incongruous on the pages of a newspaper, which specializes in the short view. But when one of the publishers of The Boston Globe, William O. Taylor, faced a severe economic crunch, he summoned the long view in 1932, citing Romans 8:18: ''For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.'' That is the spirit that should animate us now, at the shore of the new century, looking out at the great ocean of time before us.
But here, more than almost anywhere in the country, the new century begins on the foundation of the past. Here, reinventing the way people think about things is a habit, and a habit of mind.
''There are two New Englands,'' Lewis Mumford wrote in The New Republic in 1934. ''One is the dead and moth-eaten New England that flourishes in the gift shoppes, and that specializes in battered furniture, 'ancestors by purchase,' imitations of hooked rugs, even replicas of Colonial gardens,'' he said. ''The other New England is the same vital regional culture that originally helped nurture Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne.'' That sounds like 20th-century perspective, and of course it is. But this was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1869, and the meaning is identical: ''Full of crooked little streets; but I tell you Boston has opened, and kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and free speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead men.'' If we put our minds to it, something very much like that will be written 25 years from now as well.
The millennium is, to be sure, a historic event. But it is also a historic opportunity.
It is a chance to start anew. It is a chance to begin over. It is a chance to think and, more important, to rethink. And the good thing about a millennium is that there is no need to rush. The new one will last, after all, a thousand years. We have world enough, and time.
David M. Shribman is the Globe's Washington bureau chief.
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