Otherness (23 page)

Books such as Hal Lindsey's runaway best-seller,
The Late, Great Planet Earth
, revealed to millions the "obvious" identity of the Soviet Union as the devil's final fortress, foretold in scripture. Ronald Reagan's interior secretary, James Watt, declared environmentalism moot for the simple reason that the Earth was scheduled to end soon anyway, so why bother saving trees? In retrospect, these pronouncements may seem quaint, what with the entity called the USSR fading into archaeological dust along with Nineveh and Babylon. But one sees no retractions by Lindsey or others. Just as peddlers of "downside" stock-market newsletters keep pushing ahead the date of the Crash that never comes, Armageddon merchants simply rearrange the details of their prophecies in order to keep up with each geopolitical turn, so that the latest bogeyman perfectly fits the bill.

And it's certain to get worse soon. Will Japan or China replace Russia as the next archfoe of heaven's host? Will we soon hear political candidates accusing each other of being the Antichrist? One thing is certain—a single riveting symbol will come to dominate the years ahead—the sight of those eerie triple-zeros in the figure 2000.

And when the thousand years are completed
,

Satan will be released from his prison
. . . .

—
THE BOOK OF REVELATION

Nearly all millennialists share an interesting premise, that the entire vast universe was fashioned by a Creator with a penchant for brief experiments, foregone conclusions, petty vengeance, and mysterious riddles. During most of human history this might have seemed a reasonable model of the world, since life appeared so capricious, so instantly and inexplicably revocable. To some extent that age-old sense of helplessness and enigma remains. Only under a conceited gloss of modernity do we dare step forward and (without meaning any deliberate offense) attempt to pose a question or two.

For instance, even granting the aforementioned godly premise, why would a Creator of universes base His doomsday timetable on a
human
dating system? Might He not use ticks of an atomic clock, marking off radium half-lives until—phhht? Or, going by certain biblical passages, should we estimate how many sparrows, or shooting stars, have fallen since the Earth began?

For that matter, why count down in decimal? Why not base six, used by the Babylonian inventors of the calendar? Or
binary
notation? In the code native to computers, this year, 1994 of the common era, translates as 011111001010. It will be a much rounder 10000000000 on the date
A.D.
2048, and a symmetrical mysterious-looking 11111011111 in 2015. On the other hand, if prime numbers are His thing, then both 1997 and 1999 fit the bill in any notation.

Assuming the Omnipotent simply cannot resist round multiples of ten, and conveniently chose Earth's orbital period as the unit of measure, what date shall we figure He is counting
from
? To Hindus a three-billion-year cycle of creation and destruction passes through multiple "yugas," of which the present is but one of the more threadbare. The Mayans believe in cycles of 256 years, based on motions of the moon and planets, of which the most recent major shift occurred in 1954.

To certain Christian fundamentalists, the answer is plain.
Obviously
, the countdown began at the pivot point of the common-era calendar, the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

Unfortunately, that postulate presents problems. Regarding the actual date of nativity, biblical scholars disagree over a range of five years or more. Nor is there good evidence that the
month and day
assigned to Christmas under the Gregorian Calendar have anything to do with the celebrated event. (Eastern Orthodoxy commemorates Christmas weeks later.) Early church leaders may have meant to match the popular solstice festivals of the Mithraic cult, followed by their patron Emperor Constantine, thus making the conversion of pagans easier.

It gets worse. Suppose we reach the year 2005 and nothing has happened? Are we rid of millennialists until the next century rolls around? Not a chance! Doom-seers are well practiced at the art of recalculation. In the nineteenth century one midwestern preacher managed to hold on to his flock through
six
successive failures of the skies to open, until at last he was abandoned by all but the most fervent and forgiving.

Here is just one of the excuses we are bound to hear—"Of course the countdown shouldn't date from the
birth
of Jesus. After all, the chief event of his life, the promise of redemption and resurrection, came at the
end
of his earthly span."

If so—assuming the clock has been ticking from Calvary to Armageddon—we would seem in for a slight reprieve, and yet
another
wave of millennial fever set to strike some time in the mid-2030's. Again, the lack of any specific written record in Roman or Judaean archives will let enthusiasts proclaim dates spread across five or six years, but at least the
season
won't be vague—sometime around Easter, or during the Passover holiday.

We've only begun to plumb the options available to millennial prophets. While some sects focus on two thousand Christmases, and others on as many Easters, there will certainly be those who consider such thinking small-scale and altogether too "New Testament." After all, why should the Creator terminate His universe on the anniversary of some event that took place midway through its span? Why not start counting from its
origin
?

It so happens that another nice, round anniversary is coming up, which just fits the bill. Remember Archbishop Ussher of Armagh? He's the fellow who carefully logged every "begat" in the Bible, then declared that the creation of the world must have occurred at nine o'clock in the morning, on October 25 of the year 4004
B.C.

Now, there has been a considerable amount of teasing directed at poor Ussher, since he made this sincere calculation back in 1654. His results don't jibe too well with the testimony of rocks, fossils, stars, or the scientists who study such things. Still, he has followers even today, folk who believe that all physical evidence for a vastly older Earth (four and a half billion years) was planted to "test our faith." (One might ask, if the Lord went to so much effort to convince us the world is billions of years old, who are
we
to doubt it? But never mind.)

If Ussher fixated on time's origin, the famed founder of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, had something to say about its end. Luther took into account that "a day is as a thousand years to the Lord" (Psalms 90:4), and that genesis itself took six days. He then concluded that the Earth's duration would thus be six thousand years from first light to the trump of doom. Further, this span would be symmetrically divided into three two-thousand-year stretches, from Origin to the time of Abraham, from Abraham to Jesus, and a final two millennia rounding things off at Judgment Day. While this speculation drew little attention back in Luther's day, it is sure to appeal to modern millennialists, hoping for the good luck of witnessing the end in their own time.

Unfortunately, combining Luther's logic with Ussher's date (4004
B.C.
) shows that we've just shaved four years off the countdown! Now the end comes in October 1996! No time for that final stab at the Winter Olympics, then, or to pay off the car loan. Celestial trumpets will blow two weeks before the Democrats' last hope to retain the White House. (At least we'll be spared the possible scenario of
President Quayle
making plaintive, placatory welcoming speeches for the Heavenly Host from the Rose Garden.)

We may win a
little
more time on a technicality. Since there was no Year Zero in the common-era calendar (One
B.C.
was followed immediately the
A.D.
One), the Ussher-Luther deadline shifts to autumn 1997. Alas, still too short a reprieve to save those lovely turn-of-the-century parties we're all looking forward to.

Fortunately, old Bishop Ussher wasn't the only one counting off from Adam and Eve. The Jews have been at it much longer, and by the Hebrew calendar it is only year number 5753, which seems special to no one but mathematicians.

What of Jewish millennialists, then? Back in the 1640's, followers of Shabbtai Zevi believed in him passionately, but neither that "false messiah," nor Jacob Frank in the 1720's, brought any New Kingdom, only disappointment. Since then most Jewish scholars have put less faith in vague riddles than in a growing maturity of human culture working gradually toward a "millennial age"—an attitude that baffles some Christian evangelists.

Is the coming plague of millennialism simply to be endured by the rest of us until it's over? As with UFO cults, there is no such thing as "disproof" to those who can always find convenient explanations for each failed prophecy. It is useless to cite scientific data to refute the supernatural.

All isn't hopeless. There
are
methods for dealing with doomsday cant. One way is to turn things around and confront millennialists on their own turf. In the end the entire question revolves around symbols.

In Judeo-Christian mythology two chief metaphors are used to describe the relationship between the Creator and humankind. The first of these depicts a "shepherd-and-his-flock." The second describes a "father-and-his-children." These parables are used interchangeably, but they
aren't
equivalent. Rather, to modern eyes they are polar opposites, as irreconcilable as the tiny, closed cosmos of Ussher and the vast universe of Galileo and Hubble.

A shepherd protects his flocks, guiding them to green pastures, as the Psalms so poignantly portray. All the shepherd expects in return is unquestioning obedience . . . and everything else the sheep possess. Lucky ones are merely shorn, but that reprieve is brief. None escapes its ultimate fate. None has any right to complain.

Everybody also knows about
fathers
. Sons and daughters are expected to obey, when tight discipline is for a young child's own good. Nevertheless, with time, offspring learn to think for themselves. Even in patriarchal societies, a good father takes pride in the accomplishments of his children, even—
especially—
when they exceed his own. If there
is
a foreordained plan, it is for those children to become good mothers and fathers, in turn.

To the perennial, millennial oracles, with their message of looming, irresistible destruction,
here
is a head-on response. Ask them this: "Are we children of a Father, or a Shepherd's sheep? You can't have it both ways.

"You preach a tale of violent harvest," the challenge continues. "Of judgment without debate or appeal, fatal and permanent. A shepherd might so dispose of lambs, but what sane
father
does thus to his offspring? Would you stand by if a neighbor down the street commenced such a program on his flesh and blood?

"Anyway, you choose an odd time to proclaim the adventure over, just when we've begun
picking up
creation's tools, learning, as apprentices do, the method of a great Designer. Those techniques now lay before us, almost as if someone had placed blueprints to the universe there to be pored over by eager minds . . . by those perhaps ready soon to leave childhood and begin adult work."

The latest crop of millennial prophets might be asked, What do sheep owe the shepherd of a cramped pasture, a cheap, expendable world just six thousand years old?

Personally, I prefer a universe countless billions of parsecs across, vast and old enough for a hundred million vivid, exciting creations. An evolving, growing, staggeringly fascinating cosmos. One truly worthy of respect. One that will endure, even if we do foolishly cause our own midget Armageddon.

Time will tell. We, humanity, may yet thrive, or fry, by dint of our own wisdom or folly. The macrocosm may be, as secularists say, indifferent to our fate.

Or perhaps some great mind out there does see, does care. If so, that spirit may be more patient than doomsayers credit, with a design far subtler, yet more honest. None of us can know for sure, but I'll bet a truly
creative
Creator would be disappointed in an experiment that ended so trivially, or so soon.

I know, things taste better fresh, not packaged. They say hamburger clots your arteries and hurts the rain forest.

We should eat like our Stone Age ancestors, who dug roots, got lots of exercise, and always stayed a little hungry. So they say.

Still, I balked when my wife served me termites.

"
Come on, sweetheart. Try one. They're delicious
."

Gaia had the hive uncrated and warmed up by the time I got home. Putting down my briefcase, I stared at hundreds of the pasty-scaled critters scrabbling under a plastic cover, tending their fat queen, devouring kitchen trimmings, making themselves right at home in my home.

Gaia offered me a probe made of fine-grained pseudo-wood. "See? You use this stick to fish after nice plump ones, like chimpanzees do in the wild!"

I gaped at the insect habitat, filling the last free space between our veggie-hydrator and the meat-sublimate racks.

"But . . . we agreed. Our apartment's too small . . ."

"Oh, sweetheart, I know you'll just love them. Anyway, don't I need protein and vitamins for the baby?"

She put my hand over her swelling belly, which normally softened any objections. Only this time my
own
stomach was in rebellion. "I thought you already got all that stuff from the Yeast-Beast machine." I pointed to the vat occupying half of our guest bathroom, venting nutritious vapors from racks of tissue-grown cutlets.

"
That
stuff's not
natural
," Gaia complained with a moue. "Come on, try the real thing. It's just like they show on the NatuLife Channel!"