THE SPIRIT OF THE (NOW DEPARTED) MILLENNIUM

Readers will, I hope, forgive us for imposing on them one last look at the recent shift from 19 to 20 hundreds of years in the most commonly used calendar. If you are like me, you probably OD'd on the millennium hype of December 31, 1999-January 1, 2000, and had hoped the subject was dead and buried. I apologize for raising it once more, but ask you to consider two mitigating factors. First, this is being written in early January (SCIENCE & SOCIETY has a long lead time to publication). Second, S&S, after all, is the journal that celebrated the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution in 1990, and the 100th birthday of Frederick Engels in 1998! We tend to be a bit slow on the uptake. There is the final circumstance that a review of the "high points of the (second) millennium" enterprise will only become even more stale in the future; this material must be used now, or never.

I attempt nothing like a comprehensive or systematic survey. The obvious point is the rampant individualism in the variety of projects designed to identify the greatest man/woman/thinker of the millennium, or the top 10, or top 100, or whatever. Contributions to history, or to progress, or to human well being, are made in this view by individuals rather than by great movements of large numbers of people. Even with this significant - and largely unexamined - limitation, however, all manner of political storms (or tempests in teapots) were generated.

Thus, a BBC News poll, reported by the BBC Online Service on October 1, 1999, named Karl Marx the "greatest thinker of the millennium." The report states that Albert Einstein, "who had led for most of the month" (of September), had been pushed into second place. (Would either Marx or Einstein have agreed to participate in this "contest"?) Among the top ten in this poll were Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes and Stephen Hawking. This was one of a series of BBC polls; the others of which I am aware were for greatest explorer, greatest woman (Indira Gandhi won that one), and greatest man.

Facts about the greatest man contest were forwarded to me by email. The top ten, at a moment when the poll was still in progress, were, from top to bottom: Mahatma Gandhi, Leonardo da Vinci, Nelson Mandela, Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Jesus Christ, Sir Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, and - Karl Marx. My friend, who sent this information, wrote: "Karl won the September "Thinker of the Millennium" vote, got tons of publicity, and he stands a real chance now - so VOTE NOW!" And: "As you can see, our man Karl is trailing in tenth spot. Help boost Karl to first (we did it once
before. . .)." Thus reduced to a popularity campaign, the contest, one might argue, is totally unfair: of the top ten candidates only three (the other two being Jesus and Dr. King) have movements of people behind them that could mobilize a vote. By simple numerical standards, especially if the individual in question is to represent the entire millennium, the top spot should by right have gone to Jesus. (Again, I have no idea what the final outcome was.)

But enough of British democracy. In the United States, the A&E cable television network presented its top 100 "Biographies of the Millennium," in a two-part program narrated by Harry Smith. Here the selections were made by an aristocracy of notables - people such as Newt Gingrich, Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton, Gloria Steinem, Thomas Hoving, C. Everett Koop, Abraham Paiz, and Richard Holbrooke, among many others. In the socio-political area, Holbrooke played a significant role, and his commentaries do not, to put it mildly, inspire confidence in his judgement. For the record, we report, in the accompanying box, the top 25 individuals selected, in descending order. You will notice that there is not a single woman on the list (there were several among the top 100).

Well, it appears that Marx just beat out Einstein a second time. Aside from the dubious presence of Genghiz Khan and Adolph Hitler (A&E dubbed the latter "madman of the millennium," a characteristic failure to seek understanding), one feels in the presence of genuine greatness, and I imagine, as with Marx and Einstein, that none of these creative individuals would be greatly interested in jockeying for position on a list of this type. There is an issue concerning the vast variety of fields of endeavor, and whether these can be compared in any meaningful way. There is another issue concerning omissions: why, for example, Martin Luther and not John Calvin? Why Newton and not Leibnitz? Why Locke and not Rousseau? Why Darwin and not Wallace? Where are the chemists? The musical composers? And so on.

There is a "deficiency of the telescopic faculty" as we look back toward the early part of the millennium: Acquinas is the only figure representing the first four centuries. Certainly, progress was made in the later period over the achievements of the earlier, but isn't that always the case? The early years are slighted. How will our meager 21st century efforts look to the framers of a retrospective on the third millennium in the year 2999?

A&E was clearly pleased to be able to spring its big surprise: Guttenberg, inventor of the movable-type printing press, is placed in the number 1 position, the most important biography of the millennium. This prompts us to inquire: what is the meaning of "important"? Suppose we accept the notion that printed books and newspapers were the key to major social advance - perhaps confusing cause and effect. How relevant to this understanding is the biography of the single individual credited with the invention of printing?

The historical materialist saying, "necessity is the mother of invention," undoubtedly applies here. Anthropologist A. L. Kroeber and political scientists William F. Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, early in the 20th century, documented the widespread fact of simultaneous invention and discovery in the history of science and technology (their findings are summarized in Leslie White, The Science of Culture, ch. 8: "Genius: Its Causes and Incidence"). Thus, in 1843, the Law of Conservation of Energy was formulated by one scientist, and in 1847, independently, by four others. The discovery of the cellular basis of animal and plant tissue was proclaimed simultaneously by seven men, all around the year 1839. Sunspots were discovered independently by Galileo, Fabricus, Scheiner, and Harriott, in 1611. The parallax of a star was measured by Bessel, Struve, and Henderson, all in 1838. Oxygen was discovered by Scheele, and by Priestly, in 1774. The list continues. Human endeavor in the arts, literature and the sciences is cumulative and interactive, and no particular individual's work, no matter how it stands out for intrinsic or ideological reasons, could have occurred without the prior and simultaneous activity of countless others.