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    On the Eve of the Millenium: The Future of Democracy Through an Age of Unreason
    On the Eve of the Millenium: The Future of Democracy Through an Age of Unreason
    On the Eve of the Millenium: The Future of Democracy Through an Age of Unreason
    Ebook159 pages2 hours

    On the Eve of the Millenium: The Future of Democracy Through an Age of Unreason

    By Conor Cruise O'brien

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    "All my life," writes Conor Cruise O'Brien, "I have been fascinated and puzzled by nationalism and religion; by the interaction of the two forces, sometimes in unison, sometimes antagonistic." In these wide-ranging and penetrating essays, O'Brien examines how throughout the world today these age-old forces are once again threatening democracy, the rule of law, and freedom of expression -- particularly in the United States, the nation founded on Enlightenment values. He weaves together beautifully written discussions on these and other timely, related topics. Enlivening his grim predictions with dry wit, he nevertheless conveys an apocalyptic sense of the threats facing democracy as we approach the third millennium.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFree Press
    Release dateNov 1, 1995
    ISBN9781439136980
    On the Eve of the Millenium: The Future of Democracy Through an Age of Unreason

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      Book preview

      On the Eve of the Millenium - Conor Cruise O'brien

      On the Eve of the Millennium

      Atheneum Books for Young Readers

      An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

      1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

      www.SimonandSchuster.com

      This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

      Copyright © 1994 by Conor Cruise O’Brien and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

      The Free Press

      A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

      1230 Avenue of the Americas

      New York, NY 10020

      First American Edition 1995

      Printed in the United States of America

      printing number

      2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      O’Brien, Conor Cruise

      On the eve of the millennium: the future of democracy through an age of unreason / Conor Cruise O’Brien—1st. American ed.

      p.   cm.

      Originally published: Don Mills, Ont.: House of Anansi, 1994, in series: CBC Massey lecture series.

      ISBN 0-02-874098-X (hard).—ISBN 0-02-874094-7 (pbk.)

      ISBN-13: 978-0-0287-4094-2

      eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-3698-0

      1. Civilization, Modern—1950- 2. Christianity and culture. 3. Enlightenment. 4. Democracy. 5. Catholic Church—Relations—Islam. 6. Islam—Relations—Catholic Church. 7. Catholic Church—Doctrines. 8. Sex—Religious aspects—Catholic Church.   I. Title.

      CB428.027  1995   95-35636

      303.49′09′05—dc20   CIP

      The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats is reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1924 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.

      Contents

      I The Enlightenment and Its Enemies

      II Democracy and Popularity

      III Things Fall Apart

      IV The Millennium Commission

      V The Guarded Palace

      Acknowledgements

      I THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS ENEMIES

      I SHALL BEGIN WITH one of W. B. Yeats’s most famous poems, The Second Coming.

      Turning and turning in the widening gyre

      The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

      Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

      Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

      The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

      The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

      The best lack all conviction, while the worst

      Are full of passionate intensity.

      Surely some revelation is at hand;

      Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

      The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

      When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

      Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

      A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

      A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

      Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

      Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

      The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep

      Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

      And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

      Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

      The rough beast that Yeats expected, around the end of the First World War, would have been a mystical force assuming a political shape, whether of Communist or Fascist colour, and moving through the blood-dimmed tide to dominate a new post-Christian Era. By our own time, the rough beast has divested itself of those particular colours, but Yeats’s images have lost nothing of their relevance. Mere anarchy is loosed upon huge areas of the world, and the blood-dimmed tide is loosed in more than fifty wars in the middle of the last decade of the second millennium of the Christian Era. For us, too, Yeats’s question remains a haunting one:

      And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

      Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

      I shall come back to that question. But first I should like to look at how people thought and felt a thousand years ago, on the eve of the close of the first millennium of the Christian Era. As it happens, the most arresting description we have of these matters is from the pen of the great French historian, Jules Michelet, in the section devoted to The Year 1000, in his monumental History of France. As well as being a great historian, Michelet is also a great master of French prose. As with all great masters, his prose suffers greatly in translation. His account of the year 1000 has far more impact in the original ardent and idiosyncratic French than it can possibly have in any translation. I propose, therefore, to read Michelet on the year 1000 in takes, first in the original and then in translation:

      Cet immense concert de voix naïves et barbares,

      comme un chant d’église dans une sombre cathédrale

      pendant la nuit de Noël, est d’abord âpre et discordant.

      On y trouve des accents étranges, des voix grotesques,

      terribles, àpeine humaines; et vous douteriez

      quelquefois si c’est la naissance du Sauveur, ou la Fête

      des fous, la Fête de l’âne. Fantastique et bizarre

      harmonie, à quoi rien ne ressemble, où l’on croit

      entendre àla fois tout cantique, et des Dies iræ et des

      Alléluia.

      A translation of that opening would read:

      This vast concert of naive and barbarous voices, like

      the chanting in a sombre cathedral during Christmas

      night, seems at first harsh and discordant. You find

      strange accents there, grotesque voices, scarcely

      human, and you would wonder sometimes whether

      this was the Birth of the Saviour, or the Festival of

      Fools, the Festival of the Donkey. Fantastic and bizarre

      harmony, to which nothing can be likened, and in

      which you think you hear simultaneously every kind

      of canticle, Dies iræ and Alléluia, all being sung together.

      Birth of the Saviour, Festival of the Donkey. Strange anticipation there, though in a less scary mode, of Yeats’s rough beast, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

      After that baroque overture, Michelet continues in a more analytical manner:

      C’était une croyance universelle au moyen âge, que le

      monde devait finir avec l’an 1000 de L’Incarnation.

      Avant le christianisme, les Étrusques aussi avaient fixé

      leur terme à dix siècles, et la prédiction s’était

      accomplie. Le christianisme, passager sur cette terre,

      hôte exilé du ciel, devait adopter aisément ces

      croyances…. Ce monde ne voyait que chaos en soi; il

      aspirait à l’ordre, et l’espérait dans la mort. D’ailleurs,

      en ces temps de miracles et de légendes, où tout

      apparaissait bizarrement coloré comme à travers de

      sombres vitraux, on pouvait douter que cette réalité

      visible fût autre chose qu’un songe…. Il eût bien pu se

      faire alors que ce que nous appelons la vie fût en effet

      la mort et qu’en finissant, le monde … commençât de

      vivre et cessât de mourir.

      Translated:

      It was a universal belief in the Middle Ages that the

      world would end with the year 1000 from the Nativity.

      Before Christianity, the Etruscans had fixed the term of

      their civilization at ten centuries, and the prediction

      had been fulfilled. Christianity, a transient on earth, an

      exile from heaven, was to adopt the Etruscan term…. This world saw nothing in itself but chaos; it longed

      for order and hoped to find it in death. Besides, in

      those times of miracles and legends, where everything

      appeared in bizarre colours, as if through dark stained

      glass, people could doubt whether this visible reality

      were anything other than a dream…. It could well be

      that what we call life was really death, and that by

      ending, the world … began to live and ceased to die.

      Michelet goes on:

      Cette fin d’un monde si triste était tout ensemble

      l’espoir et l’effroi du moyen âge…. L’empire romain

      avait croulé, celui de Charlemagne s’en était allé

      aussi … et ils continuaient. Malheur sur malheur,

      ruine sur ruine. Il fallait bien qu’il vînt autre chose, et

      l’on attendait. Le captif attendait dans le noir

      donjon … le serf attendait sur son sillon… le moine

      attendait, dans les abstinences du cloître, dans les

      tumultes solitaires du coeur, au milieu des tentations et

      des chutes, des remords et des visions étranges,

      misérable jouet du diable qui folâtrait cruellement

      autour de lui, et qui le soir, tirant sa couverture, lui

      disait gaiement à l’oreille: Tu es damné!

      In English:

      This end of such a sad world was at one and the same

      time the hope and the horror of the Middle Ages….

      The Roman Empire had gone, that of Charlemagne

      also … and suffering continued. Misfortune on

      misfortune, ruin on ruin. There must be something else

      to come, and people were waiting. The prisoner waited

      in his dark dungeon … the serf in his furrow…. The

      monk waited in the abstinences of the cloister, in the

      solitary tumults of the heart, in the midst of temptations

      and of remorse and curious visions, miserable

      plaything of the Devil who fooled around him cruelly

      and who, at night, pulling back the bedclothes would

      say gaily into his ear: You’re damned!

      Ten centuries separate us from the people whom Michelet describes. In terms of history, this is a very long span. Those people lived halfway between our own time and that of the early Roman Empire, the time of Jesus Christ. But in biological terms, in terms of the existence of our species on earth, a thousand years is as nothing. Those people, our ancestors, were very like us indeed. They were smaller, because less well-fed, and the information available to them was different. That’s about all.

      You may think that the all is quite enough, since it includes a huge difference in beliefs. But the difference is not so huge as those of you who are children of the Enlightenment may think. There are actually more people in contemporary North America who believe in the literal truth of the New Testament’s Book of Revelation than there were in medieval Europe who believed the same. (There are more, because there are more of all sorts of people.) And it is of course on the Book of Revelation that the expectations about which Michelet writes are founded. St. John, in Revelation, tells us that Christ will return to earth and reign for a thousand years. After that, Satan will again revolt, but will be crushed and cast into the lake of fire and brimstone there to be tormented day and night forever and ever (Revelation 20.10). After that comes the new Jerusalem, seen by John in the twenty-first chapter. I shall now quote the first seven verses of that chapter:

      And I saw a new heaven and new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

      And, I, John, saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

      And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.

      And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

      And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.

      And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life

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