MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"

Eclipse

by Kevin Carey

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In the Fifth Century BC, Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher - in that broad sense of the word we now only rarely use - explained the phenomena of moonshine and the solar eclipse.

As has been customary throughout the ages in dealings between philosophers and politicians, what he said had absolutely no effect on public policy, to such an extent that a century later Alexander the Great almost lost his war with Persia because of an eclipse.

But, then, what could you expect from the man that so enraged Diogenes - he of the barrel - that he put his life in danger by telling the Emperor to get out of his light.

Indeed when philosophers depart from what we now think of as their calling, the purified concern with the meaning of life, and dabble in warfare and politics they come a cropper; one only has to think of Archimedes' death in the siege of Syracuse as the result of his interest in the mechanics of war machines; he should have stuck to his Principles and jumping in and out of his bath.

This week sees a major solar eclipse which is a kind of heavenly bodies curtain raiser to the Millennium. At least one can say of the eclipse that it something to look at whereas the Millennium was just an excuse for a massive binge. I say "was" because two years ago the consensus was that it would be almost impossible to hire anything bigger than a crofter's cottage on December 31st 1999 and there would certainly not be a single unoccupied cover at a restaurant.

Then came the demands of the nurses, bartenders and waiters such that the current fear is that all emergency services, including restaurants and bars, will close down well before the magic hour, thereby demonstrating the ability of whole countries to cut off their noses to spite their faces.

If this latest version of the Millennium Eve is true we will all be locked up in our houses, frightened of cutting our hand open with an oyster knife when we are stunned by a cacophony of burglar alarms set off by buried, non-Y2k-compliant chips. I can only suppose that this gloomy scenario is of the discounting sort used by contemporary politicians. You know the sort of thing; Finance Minister G leaks it to the media that growth might be 0.5% in an economy that really should be performing at 2%; and when it emerges that growth is at 1% we are all so relieved that it is twice the forecast we don't notice that it is only half of what it should be. Never mind, most of us will have a wonderful evening even if the majority isn't quite sure what we are celebrating.

It is one of those delicious pieces of irony that what we are actually celebrating - the birth of Jesus Christ - certainly didn't take place 2000 years ago. It was another Diogenes, known as "Exiguus" who messed things up because at the time he calculated the date of the birth he wasn't conscious of the concept of zero, so his almanac jumped from 1 BC to 1 AD without a year 0 between them. Purists will, of course, argue that even if that error is corrected the birth must have been earlier still.

What we lose in all this earnest calculation of the history is the Millennium as a culmination; in 999 AD many mystics quite properly believed that the end was nigh and we shall have plenty of that again this time.

Personally, I hope that the Millennium will be seen as a new start, a psychological break with the truly horrible 20th Century. There have already been stacks of books about what we have done to ourselves in the last Millennium and the last Century and it is useless to wish for Utopia but quite proper to wish for better public behaviour.

As we look back over history, societies have not all been uniform nor uniformly bad; a proper balance between social discipline and self discipline is possible and of course desirable.

The centrality of this social cohesion has been rather down-graded by three competing and self-serving substitutions: cleverness for goodness; selfishness for self-interest; and inevitability for difficulty. The products of these three capitulations are hubris, greed and idleness, the kind of qualities we might well associate with Edwardian dandies but hardly appropriate ideals for democracies.

On this, and so many other matters such as abortion, euthanasia, biotechnology, ownership, obligation and identity, public policy could benefit a great deal from the work of philosophers who have happily ventured out in recent years from the fastnesses of linguistics and logical positivism into the world of ethics. Though not ideal holiday reading, John Rawls on social obligation and Ronald Dworkin on abortion (even though I disagree with him) wouldn't be a bad start. Even so, I don't expect any politicians to take such books with them to the beach. Nowadays one is grateful if they take any book at all.

Kevin Carey can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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