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The passage into a new millennium will occur this time in the global electronic village. It will be the first (obviously, given the state of technology in the year 1000) to be observed simultaneously worldwide, with one rotation of the planet. Almost every human intelligence will be focused for an instant in a solidarity of collective wonder and vulnerability -- Mystery in the Age of Information.
The millennium is almost by definition a moment of extreme possibilities, arousing fantasies that veer wildly between earthly paradise and annihilation. "The human mind abhors a vacuum," says Michael Barkun, a political ; scientist at the University of Syracuse. "Where certainties are absent, we make do with probabilities, and where probabilities are beyond our power to calculate, we seek refuge from insupportable ignorance in a future of our own imagining."
DARK MEANINGS still reverberate like distant thunder from the last millennial passage. There was no widespread panic at the approach of the year 1000, as some writers have claimed, but an inescapable note of Armageddon was in the air. Men pondered over the text of the last days in the book of Revelation: "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea" (Revelation 21: 1).
In the year 1000, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse -- War, Plague, Famine and Death -- were riding unimpeded. To be sure, the apocalyptic Four have a sort of chronic credibility: They have been prominent in every century. The world would be paradise indeed if they visited only at each turning of a thousand years. But in the centuries since the first millennium, zealous, punitive preachers have endlessly invoked the Four, backing up their threats of doom with Revelation.
Millennial expectations at the beginning of this century brightened, however, and for a while shone with optimism and self-confidence. The 1939 World's Fair (just before Hitler marched into Poland) was organized around the sleek theme, "Building the World of Tomorrow." In 1965 (just before the Vietnam War began in earnest), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences brought together its "Commission on the Year 2000." The chairman, sociologist Daniel Bell, declared, "The problem of the future consists in defining one's priorities and making the necessary commitments." In other words, as Barkun observes, "We get the future we are prepared for."
But in the past quarter-century millennial visions have grown darker, lurid as a Brueghel. The best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s in America was Christian author Hal Lindsey's jeremiad, The Late Great Planet Earth. Among many other things, Lindsey predicted that the Soviet Union would invade Israel and that, after millions of the righteous were gathered up in the eschatological event known as the "rapture," Jesus would descend from the heavens to preside over the real New World Order. In his 1974 book Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis, John F. Walvoord projected his vision: "Destruction on a formerly incomprehensible scale is clearly predicted for the end time in the book of Revelation and may be the result of nuclear war." Evangelist Pat Robertson has said that in the millennial age the saved will be empowered to control geologic faults spiritually and thereby prevent earthquakes.