Can The Millennium Deliver?

By Henry Grunwald

The year A.D. 2000 has long hovered in an imagined sky like a distant, luminous sign. Generations have used it as a target for their dreams, hopes and fears. Since prophecies usually tell us more about the past than the future, how the millennium was envisioned--and, in a sense, invented--during earlier eras says a great deal about the successive stages of Western history, about the religious as well as secular faith of our ancestors--in short, about how we came to be what we are.

Unlike Eastern religions, Christianity saw history not as an endless cycle but as an ascent to a magnificent goal. The special significance of the year 2000 emerged from prophecies about Christ's Second Coming. By the reckoning of early Christian scholars, human history would end after 6,000 years, each thousand years corresponding to one day of creation. Some believed that there were 2,000 years between Adam and Abraham and 2,000 between Abraham and Jesus, and that after 2,000 more (constituting the Christian era) Jesus would return and reign in glory for 1,000 years--hence the millennium.

For centuries such calculations were confined to a few learned theorists. In the minds of most people, time was vague; the future was tomorrow's sunrise, the next harvest, the coming winter or the inevitability of death. The more distant future belonged to the realm of religion. The modern concept of the future did not begin to develop until the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, with the gradual consolidation of calendars, the spread of clocks and the stirrings of new forces. Both science and commerce needed to anticipate things, whether a chemical reaction or the expiration of contracts.

But visions of the future still mixed science with superstition, as was demonstrated by Nostradamus. A successful physician in 16th century France (for years he ministered to victims of the plague), he managed to believe both in scientific Copernican astronomy and in astrology. Eventually he turned to the occult. In seven volumes he foretold "the future events of the entire world" (according to his epitaph). In one of his obscure quatrains, he prophesied that in 1999, "from the sky there will come a great King of terror." Nobody knows what that was supposed to mean, but in recent decades many would-be prophets have used those lines to predict all manner of cataclysms, from nuclear war to global warming to the end of the world. This suggests that centuries of science have not displaced--and perhaps have even reinforced--people's desire for mystical clues to their fate.

A contemporary of Nostradamus was Sir Thomas More, whose Utopia was not so much a vision of the future as a vision of a better society and thus a reproach to present evils. But henceforth, Utopian dreams of reform invariably mingled with anticipation of tomorrow. This was particularly true in the 18th century, with the Age of Reason's belief in the perfectibility of human nature and the near inevitability of progress. Revolution was in the air, and revolution itself is a kind of prophecy--a violent prediction.

One symbol of this was a play, The Year 2000, written in 1789 by Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, a prolific author and polemicist who functioned in the literary demimonde between the great philosophers and the pornographic hacks. In preceding years he had addressed voluminous suggestions to the Estates General for legal and constitutional reforms, including an embryonic welfare state with workers' insurance, retirement funds, free medical care and education. The play itself projected an ideal community in which marriage has been purged of all crass commercialism and bridegrooms are chosen by a council of elders according to merit, military or otherwise. Married couples are kept apart for years to ensure the survival of their passion. Society as a whole, under a benign king, is perfectly just, even though--or perhaps because--lawyers have been eliminated. The King declares, "In the year 2000, virtue never goes unrewarded!"

By the 19th century, visions of the future had come to be dominated by the machine, belching steam and later sparking electricity. This is what inspired Jules Verne, the first major prophet of technology, who was born a generation after the French Revolution and lived until 1905. A bourgeois stockbroker who became fascinated by science, he noted near the end of his life that he had been present at the birth of railroads, trams, the electric light, the telegraph, the telephone and the phonograph, not to mention postage stamps and detachable collars.

In his books, Verne always tried to stay within the limits of what he considered scientifically plausible. Apart from his major works (Around the World in 80 Days, Journey to the Center of the Earth), he wrote a fantasy about the year 2000 titled An Ideal City. The story is full of mechanical gimmicks: streets are cleaned automatically, recitals are conveyed from the artist by wire to pianos around the world, babies get their milk from steam-driven breast-feeding machines. The trains of women's gowns, having grown absurdly long, move on little wheels (one of the rare touches of humor in futurist writing). But much of the emphasis is less on physical than on social engineering: bachelors are taxed to prod them into marriage; physicians are paid for healthy patients rather than sick ones.

Social engineering became a dominant theme in the futurist imagination, and increasingly its symbol was 2000. It was the year chosen by Edward Bellamy for his projection of the future America in Looking Backward, published in 1888. The book instantly became immensely popular, obviously filling an emotional need in a country that was beset by strikes, battles between workers and police and proliferating industrial trusts. Bellamy, the son of a Baptist minister, was revolted by the brutality of contemporary capitalism and the misery it caused. He believed relief must come not through promises of heaven but--in the Utopian tradition--by building something like heaven on earth.

According to his vision, which he called Nationalism, America in 2000 is essentially one huge corporation. In his odd version of economics, the absence of competition means that all production is efficient and goods are cheap. Since there is enough for everybody, greed has disappeared and so has money. People are issued something like credit cards with which they can draw whatever they need from common stores. Every citizen must serve in a kind of workers' army in which all get the same pay. In lieu of financial incentives there is patriotism and "passion for humanity." People marry each other only for the finest moral and physical qualities; the race has been "purified." A minor detail symbolizes the collectivist ideal: when it rains, canopies are lowered over the streets, replacing everyone's individual umbrella.

Looking Backward not only popularized long-standing socialist ideas but also strongly influenced their further development and appeal. The Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs publicly thanked Bellamy for guiding him "out of darkness into light..." and for "fill[ing] a despairing world with hope." Not everybody shared that particular hope. Like most Utopias, Bellamy's not only was naive but also seemed to leave little room for individual freedom.

A few years after the publication of Looking Backward, there appeared a very different view of A.D. 2000. It was a sort of capitalist rebuttal, although by definition the free-market philosophy does not easily lend itself to Utopianism, with its regimented bliss. In A Journey to Other Worlds by John Jacob Astor, Socialism has hopelessly ruined Europe, while the U.S., having absorbed Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America, virtually rules the world together with its ally, Great Britain. A great-grandson of the dynasty's founder, Astor was a playboy with a serious side. Fascinated by science, he spent much time working in machine shops and patented a number of inventions, including marine turbines. His book is filled with some of his imagined inventions. Steam boilers are powered by the sun; electricity, which runs everything, is generated by tides; battery-powered airplanes traverse the sky.

At the center of the plot is the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company, which plans to reposition the globe so that the Earth's climate will be universally benign, like everlasting spring ("Polar bears will soon have to use artificial ice"). In Astor's view, "this period--A.D. 2000--is by far the most wonderful the world has as yet seen." But the world has grown too small, which is why the book's main characters take off for Jupiter in a spaceship equipped with booster rockets. "The future glory of the human race," concludes Astor, "lies in exploring at least the solar system." Ironically, this dreamer of technical progress, especially of huge powerful ships, went down with the Titanic.

Alongside Astor's kind of optimism, the Socialist critique of society and the era's muckraking passions continued, contributing darker shades to images of the future. In 1903 William Wallace Cook, a newspaperman and free-lance writer, published A Round Trip to the Year 2000, in which robots known as "muglugs" displace human workers, sending them to live out a miserable existence somewhere in the Midwest (a vision not designed to cheer chambers of commerce in the heartland). Voracious capitalism has triumphed. The "Air Trust" sells the very air people breathe; the "Sun Trust" forces the public to pay even for sunshine.

World War I, with its machines that dealt death rather than hope, further darkened the view of things to come. In 1927 the famous German moviemaker Fritz Lang released Metropolis, the idea for which came to him when he first saw, from shipboard, the glaring lights and tall buildings of Manhattan. (The film became a favorite of Hitler's.) Set in the year 2000, Metropolis shows plutocrats living in idle pleasure while workers slave away underground until a spectacular rebellion sets them free. This was reminiscent of H.G. Wells' 1895 dystopian fantasy, The Time Machine, in which a subhuman race called the Morlocks lives underground and emerges to devour the humans who live above.

In the meantime, what was not yet known as the media had enthusiastically taken up the science-fiction approach to the future. In 1910 an illustrator named Jean Marc Cote began a series of advertising cards depicting life in the year 2000: underwater croquet tournaments, men being shaved by robots, battery-powered roller skates. Later, Hugo Gernsback, who started out as a manufacturer of automotive batteries, launched the magazine Amazing Stories ("Extravagant Fiction Today--Cold Fact Tomorrow"). It was endlessly imitated. A typical series in Famous Fantastic Mysteries was titled Crimes of the Year 2000. The crimes were not especially novel, but some of the crime-fighting devices were, for the time: tiny recorders strapped to the wrist, heli-pursuit cars, bloodhound machines that identified a perpetrator's smell. The pulp view of the millennium was dominated by gadgetry. If there was a philosophical outlook, it was patriotic and upbeat in the sense that the good guys always won.

In the next significant--and much less entertaining--phase of futurology, the year 2000 was taken over by the think tanks. Most notably there was the Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on the Year 2000, set up in 1966 (rather rushing things). It was headed by the distinguished sociologist Daniel Bell and included 42 leading thinkers in fields ranging from science to mysticism. One of the commission's prominent members was that brilliant man-mountain Herman Kahn, who published The Year 2000 alongside the commission's report, Toward the Year 2000.

In a mass of speculation and extrapolation, the reports forecast many trends that have come true: decentralization, the communications revolution, the rise of services, genetic engineering, threats to privacy, nuclear proliferation. They were optimistic about the economy, predicting huge increases in personal income and the GNP (they forecast an increase to $3.6 trillion, thus falling short of the actual figure, at latest count, by about $5 trillion). They also foresaw a rise in hedonism and a decline in the work ethic. There were the inevitable misjudgments and omissions--especially, as Bell now concedes, a lack of any reference to the dramatic change in the role of women.

As if to make up for that, a group of writers a few years later published the book Woman in the Year 2000. The contributions were cast in the form of fantasy and fiction but largely reflected the familiar feminist gospel. One story involved a girl born at midnight in the year 2000, appropriately named Millenny. When she goes to school, she finds that girls are no longer discouraged from fighting with one another and that boys are no longer looked down on when they weep. On television, violence and machismo have been banned. Safe pharmaceutical contraceptives are available free at banks and post offices. When and if Millenny is ready to get married, she and her partner will negotiate a contract specifying their mutual expectations and responsibilities, a document to be renegotiated from time to time and always subject to cancellation.

Other pieces in the book predicted that conception would take place in laboratories and gestation in artificial wombs, that the gender of babies would be determined in advance, that homosexuality would be universally accepted. Today, two years before Millenny's birth, it all sounds remarkably familiar.

During the 1970s, gloom spread, partly as a result of the energy crisis, and growth was demonized. At the end of Jimmy Carter's presidential term a group of federal agencies submitted Global 2000 Report to the President. It was strongly neo-Malthusian, predicting environmental degradation, overpopulation, shrinking resources and vast increases in poverty unless there were technological breakthroughs and international action. The Carter Administration passed the report on to Ronald Reagan, who ignored it. The doomsayers could not have foreseen the collapse of the Soviet Union, the retreat of the welfare state in most parts of the world, the full impact of the global market or the resurgence of the American economy.

On balance, technological forecasts have often proved remarkably accurate, in outline if not in detail. By contrast, the political forecasts--whether the dreams of brotherhood or the nightmares of Big Brother--have been far more dubious.

For decades the phrase "by the end of the century" denoted something far distant. But it is distant no longer. Millennial predictions are proliferating with increasing speed as prognosticators try to get in under the wire. The Internet, that electronic jungle drum, vibrates to the beat of prophecy. Much of it is in the religious, apocalyptic tradition. Just about any recent event, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, is taken by some as a sign of the impending Doomsday or the flowering of the Peaceable Kingdom. Countless secular predictions also sway between doom and hope. Socialist Utopias are out of fashion, but belief in free-market cornucopias is rivaled by nightmares of savage Blade Runner cities.

Forecasters have a problem because stunning developments in science and technology are constantly overtaking their imagination, while the most logical predictions are bound to be pushed aside by the unexpected. We also know that the millennium is an entirely artificial mark on the calendar. But beneath our preoccupation with it is a deep psychological meaning: the need to believe that we are not lost in time, that we are going somewhere and that we can glimpse where. We will feel a little forlorn having to look back to the year 2000. But soon enough, the predictions will start reaching toward A.D. 3000.

Henry Grunwald, former managing editor of TIME and editor-in-chief of Time Inc., is the author of One Man's America.