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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.