July, 1997

Dear ICE Subscriber:

In the June 2 issue of Newsweek appeared the first comprehensive mainstream publication article on the year 2000 and the worldwide social havoc it will produce. It appeared on May 27, the day after Memorial Day. The Dow Jones broke a new record high that day. So, the warning has been sounded. It has not been heard. "Hearing, they will not hear." As the year 2000 approaches, there will be more and more articles like this one. Like flood waters rising behind an earthen dam, the story of the year 2000 will press against the consciousness of the public. My suggestion: be where you want to live for the next 10 years, with all of the items that you will need to live there in comfort, before the dam of public awareness breaks. When you feel panic in your belly, it will be too late.

There is one good thing that will come from the coming disruption of Western Civilization: it will finish off dispensationalism. After the computers go down and the division of labor implodes, Christians who survive the ordeal will look back and say to themselves, "That's it. I survived. As for the Great Tribulation: 'Been there; done that.' Now it's now going to get better. The postmillennialists were right."

One of the recurring worries on the year 2000 discussion forums on the World Wide Web is this: "The fundamentalists are going to get into it, claim that the year 2000 is the prophesied end of the world, and thereby discredit us (serious) people who see a catastrophe coming if the problem can't be fixed." So far, there is not a single fundamentalist who has discussed y2k, as far as I can tell. I'm the only certifiable public Bible-thumper who has sounded the alarm, but I don't think y2k has anything to do with biblical eschatology.

 

HUMANISM'S ESCHATOLOGY

I do think it has a lot to do with eschatology, however: humanist eschatology. Before I explain why, I must provide some personal background. I did not major in sociology, but I studied sociology under America's most famous conservative sociologist, Robert Nisbet. I could do this because Nisbet had ceased paying any attention to academic sociology. He was interested mainly in history. He always had been, ever since his days at Berkeley when he studied under Frederick Teggert, an incredibly well-read historian whose book on China and Rome is still a masterpiece, although long forgotten — actually, never acknowledged.

Nisbet was interested in how Western social theorists have viewed history. He spelled this out in detail in two books, Social Change and History (Oxford University Press, 1969) and History of the Idea of Progress (Basic Books, 1980). In 1968, he published one of the most illuminating essays I have ever read, "The Year 2000 And All That." It appeared in Commentary (June 1968), a publication of the American Jewish Committee. I was taking graduate courses from him is this period, so I heard a lot in the classroom about his studies on this topic.

He began his essay with his own prediction: "The approach of the year 2000 is certain to be attended by a greater fanfare of predictions, prophecies, surmises, and forewarnings than any millennial year in history." He referred to four books on 2000 published over the last 12 months. He wisely did not dredge up the old story about widespread millennial fever in the year 999 — a story that is never accompanied by footnotes to detailed historical studies, since it did not happen. It was the 12th and 13th centuries that were the high-water mark in medieval prophesying. Ironically, the year 1000 deserved prophecies regarding the end of the world: the old order. The period centering around 1000 was surely a turning point in Western history: the transformation of the Vikings from raiders into traders, the revival of commerce, the growth of cities, the consolidation of feudalism, the introduction of the doctrine of transubstantiation, the revival of concern over witchcraft, and so forth.

Nisbet had a bit of fun with some Caltech professor who was bewailing the coming of thermal pollution by technology, who in turn had cited a pair of Rutgers scientists who predicted that by 1980, some rivers could reach the boiling point, with evaporation by 2010. Then he got to the heart of the matter:

By the 17th century, Western philosophers, noting that the earth's frame had still not been consumed by Augustinian holocaust, took a kind of politician's courage in the fact,and declared bravely that the world was never going to end (Descartes, it seems, had proved this) and that mankind was going to become ever more knowledgeable and, who knows, progressively happy. Now, all of a sudden, the year 2000 became the object of philosophical speculation.

He referred to a play written by Restif de la Breton, L'An 2000. He did not mention that Restif was a pornographer and a tract-writing promoter of the French Revolution before it happened. He also was the first person known to have coined the word, "communism." (For more on Restif, James Billington's book, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith, Basic Books, 1980. Billington is now the Librarian of Congress.)

Nisbet also referred to Edward Bellamy's socialist novel, Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887 (1887). A new edition published by Harvard University Press had just appeared. He wrote: "Considering the immense appeal that this book exerted for years in the minds of American citizens, politicians, and business men, it can be regarded as one more example of the occasional superiority of the 'soft data' of ideas and fancies over the 'hard data' of demographers in shaping the future." His point was well taken: the fascination with the year 2000 has been a humanist passion far more than a Protestant-fundamentalist passion. The year 2000 has been a kind of touchstone, a symbolic date marking the creation of a humanistic New World Order.

Then Nisbet pointed to another aspect of the interest in the year 2000: technology. He cited sociologist Daniel Bell, who had written of the modern world's "bewitchment" by technology. The computer seemed to promise the ability of highly trained men to forecast the future, Bell said. Nisbet sounded a warning: a computer can't do this. The idea that it can is just one more reincarnation of Leibniz's assertion that there is total continuity between past, present, and future. Not so, Nisbet insisted: it is the discontinuities of life — the unexpected discontinuities — that make it impossible for us to know the future.

Western intellectuals since the days of Leibniz have been trying to ascertain the historical laws of development. Nisbet was in the final phases of writing Social Change and History when he wrote this essay. He surveys this tradition at length in the book. But in his essay, he warned against the whole methodology. He ended the essay with one of the most brilliant insights I have ever read on the limits of man's prophetic abilities:

Let us be clear on two points. (1) Events do not marry and have little events that grow into big events which in turn marry and have little events, etc.; (2) small social changes do not accumulate directionally and continuously to become big changes. We pretend in our histories and sociologies that such is the case, but it is all a posteriori. . . . It is very different with studies of change in human history. Here the Random Event, the Maniac, the Prophet, and the Genius have to be reckoned with.

We have absolutely no way of escaping them. The future-predictors don't suggest that we can avoid or escape them — or ever be able to predict or forecast them. What the future-predictors, the change-analysts, and the trend-tenders say in effect is that with the aid of institute resources, computers, linear programming, etc. they will deal with the kinds of change that are not the consequence of the Random Event, the Genius, the Maniac, and the Prophet.

To which I can only say: there really aren't any; not worth looking at anyhow.

Nisbet died last September. The next month, I wrote my first Remnant Review dealing with the Millennium Bug. He would have enjoyed the thought that the computer itself — the Deus en machina of the trend-tenders — would itself become the source of the most unlikely event in the history of the West: programmed randomness!

There were programmers in 1968 who were well into the programming that will bring the West to its day of reckoning in the year 2000. Nobody "upstairs" talked to them about the wisdom of this — not upstairs in IBM or any of the giant corporations and governments that were installing the IBM's Big Iron into their systems. Surely, nobody in the academic world knew anything about it. As for pastors, they still haven't heard about it.

Here we have the ultimate socially random event programmed into the computers that gave the modern world its ability to cut the costs of inventory, corporate planning, and nuclear annihilation. In the midst of autonomous man's quest for omniscience and omnipotence lies the prophetically random event which will bring down modern man's millennial dreams as surely as the confusion of languages did at Babel. Hidden in layers of software code — code whose written documentation was rarely complete and is now lost — is the minor glitch that will bring the humanists' New World Order to grief. Today's priesthood of programmers now faces the impossible task of repairing hundreds of billions of lines of code: the infected legacy of the first generation of code-writing priests.

 

MR. PROPHECY SPEAKS!

Why do I know that the year 2000 will be the most decisive year in my lifetime, your lifetime, and anyone's lifetime over the last millennium? A good reason is that Hal Lindsey says there is nothing special about it.

Hal Lindsey, the prophetic author who wrote the 1970's best seller, "The Late Great Planet Earth," which predicted the coming of the end of time as we know it, is undaunted by the year 2000.

"I don't think there's anything special about the changing of the millennium," he says. ("Predictor of end doesn't fear 2000," Cleveland Plain Dealer, Feb. 3, 1997.)

If that story doesn't persuade you to buy a five acres in the country, sink a well, buy a year's supply of dried food and a used mobile home, then you're hopelessly in denial. After writing 13 wildly inaccurate books on prophecy, Mr. Prophecy misses the boat. Again. Of him it will be said, "When his ship finally came in, he was down at the bus depot."

For two decades, tabloid dispensationalists, whether pre-trib or post-trib, have been hypnotized by all the New World Orderers' hype about their coming New World Order. Convinced, they have spread the alarm: "Rockefeller's gonna get ya if you don't fly out!" (How he fits into the "bear of the north" scenario, I have never figured out.) I wrote Conspiracy: A Biblical View (1987) to calm such fears. Today, David Rockefeller is an octogenarian who is facing the end of his empire. His Chase Manhattan Bank has 200 million lines of vulnerable code. If the programmers can't fix this, and if all the other money center banks on earth can't fix theirs, and if the fixes (if any) don't mesh, and if the Federal Reserve System's Fedwire electronic funds transfer system is not fixed, then the New World Order comes up empty: "Insufficient funds." That event will deserve a headline: "New World Order Collapses: Dave Hunt Returns to Accounting."

Sincerely,

Gary North