Column by George Sibley
Chronology – January 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
THE END OF THE YEAR is a good time to think about time, but the end of a “millennium” is an even better time to think about it.
So did the new millennium began last New Year’s Eve, or (since the Romans counted from “1” rather than “0”) does it begin this New Year’s?
That argument still goes on here in Gunnison, when we don’t have something more productive to argue about. But I say we should celebrate both. After all, it’s a pretty sure bet that Gunnison will only see one millennial eve, so why miss the chance — especially since this year there are no immediate “Y2K” fears to keep us home.
This millennial discourse, however, leaves me wondering about the relevance of the whole thing — especially here in the southern Rockies, where we are closer in many ways to the ancient peoples who once walked these valleys and steppes than we are to the peoples who traversed the deserts and mountains of Europe and Asia Minor long ago.
Thanks to the economic dominance of us Western civilized folk, though, today the whole world more or less operates by the Judeo-Christian calendar, at least during business hours. So now it seems to be an acceptable convenience around the world to call the coming year “2001.” But this number is devoid of cultural relevance for many of the world’s people.
And given the rules and covenants by which Western Civilization runs these days, it’s of marginal relevance even to those nations that call themselves “Christian.” Why are we all, in this profane age, measuring time from the birth of a religious figure whose teachings no one really lives by?
Isn’t there a better “zero point,” a point in time from which everyone in the world could meaningfully count time forward?
A good zero point for time is a problem. Time is funny: time past is really all the time we can actually measure, in the most literal sense. The present is actually pretty “timeless” — a moment that can slide by in a flash or crawl along like a post-office line — and the future is just an abstract projection. But time past is real time, accumulating under us like our landfills.
Out at the Tenderfoot Archæological Site here — across the runway from Gunnison — the archæologists count only time past, using the “BP” convention, Before the Present. This is a little problematic because the present is always retreating in the face of that growing landfill of time past. But when you are dealing in thousands of years — or millions as is the case for the geologists — a few decades of “Present” can slide by without significantly altering the relative accuracy of those big numbers.
But B.P. would not be a good zero point for running the day-to-day spinning world. We must have — mostly for financial dealings, but for many other conveniences as well — a commonly accepted, fixed zero point from which we can count time forward. Is there no globally relevant zero point that could serve everyone, everywhere?
I think there is. Roughly five hundred years ago, the world became finite. Late in the 15th century CE (Christian Era) ships went out in all directions from Europe. Vasco da Gama sailed south and east and got to India. Columbus sailed west and hit something he mistook for India. Then Magellan’s ships sailed west and returned (minus Magellan) from the east — demonstrating conclusively in 1522 what Copernicus had proclaimed scientifically in 1512: that the earth is a finite orb revolving around the sun.
WITHIN A CENTURY of this cluster of events, most of the major human groups on earth knew that there were a lot of other peoples out there, on a large but finite globe. And by then — like it or not — we were all becoming bound together by a set of European economic principles.
The Global Era (GE) had begun.
All of this happened within a few decades around the year 1500 CE, so a case can be made for calling that a zero point for cultural transformations around the world. Before the Global Era (BG), there was always land beyond, Terra Incognita, but there was no general sense of a finite earth where eventually you would come back around to yourself. Now, in 500 GE, we know differently — or should.
But is it too cynical to suggest that, in the first 500 years of the Global Era, most of humankind has not yet come to a real understanding of what it means to live on a finite earth? We are half a millennium into a Global Era in which both the managers and the managed are working out the final details on the world conquest and consolidation that began at Copernicus’s and Magellan’s zero point — but we still seem to act with BG sensibilities.
But maybe if we counted time from the point at which the world became finite, we could begin to develop a more realistic — and conceivably even truly Christian — sensibility. Whether a new perspective on time could actually help or not, something of the sort may be needed to help us recognize the accumulating consequences of global finitude.
So — Happy New Year. Next year, in 501 GE, let’s start to get real.
George Sibley teaches, writes, and argues about time in Gunnison.
