Marking the Millennium

An excerpt of an email interview with Richard Landes, director of the

at Boston University. The interview originally appeared in the Spring 1998 issue of Mass Humanities.

Why should thoughtful people interested in the humanities give serious attention to the millennium?

Millennialism is amazing: No social phenomenon is more completely the product of the human imagination than millennial thinking. Because God never has brought (nor will bring?) about the End of the World, the impact of the phenomenon is purely the product of human desire and communication. On a psychological level, millennialism combines two of the most fundamental human emotions: hope and fear about the future.

Can you give a specific example of how millennial thinking has shaped new forms of community?

An example would be the Shakers; a more controversial one, that goes to the core of the problem, would be [early] Christianity, or, for that matter, Judaism [around the time of the Exile]. A more recent one would be Jehovah's Witnesses or Seventh-Day Adventists. More secular ones might be anarchist or hippie communes.

Millennialism is one of the most fertile forms of social imagination. It's also very heady and leads to megalomania. What the West has done more than any other culture is to develop an ascetic millennial tradition so that the dramatic impulses of apocalyptic fever get channeled into what I call millennial projects.

Explain what you mean by "an ascetic millennial tradition."

Apocalyptic millennialism is instant, total and permanent gratification. To be able to get worked up into a lather of expectation, but not go bonkers with impatience, to anticipate a radical transformation occurring right now, but be able to work on it without overreaching yourself, to handle the frustration of having your expectations crushed without giving up, that's ascetic millennialism.

On an historical level, millennialism may provide one of the strongest explanatory models for the rise of the West -- a culture which, whether one likes it or not, dominates the global community it has created over the last half a millennium. [The central thesis is] that while God tarried, [we] tried to bring about the millennial kingdom of plenty and fellowship and justice, with mixed results. In the course of this century, when we looked in the mirror (e.g., the post-war period), we saw more of a Frankenstein's millennium than we had hoped for.

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