ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, January 2, 1997 TAG: 9701020064
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN YEMMA THE BOSTON GLOBE
FEELING WEIRDER? Could be the year 2,000 on the horizon making you edgy.
It's still three years before the big party, but Richard Landes and other millennium watchers around the world are gearing up already for a rowdy, frothy wind-down to the century.
``I think it's clear that perceptions are going to be distorted at the approach of the year 2000,'' said Landes, sitting in a disheveled office overlooking Boston's Commonwealth Avenue. ``It's a really juicy time.''
Ends of centuries, Landes and other academics say, are times when some people feel greater anxiety and some greater hope for the future than they normally do. No one is unaffected, they say.
``Whether people know it or not, they experience a sense of urgency about change,'' said Hillel Schwartz, a historian and author of ``Century's End,'' a study of the close of previous centuries. ``That can lead to frustration and exhaustion or to furious but inconsequential gestures - like big parties and celebrations. But it could also create concerted action - I hope for a more sustainable world in the next century.''
Landes, a professor of medieval history at Boston University, has found many portents of current apocalyptic thinking and says they echo apocalyptic rumblings around the year 1000.
``I believe there is, as Blake said, a `fearful symmetry' between the two periods,'' Landes said.
While there was not widespread ``paralyzing fear'' around the year 1000, Landes said, there were ``intense apocalyptic expectations'' throughout Christian Europe.
The early Christian church, Landes said, was constantly resetting its calendar to forestall the letdown that occurred when apocalyptic predictions failed to come true. Even a secular society, he said, will experience the same buildup and possible letdown.
Though 2000 is a Christian date, both Landes and fellow millennium-watcher Charles Strozier, a history professor at John Jay College in New York, say they have heard predictions of imminent apocalypse in Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim sects.
Landes has set up a web site for his Center for Millennial Studies at BU (www.mille.org) to study millennial fervor as it crests this time around and to ``harvest'' apocalyptic literature and ephemera produced over the next few years.
For most people, millennium events will just be a bigger version of annual New Year's Eve bashes. But not everyone will be in an up mood. Some fundamentalists, pop-culture prophets and New Age adherents are anticipating a day of reckoning.
Among signs and wonders Landes and other millennium watchers are tracking:
* Apocalyptic talk among Southern Baptists, Pentecostals and other denominations. Many religious groups set the apocalyptic clock ticking in 1948, seeing the creation of the state of Israel as a key development in a biblical ``end-time'' scenario, said Strozier, author of ``Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America.''
The most popular apocalyptic books among fundamentalist Christians are Hal Lindsey's 1977 ``The Late, Great Planet Earth,'' Lindsey's 1995 book, ``The Final Battle,'' and the Rev. Pat Robertson's 1991 best seller, ``The New World Order.'' Almost all Christians - and many non-Christians as well - are familiar with the vivid, ominous imagery of the Book of Revelation.
And even though the Catholic Church is strongly anti-apocalyptic in its teachings, Landes points out that Pope John Paul II has declared 2000 a ``jubilee'' year in Rome. That, plus inevitable increases in pilgrimages to Jerusalem in 2000, promises to create major events in those religiously significant cities.
* The year 2000 computer problem, in which large numbers of older computers are expected to malfunction when their dating systems confuse the upcoming year '00 with 1900. Remedying the problem is costing billions. The problem dovetails with long-standing fundamentalist beliefs about powerful computers as the ``beast of the apocalypse.''
* A surge in pop-culture tie-ins with the millennium - from TV and movie doomsday themes to supermarket tabloid headlines with apocalyptic predictions.
``I'm sure politicians will try to feed on'' apocalyptic interest in the coming years, Strozier said. ``In Hollywood and a lot of other places, it will be commodified.''
Even very secular people are likely to experience a millennial moment or two in the next few years.
``It's not just fundamentalist religious groups that are doomsayers about the end of the century,'' Landes said. ``Ecologists are doing it to get people off their butts. Some of the militia groups are pushing it by gleefully talking about the year 2000 computer bug. Look, if you are trying to motivate your people, who wouldn't take advantage of the year 2000?''
The Millennium Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Arlington, Va., is organizing a series of events, including a meeting of the World Parliament of Religions in South Africa in 1999, a ceremony in the summer of 2000 in Iceland and a series of simultaneous youth-oriented celebrations around the world in 2001.
``The end of the millennium is a time to reflect back and realize what was both good and bad,'' said Ida Rademacher, special projects coordinator for the institute, which grew out of a Carter administration project known as Global 2000. ``There is as much reason to have hope for the future as worry and fear as we approach this threshold.''
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