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5.0 out of 5 stars
Revisiting and Reviewing the End, June 10, 2000
The editors of *The Year 2000: Essays on the End*, Charles Strozier and Michael Flynn, have collected 26 exceptional essays, capturing the variety of millennial sentiments prevalent in American culture. Significantly, many of the essays deal with their subject's millenarianism as a latent, disguised, or defensive aspect of that subject. Strozier and Flynn, both psychologists, have managed to make the psychology of endism a recurrent theme of this collection although no piece is explicitly psychological in its analysis. The relationships among individuals, society, and the sense of impending end or transformation at various times and places are typically set forth in rather straightforward prose, investigating interesting subjects which speak for themselves.
The book is divided into four sections: Religion, Apocalyptic Violence, Politics, and Culture. By no means are these divisions airtight; several essays could fall into other sections, which only illustrates the enormous complexity of the issues these authors treat. But the book as a whole is served well by the "atomistic" approach. One can read a single essay -- the one on Waco by Strozier himself, for example -- and quickly glean the pertinent facts about the confrontation and the context in which it occurred. But then Margaret Thale Singer's "On the Image of 2000 in Contemporary Cults" expands the picture a bit more; the indirect consequences of history after Waco are illustrated by J. William Gibson's "Is the Apocalypse Coming? Paramilitary Culture after the Cold War"; and the particular millennial culture that thrives in Texas Michael Erard investigates in "Millennium, Texas."
So while all the bases are covered, the true pleasures of this collection are in the unexpected connections and examples. Phillip Charles Lucas describes the change in millenarian expectations from New Age spirituality to Orthodox Christianity by the Holy Order of MANS. Lois Ann Lorentzen depicts the core beliefs of Earth First! as logically in the same ideological range as those of a David Koresh or Aum Shinrikyo. The conservative movement's aggressive endism receives thorough exposure, as Lee Quinby dismantles the masculine future envisioned by the Promise Keepers, while Michael Barkun and Sara Diamond lay bare the frightening assumptions of the racial and evangelical foci of the far right, respectively.
Three of the sections contain one or two provocative philosophical essays. In the Religion section, Bernard McGinn and Marie L. Baird offer thoughts on spirituality in the third millennium. In Politics, Jean Bethke Elshtain explores the notion that our own drive toward the future represents a fear of limitations imposed upon us by nature in "The Flight from Finitude." And Jean Baudrillard, in the Culture section, offers a maddening, yet somehow beautiful and insightful, post-Everything view of the millennium in "Hysteresis of the Millennium".
Perhaps it is this notion that subtly disquiets many ordinary people, so that they almost defensively ignore talk of the impact of year 2000 and beyond: The New Millennium undermined its own significance simply by continuing to approach, day by day as it always has, but seemingly bringing with it impossibly rapid change and the impossibility of real change at the same time. Strozier and Flynn's collection, in a way, demonstrates that amidst the chaos some constants emerge, that there is a consistency and logic to even the wildest convictions about the world and fantasies about the future. For those with a spoon in the ever-present American millennial stew or those not sure they even want a taste, *The Year 2000: Essays on the End* provides a clear, comprehensive guide to the varieties of Endtime flavors, combinations, and aftertastes one can sample at almost any given time or place today.
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